A Better Tomorrow with Pascaline Lepeltier

Words by Jennifer Green | Photos by Kyle Johnson

It is a rare kind of adrenaline rush to share a bottle with Pascaline Lepeltier on a Monday afternoon in her restaurant as Lower Manhattan collapses around you. Outside the window people scuffle by. A quiet chaos of rays shoots through the buildings. This is not 9/11, nor the financial crash of 2008. It’s the second week of March 2020. America is waking up to the specter of Covid-19, which today has loomed large enough to send the DOW shooting down 2,013 points. Today will become known as Black Monday.

It would seem senseless to be talking about wine in this moment, with the world about to crash down, if every interaction with Pascaline didn’t seem so vital.

She’s peering straight through us over the rim of her glasses as if performing a CT-scan. “I am always relaxed and comfortable,” she quips, curling her lips into a smile. “Especially when I have a camera pointed at me.”

Her accolades bear no repeating. If she were a doctor, framed plaques would cover the walls of her office, floor to ceiling. Instead, her cellar at Racines, the restaurant she co-owns with David Lillie of Chambers Street Wines and Sommelier Arnaud Tronche, is lined with 2,500 references, 90% from winemakers she knows personally. 

Pascaline is recounting a story of returning from Champagne last spring, when she posted a photo of a set of fake teeth she discovered lodged in a Grand Cru vineyard in Avize. “It’s a shame. I’m sorry, but whatever you want to say, it’s nothing more than some of the greatest terroir in the world. Today we’re talking about minerality blah blah blah. This shouldn’t be tolerated by the AOC.” Immediately, “Champagne people” were blowing up her phone, begging her to take it down because apart from the trash, the vineyard was also yellowing from Roundup. “I have less and less of a problem calling people out these days,” she explains, maintaining her surgical gaze. “We have no time. Let’s face it, we’re in a terrible situation.”

For all her composure, Pascaline is as spirited as your standard issue activist. Exuberant, even. The terrible situation she’s referring to now is of course different than the one which would unfold in the days that follow. Yet the urgency holds, and people are listening. Just last month, Moët Hennessy committed to quit using herbicides across its Champagne houses — Dom Perignon, Moët et Chandon, Ruinart, Mercier, Veuve Clicquot and Krug — by the end of 2020 (though no mention of insecticides or fungicides).  

“We always, always, always say [in philosophy], once you formulate the problem, you have the solution,” she is saying emphatically. “It's always about creating new concepts, creating new words. And today, more than ever, we need to create new concepts because we're unable to talk about this beautiful thing that is ‘alive wine.’ Real wines are alive. We don't know how to talk about them. We have a new concept to create. That's amazing!”

The stakes are staggering, but she’s not daunted. She takes a sip of the white Bordeaux between us and continues:

“Some people think I just like natural wine. Yeah, it's definitely the thing that I prefer to drink. But I came to that because I tasted that, and I keep on tasting the rest. I don't take that for granted. I continue and try to understand. I continue to taste so I can keep myself as objective as I can. And that I think is also why people are paying attention to what I say.”

In a world where snobbery masquerades as knowledge and inane details are fetishized Pascaline’s enthusiasm cuts like a scalpel through the muck. 

She recalls listening to a podcast a couple days earlier where someone had said, ‘natural wine is really cool because you never have to learn anything. It's all about the experience.’ It struck her because, in one sense, she agreed — natural wine has helped bring wine back to “where it should be: amongst friends, amongst family, on the table, in a very casual way, without all the fuss, without all this decoration.” 

And sure, there’s something to be said for education being something only the leisure class has the time or money to do, especially when it comes to wine. But that’s also a very American perspective; Pascaline notes that growing up in the Loire Valley, school didn’t cost her parents anything, and her only “luck” was that there was a library next to their house and “I liked to read very early on.” She would go on to study the philosophy of language, specifically “what we call the vivant, or ‘the alive,’ and the ineptitude of language to properly capture it.”

