Wine's Odd Couple
She was from the Upper West Side, a graduate student in French film studies who haunted Parisian libraries by day. He was a Frenchman who tuned accordions. By night the couple, Jenny Lefcourt and François Ecot, hung out with friends at wine bars. "François was feeling cooped up with accordions, and I felt cooped up in the library," Ms. Lefcourt said, sitting across from Mr. Ecot for a breakfast interview recently at Balthazar.
The two of them, who were once married but are now just business partners, say they no longer feel confined. They are coowners of Jenny & François Selections, a 7-year-old, fast growing importer of a special kind of French wines that they came to love together. For lack of a better term, they're called natural wines. Unlike many commercial wines, their taste owes more to minimal manipulation of the fermented grapes than to wine making technology. The aim is to keep a distinctive vineyard presence in the bottle. "We like wines that tell a story," Mr. Ecot said.
Aren't all wines natural — especially if they are certified as organic? Not necessarily. After harvest, even organic grapes may be subject to an array of chemical and technological interventions once they arrive at the winery. "Most winemakers immediately add sulfur to kill off the wild vineyard yeasts as soon as the grapes arrive in the winery," Mr. Ecot said. "Then they use commercial yeast strains that are designed to act predictably during fermentation."
Other interventions may include microoxidation, a process that softens the tannins in red wine, or the use of "spinning cone" machinery to lower the alcohol levels. Often, ore sulfur is liberally used right up until bottling. Along the way, the wine may gain commercial style and lose its connection to the vineyard. But sulfur, which is believed to be a cause of "wine headaches," is kept to a bare minimum by natural wine makers.
For Ms. Lefcourt and Mr. Ecot, there was no epiphany; just a slow and pleasurable gravitation toward natural wines. "We loved them, and they made us feel good, but we weren't really sure why," Ms. Lefcourt said. Then, while touring in the Rhône Valley, they noticed a sign for a winery familiar to them from natural wine bars: Domaine Romaneaux-Destezet in the village of St. Joseph. They pulled in. Far into the evening, owner Hervé Souhaut poured samples of natural wines. "Finally, his wife came into the cellar and said, 'You're going to starve these poor people,'" Ms. Lefcourt said. "She made us a great dinner, and it was so late that we slept over. And, since natural wine makers tend to know each other, we got hooked in their world."
Checking around New York wine shops in 1999, the couple realized that "none of our favorite French wine makers were here," Mr. Ecot said. The following year, the couple made their first selling foray to New York, bringing samples to local wine shops. "The wines spoke for themselves," Mr. Ecot said.
Spoke very well, in fact: Two high-volume Manhattan shops, Garnet Wines & Liquors and Astor Wines & Spirits, were strong early supporters of the wines. So was Josh Wesson's Best Cellars, a shop more devoted to what's in the bottle than what's on the label. Montrachet, the wine-oriented TriBeCa restaurant (now closed), offered Jenny & François wines, as did ultra-upscale Alain Ducasse (also closed), where the sommelier tasted 16 wines and bought 15 for the restaurant's wine list.
During the first three years of Jenny & François Selections, Ms. Lefcourt straddled the worlds of wine and academia, teaching at Harvard prior to completing her doctorate in film studies there in 2003. Mr. Ecot helped to make ends meet in those early years by doing vineyard work. Now the growing business is a full-time endeavor for both Mr. Ecot, who deals with wine makers, and Ms. Lefcourt, who handles sales.
Currently, the couple is offering 80 natural wines, ranging from Haut Lavigne Côtes de Duras 2006, an earthy and solid white from a region adjoining Bordeaux ($11.99 at Harlem Vintage, 2235 Frederick Douglass Blvd. at 121st Street, 212-866-9463), to Philippe Pacalet's Gevrey Chambertin 2005, a princely red burgundy from a supreme vintage ($64 at Chambers Street Wines, 160 Chambers St., between Greenwich Street and West Broadway, 212-227-1434). Jenny & François's biggest seller is Estezargues's "Grandes Vignes," a Côtes du Rhône big in flavor and value ($10.49 at PJ Wine, 4898 Broadway, between 204th and 207th streets, 212-567-5500).
On crowded retail wine shelves, Jenny & François's natural wines remain a tiny outpost. But they perform a function bigger than their numbers. Unlike the army of brands with precision-engineered taste profiles, these wines are the handiwork of resolutely independent growers. Consider the lively, coral-tinted wine made in 2005 by Domaine Sablonette in the Loire Valley. Like many natural wines, its wild yeasts were slow to ferment. Other Loire Valley wines made with commercial yeasts were ready to drink while Domaine Sablonette's was still burbling in the vats. When the wine was finally complete, its color was more intense than that of traditional rosés. A committee of Sablonette's confrères decided that this wine was too atypical to be called a Rosé d'Anjou. Defiantly, its makers, Christine and Joël Ménard, labeled their wine "Ceci N'est Pas Un Rosé" ("This is not a rosé"). Atypical or not, it's a terrific wine. But if not for the commitment of a former film scholar and an ex-accordion tuner, that wine might never have found an importer so that it could add its color to our splendid patchwork of wines.
