Bereche Et Fils Ay Grand Cru 2015
Grapes: Pinot Noir (75%) & Chardonnay (25%)
Looks: Gold, with streams of fine beads.
On the nose: Pineapple, baked apple, white peach, coconut, spice, yogurt. The hard guava candies they give out at Chinese restaurants. Composed apple mousse cheese cake type dessert. Brioche.
On the palate: Kardemommebolle. Lemon meringue pie. Randomly saffron? This is so complex and so balanced. Searingly high acid demurred by cheese and chalk finish. Great bubble character, so fine!
Price Point: 167 EUR / 1988 NOK (entry level is 666 NOK)
Terningkast: 6/6
My favorite restaurant in the world is in St. Louis, Missouri. It’s called U-City Grill. If you go there you will not find white tablecloths, waiters, or basic service. You’ll find the owner behind the counter, staring into space over the grill. It’s a one man show — a counter with 6 seats if memory serves correctly, but maybe it’s 10. It somehow always felt more intimate when it was just you and the owner, face to face; there was rarely anyone else in the place. Occasionally a business lunch or a small family with pudgy kids that “didn’t like that” when they sampled the food would be scattered over the remaining chairs. We never understood how it stayed in business, surely it wasn’t just us keeping this oasis open.
There are no bathrooms at U-City Grill, much to the chagrin of first-timers and online reviewers. The standard of cleanliness teetered on justified skepticism that they were a legitimate business.
Why are these surface negatives actually positives in my memory of the place? I’ve been thinking about it over the last few days and I think the answer is nostalgia, as cliche as that is to declare (and I apologize for the more general cliche of “thing that is on paper bad, remembered as good”). But there is an imprint of what U-City Grill has and has not, which has constructed a visceral memory of it in my brain. I have not been able to shake it. The times we rolled up in my best friend’s van, smelling like an afternoon in the park, and giggled as we waited for the owner to say something, or (more often than not) say nothing. I think I maybe said 20 sentences to the owner in 10 years of going to this restaurant. Out of our friend group (all regulars) I probably spoke to him the most. He is one of my favorite people in the world.
As a result of his introversion, surliness, and pact of near-silence, a mythology built around him. The prevailing theory when I left town was that he was a high-level taekwondo competitor who would travel around the United States while helping out his aging parents at the counter in his spare time. Then when his parents either retired, got sick, or passed away, he took over the counter full time out of obligation to Korean family norms and sank into a depression that never lifted. But all of the hours spent in the shop over the years, presumably since before he could walk or talk, made him a natural talent on the grill. He could cook a mean bibimbap.
I started going early enough to eat there when it was still the parents mostly in charge. I miss them. They weren’t particularly chatty either, but their silence was a silence of warmth, while the owner’s is a silence of coldness. I’m sure he misses them too.
I have no idea how much of this mythos is or was true and how much of it is apocryphal (and borderline disrespectful), but this is what we believed. I would love to get the real story, but it always felt too patronizing and glib to deign to ask. The owner is a normal person who is good at cooking Korean staples. And that’s what they serve, along with a few diner classics. From memory the menu is:
Combination Plate & Constituent Parts
Bulgogi Pork
Bulgogi Beef
Bulgogi Chicken
Bokumbob
Kimbob
Bibimbob
The latter three items would be stored in marinade bags in the refrigerator, opened every day, seared off on the flat top, then served over rice. They made a “hot sauce” out of gochugang, vinegar, and (presumably) water that I added to everything. I have probably ordered 100 permutations of the four items. Maybe they’ve added to the menu now. The bibimbap was classic: shredded carrots & cucumber, bean sprouts, bulgogi, fried egg, and hot sauce. I think about it all the time. And I know that there’s something hackneyed about my favorite restaurant in the world being a place that serves bibimbap. My Korean friends have dutifully informed me is like my favorite food being a club sandwich, but for a white Italian-American kid from the midwest, this was it. And after having eaten at Michelin-starred restaurants around the world I can confirm that this still is it. In 2024 making good food is not difficult, yet making good food that is simple, nourishing, and soul filling is rare. What the owner lacks in outward courtesy, he makes apparent with his food. That’s the power of work done well.
