After giving a talk at the University of Southern California, I found myself at the Chateau Marmont, the terminally hip L.A. hotel, hungry and thirsty. I’ve been staying there since 1984, when Paramount was putting me up, and I tapped a stash of white Burgundies from the 70s while eating tuna melts and working on the screenplay for Bright Lights, Big City. Or not eating—we did a lot of not eating back then. The glorious old whites are long gone, but looking over the wine list during my recent stay, I discovered a 2021 00 Wines V.G.W. Chardonnay. V.G.W., by the way, stands for “Very Good White.” And it’s very good, but the E.G.W.—Extremely Good White—is even better.
00 Wines is a producer from the Willamette Valley—a cool, fog-threaded region in northwestern Oregon—that I recently discovered, which, despite its limited production, seems to pop up on some very exclusive wine lists. I had had dinner a couple of months before with Chris and Kathryn Hermann, the 00 Wines proprietors, at the Noortwyck in Manhattan, where I had sampled some very fine Chards, which even in my jet-lagged state struck me as special.
