Starting with this issue, Pour Story Society follows wine around the world and takes in the food and places it comes from, and wine, food, and travel each get a section of their own. This week that means a vineyard planted on an old alfalfa field forty minutes from Hollywood, and a roast chicken for a white from the hills of southern Burgundy.

Travel

The stomping tub at Agua Dulce Winery. Photo by Patrick R. Dunn.

The Old Alfalfa Field

Agua Dulce Winery, Sierra Pelona Valley AVA, Los Angeles County

The drive to Agua Dulce Winery leaves the Antelope Valley Freeway at the edge of Vasquez Rocks, where huge slabs of sandstone tilt out of the ground at odd angles. Captain Kirk fought the Gorn on those rocks in 1967, armed with a bamboo cannon he built from what he could find, and the landscape still looks like it could be another planet.

Past the rocks, Sierra Highway runs north through scrub and horse property. The houses get farther apart and the traffic thins, and then rows of grapevines start running along the right side of the road, forty minutes from Hollywood, where most people would never expect them. The people who live out here called that ground the old alfalfa field, and it sat overgrown for more than sixty years before the first vines went in.

Travel  ·  The region

Where it is

About forty minutes north of Hollywood. Take the 5 to Highway 14, get off at Agua Dulce past Vasquez Rocks, and head up Sierra Highway.

AVA boundaries from the UC Davis AVA Project. Tap the map to see it full size.

If you go

Pack a lunch for Reyes Winery, also in Agua Dulce, which lets visitors bring their own food to its outdoor tables. Tastings there need a reservation, so book ahead.

Give Vasquez Rocks an hour on the way in. The nearest hotels are a short drive south in Santa Clarita.

Wine  ·  This issue's bottle

Paul Benoît Mâcon-Lugny 2022

Chardonnay, Mâcon-Lugny AOC, southern Burgundy

This bottle caught me off guard. It is one of the smoothest Chardonnays I have ever had, round from the first sip to the last, with nothing sharp anywhere in it.

Some of that is the village. Lugny sits in the hills of the southern Mâconnais on limestone soils, and its whites have long had a reputation for roundness. Mâcon whites tend toward flowers and fresh fruit with a touch of lemon, and the better ones show almond and hazelnut underneath.

Flavor profile The tags are smells and flavors people often find in this wine. Nothing is added; they come from the grapes and the winemaking. One bar is the least, five the most. Sweetness Dry, not sweet Body Medium weight, like whole milk next to skim Acidity Moderate mouthwatering tang Oak Little or no taste of wood or vanilla Alcohol Around 13%, a gentle warmth Serve at 50 to 54°F. This one takes me back to my ranger days, sitting in the sculpture garden at Saint-Gaudens National Historical Park in Cornish, New Hampshire, looking west across the Connecticut River at Mount Ascutney. In the Gilded Age that view drew a colony of artists to these hills, and Maxfield Parrish, who lived just up the road in Plainfield, kept putting Ascutney in his paintings. The wine has the same easy balance as one of his landscapes.

I found it at Mo's by the River in Reno. It turns up elsewhere too, so ask a local wine shop for it.

Food  ·  At the table

Roast Chicken and Mâcon-Lugny

The Bresse chicken, from across the river

Cross the Saône from the Mâcon vineyards and the hills flatten out into the Bresse, where farmers raise the only chicken in France with its own appellation. A poulet de Bresse has blue feet, white feathers, and a red comb, the colors of the French flag, and it has been protected by name since 1957. A roast Bresse chicken with a bottle of white from the hills across the river is about as local as dinner gets in that corner of Burgundy.

At home, a roast chicken with lemon and thyme does the same thing. The wine has enough weight to stand up to the meat and the crisp skin, and the lemon in the pan picks up the citrus in the glass. Grilled fish or a wedge of Brie works too.

Wine school

Wine Quiz

🛢️  Making wine

1. Which red is usually made by fermenting whole bunches of grapes in carbonic maceration, giving a bright, fruity wine meant to be drunk young?

A. Merlot
B. Beaujolais
C. Pinot Noir

🍇  Grapes and places

2. Which red grape, once little known, has become Argentina's signature wine?

A. Tannat
B. Carménère
C. Malbec
D. Bonarda

🍷  In the glass

3. True or false: if a table wine that isn't fortified smells like sherry, it may have a fault caused by oxidation.

🍽️  At the table

4. Which wine is the classic match for foie gras?

A. Pinot Gris
B. Champagne
C. Sauternes

🎩  Wine people

5. Chilean winemaker Aurelio Montes does something unusual in his barrel room while the wine ages. What is it?

A. Turns every barrel by hand at the full moon
B. Plays Gregorian chant to the barrels
C. Ages the barrels in an Andean cave

Answers at the bottom.

Meet the Winemakers

"A few grapes" In 1995 Adam Lee drove 2.47 tons of Oregon Pinot Noir to California in a rented Budget truck and pulled up to the border fruit inspection in the middle of the night. Asked if he had any fruit, he said he had a few grapes. The rest of his twenty answers include a tank named Too Tall Jones. Read the interview

Wine school  ·  Answers

1. B, Beaujolais. Whole-cluster fermentation pulls fruit and color without much tannin, which is why it's ready to drink so young.

2. C, Malbec. It started out in Bordeaux and Cahors, but it found its home in Mendoza.

3. True. Sherry gets that nutty smell from oxygen on purpose. In an ordinary table wine, the same smell usually means air got in where it shouldn't have.

4. C, Sauternes. It's the classic pairing, though Pinot Gris and Champagne go well with foie gras too.

5. B, Gregorian chant. At his winery in Chile's Colchagua Valley, Aurelio Montes plays chant in the barrel room around the clock. He believes the gentle vibration is good for the wine as it ages.

Have a question about a bottle on your table? Hit reply and ask. I read every one.

See you in two weeks.

Patrick R. Dunn

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