Which brings us to today’s wine, Bereche et Fils Ay Grand Cru 2015. We just bought a cabin and I wanted to buy a champagne to celebrate. My head immediately went to Bereche, it’s just what I drink to celebrate. It’s not the best champagne in the world, and it’s certainly not the worst champagne in the world. But I would argue that it is the best celebration champagne in the world, at least for my palate, and that extends from entry level (65 EUR) all the way up to Grand Cru (165 EUR). What makes one champagne a celebration champagne vs. others? I could spend a lot of words trying to explain the major styles of champagne based on site and grape composition, but I think in the interest of your time and attention it’s suffice to say that If I’m having a party I’m putting Unwritten on the stereo, not Creep.
For the uninitiated Bereche is a family-owned champagne house that does things incrementally better throughout the wine making process than the major houses. Closely guided vineyard management through the use of organic fertilization and natural ecosystems around the vines and soils allows them to have the lowest treatment frequency in the Champagne region. This means that they do not have to interfere with the flavors of the grapes significantly in the growing process through the use of pesticides or herbicides compared to other houses. The majority of the vines are older than 40 in the grand cru bottlings, creating concentration and complexity. They then slowly ferment the wines, age them on lees for a long period (often 7 years), and finally manually disgorge. They do everything “right” throughout the process, and the sum of these good decisions is wine with a pure expression.
When I say expression, I’m speaking about expression of flavor. What I mean by that is that the flavors reveal themselves in a way that is simultaneously unique and characteristic. For example, let’s take the dominant grape in this wine: Pinot Noir (75%). Based on the grape and the latitude of Champagne, you may expect flavors of strawberry, cranberry, and forest floor. Those are the flavor characteristics of the grape. But what’s unique is how Pinot Noir is represented in this wine. For instance, we have a lot more spices coming through in this wine than in any other Pinot Noir I’ve ever tried. I said to Julie that it tasted like a kardemommebolle (cardamom bun), a mid-day treat I have sampled a bit too often here in Oslo. The combination of the characteristics and these unique traits (often based on the site and wine making process) create expression.
Just as with good food, it’s not hard to make a delicious champagne in 2024; the market is full of fantastic bottles. When “good” is the bare minimum, it makes me wonder what the point of connoisseurship even is. Do I go out to dinner on a Friday night to say “the chicken liver mousse was yummy!” and then go home, only to do it all over again with a woodfired pizza, laab, steak frites, a twist on a classic, smashburgers, and pho on Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday? Do I tip my door dasher 20 or 25%? Do I go to the bottle shop and ask for something funky and juicy?
What U-City Grill and Bereche have in common for me is that they offer a vision of a world where there’s something greater than a product being good, a service being acceptably rendered, a contract fulfilled. The wines of Bereche are both different and better than “good”—they are a celebration. They taste like a celebration, and every bottle I’ve ever tasted has created that response in me. This is only possible because the winemakers have a point of view, which has been created over time from their daily work, imprinted with value systems, history, and repetition. I know this is a bit high concept, but the point is that this isn’t normal. This consistency without compromise isn’t normal. It is craft, and it should be celebrated. Every true craft is definitionally a dying art because it lives in the routine of the craftsman. In St. Louis the owner is probably awake right now, putting pounds of beef, pork, and chicken into ziploc bags with his family’s bulgogi marinade, then taking yesterday’s ziplocs out of the fridge, prepping for today’s shift, and getting ready to do it all over again. In Champagne Vincent and Rafael are probably stalking around the cellar, overseeing riddling, testing the levels, and tasting from barrels. In a world that romanticizes creativity, passion, and change, there’s power and beauty in the stoicism of showing up to work every day, making no compromises, and the end result being a craft that transcends the “good” and achieves real greatness.