She suddenly shoots up in her chair, as if to form a human exclamation point. “But you have to learn! How could you say that?! It's a whole world of curiosity, of new knowledge. Why stop there? Just because it doesn't matter, the brett[anomyces], the mouse, vinification? Do you know what you are missing? I was very shocked,” she says, returning to the podcast. “I was very shocked because we are so lucky to have access to education, to have access to information, to say that ‘I like natural wine because I don't have to learn’??” In her eyes, the greatest luck you can have is being able to learn:

“You have a phone. You have the internet. You have the world at your feet. Learning is real power. It's what I was telling you; I don't want to give answers to people. I want to give them the tools to understand by themselves.” We can’t argue with that. And at the time of this writing, we’re all about to have a helluva lot more time on our hands.

How to taste wine, per Pascaline

STEP ONE

She sets down her glass, locking her eyes with ours. “Teaching people how to taste is very complicated today for me,” Pascaline starts. We brace ourselves. “Because I’m realizing we really don’t know what we’re talking about,” she says, careful to enunciate.

It’s quite a statement coming from someone who leads courses for the Court of Master Sommeliers and was just crowned a MOF (Meilleurs Ouvriers de France) by President Macron himself. She breaks it down:

The first step toward realizing what you don’t know is teasing out what you do: smell, smell, taste, taste. “Calibrate the sensation” — learn what’s coming from vinification, what’s coming from oxidation, what’s coming from the grape itself. Lead yourself away from aromatic descriptors. What matters is the structure.

We ask if texture is the same as structure. “Sensation comes from the different structural elements,” Pascaline explains. Take a wine with no acidity: some sugar, some glycerol, no malic acid, no lactic acid, nothing: “your texture will be soft and velvety because your acidity is low, your alcohol is high, you have glycerol and you have sugar. The texture comes from the harmony between the structural compounds.” 

She admits it takes some time to train your tongue. We’re not constantly deconstructing what we’re eating and drinking in daily life. Our senses have dulled from lack of urgency; we don’t need them to survive the way we used to.

STEP TWO

Interrogate the bottle. Why are you the way you are? What was your winemaker’s intention? Was that intention achieved? How? What part of you is a product of place, of grape variety? The list goes on. 

“And that is the [part] that for me is getting really problematic today,” Pascaline says. “Because we are talking now about wine chemistry and we are not trained as sommeliers in wine chemistry. And so saying ‘oh, that's fantastic. I smell flint, oh I smell limestone.’ That doesn't make any sense.”

We’re all like detectives hot on the trail, eager to draw a cause and effect, but Pascaline is keen to point out we’re just waking up to the web which surrounds us. “Sulfur compounds come from very different moments during the vinification process,” she adds. Sometimes they’ll derive from viticulture, if sulfur was sprayed during the growing season to protect against oidium, the fungal spores that attack grapes. We’re “putting a word for sensation” we don’t understand. 

It’s why we should forgo the aromatic guessing game in Step One. Aromatics, for the most part, are just sulfur compounds — the same goes for ‘minerality.’

And now for the burning question: can you, or can’t you, taste minerals in wine? Apparently you can — if you burn the wine.

“Just drink mineral water, voilà,” Pascaline offers, inhaling sharply before plunging in. “A Vichy Catalan with a lot of calcium and sodium — you taste minerals. So you [can] taste water soluble minerals.”

How about soluble minerals in wine?

You can quantify those “if you burn the wine [according to a conversation I had with Olivier Zind-Humbrecht, MW], because to taste this inorganic compound, you have to get rid of all the organic compounds, make sense? So you are getting rid of the water, the sugar, the alcohol, the phenols and all that. We call that the dry extract.” 

Illustration by Laura Mauriello

She remarks that we may have heard some people say, ‘oh, I taste the dry extract [as a synonym for minerality].’ (We pause to imagine a swirl, sniff, and out-turned pinky.) “But the inorganic minerals? The only way to really know what is inorganic in your wine is to [burn] it. And the ashes at the end are going to be the inorganic because the organic is getting burnt,” she says. So tuck that pinky away.

