Vendange Tardive

In Alsace, the term for wines made from late-picked, very ripe grapes. VT wines, as they are called, are not as sweet as selection de Grains Nobles nor are they botrytized.

The Academy Award-winning film, The Revenant (2015) starring Leonardo DiCaprio, about a frontiersman on a fur trapping expedition is partially based on:

A. Writings by an early Napa Valley pioneer

B. The life of an early winemaker in the Pacific Northwest

C. A myth of revenge from the Piedmont region of Italy

D. A California miner who became famous during the Gold Rush and eventually became a judge

Napa Valley’s first non-Native American settler, George Calvert Yount was a fur trapper and a friend of fellow fur trapper Hugh Glass, the subject of the film The Revenant and the book of the same name. Some of Yount’s writings helped inform the true story of Glass and fur traders in the West. Yount settled in the Napa Valley in 1838 and his first production of “wine” was allegedly fermented in cowhides hung from trees. In 1860, Yount hired a young Prussian immigrant named Charles Krug to help him make better quality wines. Krug went on to found his own winery, Charles Krug, in 1861. After Yount’s death in 1865, the United States Postal Service renamed the town where he lived “Yountville” in his honor.

“When autumn arrives, I love the way my diet changes and consequently the kinds of wine I drink. Old white Burgundy with mushrooms, for example. With friends the other night we sautéed wild mushrooms and downed a magnum of François Jobard’s 1982 Meursault Genevrières. Wow! I hope the good Lord put some of that in my extraterrestrial cellar.”

—Kermit Lynch, wine importer and author of Adventures on the Wine Route

—Kermit Lynch, wine importer and author of Adventures on the Wine Route

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