Wines for Dinner Parties: Luck and Cunning

Sometimes the success of a dinner party depends not just on your planning and execution but also on your good luck. In the case I have in mind, a quite nice dinner was kicked up to another dimension of pleasure by the wines we served with it – wines from a mixed case that we had lost track of and had brought home from storage just a week or so before this occasion.

The dinner, arranged on necessarily short notice, was for two visiting out-of-town friends. We wanted to give them a good meal, of course, but one with familiar dishes that we could put together within the time and culinary resources we had available. We settled on a first course of pasta alla carbonara, which prepares and cooks easily; a main course of osso buco, which we could make up entirely in advance; a cheese course, which requires no work at all; and for dessert a simple apple tart, which Diane is always happy to toss together. A nice meal, but not extraordinary.

What made this dinner distinctive was its wine and food pairings. The first of these was made possible by Champagne originally bought for long-past holidays and the rest by that mixed case of wines that had luckily wended its way home just a week before.

Of course, I can and will claim that it wasn’t just luck that I had long ago purchased those wines. But I have to admit that their meshing so perfectly with the courses of this dinner was serendipity, far beyond the reach of cunning. From the 12 available wines, I’d chosen the 3 that I thought would work best with our dishes, but I couldn’t know how perfectly they would match up. I don’t have a super palate, and we all need a little luck sometimes.

.

Our first piece of good luck: For aperitifs, a fine grower Champagne, an NV “Élégance” from Vincent Couche. This mouth-filling, aptly named wine was biodynamically grown:  84% Pinot noir, 16% Chardonnay, with 3 years on the lees. It started our evening off on a properly savory and substantial note that relaxed all four of us from the week’s busy pace. Memo to self: Keep some of this around.

.

To give our first course a little distinction, we made the pasta alla carbonara with some duck bacon we had on hand (luck again) instead of the usual pancetta. This made for a richer but less assertively flavored dish that paired beautifully with a bottle of 2008 Castello di Volpaia Chianti Classico Riserva. Volpaia’s high-altitude vineyards characteristically yield wines of great elegance and restraint, and this bottle proved to be a perfect, almost interlocking match with this more restrained version of carbonara.
.

.

Osso buco is always richly flavored: long-cooked veal shank on the bone creates a wonderful sauce around itself. But this is still veal, so it’s not an aggressive flavor but a mild, insinuating one. To my mind, this dish wants the gentle suaveness of Barbaresco, so I opted to match it with a 2004 Marchesi di Gresy Barbaresco Martinenga, a beautiful wine from one of the greatest crus of the appellation, just – at 17 years – reaching its peak of mature, woodsy flavors.
.

.

With the cheeses, I went a different direction, with a slightly more assertive wine: a 2004 Château Lafon-Rochet, still from that case. Equally as old as the Barbaresco, this Saint Estèphe (55% Cabernet sauvignon, 5% Cabernet franc, 40% Merlot) had also evolved to a perfectly balanced state of maturity, which played splendidly with the somewhat battered-looking but still delicious remnants of goat, cow, and sheep cheeses we had on hand. Lafon-Rochet covers 100 acres in a single plot that lies between Lafite Rothschild and Cos d’Estournel. That’s a very nice neighborhood, as the excellent evolution of this wine amply showed.
.

.

The result of not-too-demanding cookery and wonderfully compatible wines was a dinner both guests and hosts loved. Because the interplay between the wines and the dishes brought out the best of both, the whole meal stood out as something special and memorable, making us very happy indeed. As Italian winemakers and chefs have drilled into my head, abbinamento – the matching of the food and the wine you serve with it – is everything. And if you love mature wines as much as I do, you need the luck or cleverness to have squirrelled a batch of them away years ago.

