Michael Shaps has found a surefire way to sell Virginia wine: Open the Burgundy first. For the past seven years, Shaps, Virginia’s best-known winemaker and one of the few whose label carries his name, has been crossing the Atlantic to create red and white Burgundies with a French business partner, Michel Roucher-Sarrazin. It’s a small, but exquisite operation (about 800 cases of estate wine and another 1,000 cases of modestly priced négociant wine) that, he says, moves mostly through word of mouth—much like the Michael Shaps wines that he makes here and that encounter the prejudice facing all Virginia wines. Shaps & Roucher-Sarrazin has to get onto shelves somehow, so Shaps pays personal visits to shopkeepers in three American markets (Mid-Atlantic, New York and Boston).
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Michael Shaps, ubiquitous in Virginia with his eponymous label and Virginia Wineworks, in addition to extensive consulting, creates outstanding garagiste wines in Burgundy with partner Michel Roucher-Sarrazin. “It’s so satisfying, it’s not really work,” he says. |
“If they like the Burgundies,” he says, “they’ll try the Shaps.”
If they like the Burgundies? Well, call us a cheap date, but when Working Pour poured the 2005 Meursault for our select taste-testers, by which we mean the discerning couple with whom we drink the good stuff, we experienced nothing short of l’amour for the mellow wine that somehow carried both honey tones and minerality. Trés charmant, indeed. (If you can’t rely on us, ask Wine Spectator, which has given Shaps & Roucher-Sarrazin scores in the high 80s and low 90s.)
Shaps was headed to his winery and house in the Côte de Beaune within days of our conversation (though, full disclosure: He graciously made time to drop off a couple bottles of his $80+ wine). Regrettably, his many commitments stateside have cut down on the frequency of his trips to France. The custom crush side of Virginia Wineworks, the business he opened with Philip Stafford in 2007, is on the verge of significant expansion to as many as 12,000 cases in 2011. Meanwhile, the Virginia Wineworks wine that Shaps supervises is getting a facelift—goodbye to the Constructivist worker-guys on the label; hello to something more appealing to the ladies (the majority of wine buyers). Then there’s the high-end Michael Shaps label, not to mention the consulting he does with wineries across four states.
He admits that he overextends himself, but if his heart were the only consideration, Shaps says, “I’d be happy doing the Burgundies and Michael Shaps.” Easy to understand why—especially the Burgundy part. He met Roucher-Sarrazin in the early 1990s, when Shaps decided “to drop everything and move to France” to learn winemaking. He interned with the man only two years his senior who, in time, became his partner. And though their enterprise is costly, given the mystique of Burgundian terroir—leasing a mere two rows of vines in Vosne-Romanée, for instance, runs them about $23,000 annually, thanks to the strength of the Euro—Shaps is enchanted by the traditional ways.
He recounts when he and Roucher-Sarrazin were finalizing the contract for their winery and gite in Meursault, “I had to rewrite an entire paragraph in French. It’s the Old World, where your handwriting is your word.”
That’s why the wear and tear of crossing time zones fades quickly. “It takes me back to why I got into winemaking,” he says, “to something authentic.”
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The barriers keep falling for Virginia wine. First Claude Thibaut’s sparkling wine was served at the Obamas’ State Dinner. Then, earlier this month, Veritas winemaker Emily Hodson Pelton poured her 2009 Viognier for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and First Lady Michelle Obama. The occasion was the International Women of Courage Awards. About a year ago, Pelton says, the State Department chef, Jason Larkin, visited Veritas and the region “so that he had an understanding of Virginia wines.” When the time came to plan this event, he rang Pelton.
“So honored” to be there, Pelton soon succumbed to the auspiciousness of the occasion. “At first, I was so excited that my wine was there. Then Hillary and Michelle started speaking, and I sort of forgot about my wine because I was in awe of all these strong, amazing women.”