But that’s not to say that minerals don’t have an effect on the grapes that are grown in them, even if we can’t taste them directly in our wine. She excitedly name drops another podcast, a heady episode from the Cité du Vin in Bordeaux that featured the famous soil scientists Claude and Lydia Bourguignon.

The more enthusiastic Pascaline becomes, the more she tries to contain her voice to a whisper, the crescendo rising. She confides that as an aside, Claude and Lydia had remarked on the high amounts of magnesium they were finding time and time again in the soil samples they were taking throughout Italy. It just so happens that when plants are able to absorb magnesium — when the mineral is water soluble, and with the right sort of farming — it “gives a lot of bitterness in general to the plant.” Pascaline, beaming, murmurs across the table.

We can tell she’s hesitant to say for sure, so she lets our imaginations finish the sentence. Is the Italian affinity for amaro and broccoli rabe really a coincidence?

“It’s a very complex subject, a fascinating new subject,” Pascaline contends, drawing in her breath and sitting back upright as if to restrain herself. “The only thing we need to be careful about right now is, as wine specialists that are not trained in a scientific way, we tend to abuse language. We're talking about things that are not clear and are unfounded in a certain way. We need to learn more of the science and the chemistry... to be sharper and more appreciative of what we're really tasting, knowing what we're talking about. 

Our job, my job, your job is to understand what a guest or consumer wants. So whatever you're going to do, you need to adapt your vocabulary to their level of knowledge.”

Language, after all, goes both ways. Very few people are used to talking about what they like to eat and drink, so a lot of our cues are non-verbal. A sommelier must assess, in the span of two or three minutes, “in which mood the guests are. And what do they know? What do they like?” Pascaline intones empathetically, drawing out her syllables. It’s a human problem, and it comes down to the failure of language itself: “how difficult it is for somebody to express that in front of somebody else, especially when they are not intimate.” There’s a gap between you and me, and wine compels us to bridge it. It forces your hand.

SO WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?

But it’s bigger than that moment at the table. “You know, in the end, I don't really care about winemaking,” Pascaline pipes up, calling her own bluff. She shows us her palm like a traffic cop, as if to reframe her own inner dialogue. You can see her gears turning as she looks you dead in the eye. “I care about the farming and feeding people and giving people wine. That needs to be done today more than ever, trying to defend what can give us a tomorrow. And what can give us a tomorrow is a very different way of farming.”

Her voice once again has lowered to a charged sort of whisper as she leans across the table to confide in us. We all need to support people who can prove that the right kind of farming is economically feasible, she says. She points to Stéphane Tissot [in the Jura] as her hero “a thousand times” over. Stéphane works fifty hectares biodynamically. His work is “extraordinary, beautiful” and sets an example for many people. “What Stéphane has been creating, how he's been doing it, how [fantastic] his wines are, the number of jobs he created, the number of people he trained...without this guy showing it's possible to have so many hectares in biodynamie, replanting trees, recreating some biodiversity... if guys [like him] were not here, bigger companies would not listen and see it's possible. Maybe they put a tiny bit of sulfur. You know what? Who cares. Twenty parts of sulfur, that's thirty people working with health insurance. You know what? I'm ok with the twenty parts of sulfur. Voilà.”

She breaks our gaze and shoots a look out the window. The flurry of passerby is starting to quicken, and in just a few hours, Racines will open for its last normal Monday dinner service of the month, though neither of us know it yet. Just three days later, restaurants across New York would be ordered to slash their occupancy by half in an effort to control the outbreak. In a week, all restaurants would be forced to close their doors to guests.

“I’m so happy people are already interested,” Pascaline says, whipping her attention back to us. “The thing is not to tell them, ‘you have to drink that; you have to eat that.’ That doesn't matter. We have to give them the tools to decide on their own, to become independent citizens who want to know,” she says, swirling the last drops of Closeries des Moussis in her glass. “Ecologically, socially, economically viable. We have to prove it's possible. Otherwise the system won't change.”