Read Full Post »

Champagne Extravaganza

Once again, as he has for the past 20-some-odd years, friend and colleague Ed McCarthy organized the Wine Media Guild’s annual Champagne luncheon, this year held in the special-event space at restaurant Il Gattopardo. Ed, the author of Champagne for Dummies, has the finest Champagne palate and deepest store of Champagne knowledge of anyone I’ve met in wine journalism, and the lineup of wines he collected for this occasion exceeded impressive: 20 specimens of the best bubblies around. Here is the whole festive list:

Pol Roger Valentine Leflaive NV Blanc de Blancs
H. Mumm NV Blanc de Blancs
Collet “Collection Privée” 2006
Perrier-Jouet Belle Epoque 2012
Alfred Gratien Cuvée Paradis 2009
Delamotte Blanc de Blancs NV
Piper-Heidsieck “Rare” 2006
Boizel Joyau de France 2000
Henriot Cuvée Hemera 2005
Palmer & Co. 2003 (magnum)
Taittinger Comtes de Champagne 2007
Dom Ruinart Blanc de Blancs 2004
Moet & Chandon Dom Perignon Rosé 2007
Laurent-Perrier Grand Siècle
Charles Heidsieck Blanc des Millénaires 2004
Louis Roederer Cristal 2008
Pol Roger Cuvée Sir Winston Churchill 2006
Veuve Clicquot La Grande Dame 2008
Bollinger La Grande Année 2008
Krug Grande Cuvée 168ème édition

Lists like that are what make Wine Media Guild events important. The chance to taste a battery of wines of this caliber (and cost!) happens only rarely, and for a wine professional the opportunity to taste so many such wines side by side, both by themselves and then with a good lunch, in congenial company and comfortable circumstances – that’s simply incomparable.
.

One of the Two Tasting Tables

.
It hardly counts as a spoiler alert to say at the outset that there wasn’t a single bottle of those 20 Champagnes that I would not happily drink for Christmas or New Year’s Eve or my birthday – or tomorrow’s breakfast, for that matter.

The Champagne guru did have a reservation, however: Ed thought that almost all the wines were too young. For example: of Champagne Collet’s 2006 Collection Privée, he said “it still needs time”; of Boizel’s 2000 Joyau de France, he said it was “still quite young” at almost 20 years of age; of Champagne Palmer & Co’s 2003, poured from magnum, he said it was “a bit young still – amazing”; and of Louis Roederer’s 2008 Cristal, he said it was “a great Champagne that needs 20 years to develop.”  Do you sense a theme?

Ed likes his Champagne mature, and I can fully sympathize with that. That this Cristal can develop fascinatingly over the next 20 years, and then stay at a beautiful plateau for 20 more, I have no doubt – but I would certainly want to dispel any notion that it wasn’t pleasurable drinking any time before then. Ditto for all the other “too young” wines in this lineup. Yes, they will all get better, more complex, more nuanced, with more age, but none of them was in any way not enjoyable right now.

They may give you more later in their life, but then as now, whether they show their best or not will depend on what food you pair them with. It is true of all wines, but, I think, especially of Champagnes, that the food pairing can make or break the wines. “Buy on apples, sell on cheese” is a universal wine maxim. For example: Our lunch ended with a lovely, light, refreshing dessert, an orange and Grand Marnier custard on pan di Spagna, with which not a single one of these fine Champagnes matched well – not even the lightest entry in the field, Pol Roger’s Valentine Leflaive NV Blanc de Blancs. The light sweetness of the custard made all the Champagnes taste too big, too austere, even bordering on harsh; whereas simple dry chocolate biscotti matched with most of the Champagnes quite decently, and certainly more pleasurably.

So the lesson is, if you’re going to invest in any of these fine and costly specimens, think very carefully about what to serve them with, lest you just throw your money away – or worse yet, decide that you just don’t understand Champagne and give up on the whole genre, which would be a terrible triumph for the Christmas Grinch.

For the sake of those who always ask such questions, I tried to come up with my five favorite Champagnes of the day, but I couldn’t do it. By the most rigorous process of elimination, I came up with eight favorites – and I hasten to stress, favorites on this day, in these circumstances. Here they are, in the order in which I tasted them.

.

Pol Roger Valentine Leflaive NV Blanc de Blancs: New in the US, light-bodied and charming. Ed called it a “fresh, vibrant baby.”

 .

Alfred Gratien Cuvée Paradis 2009: As I am, Ed is a fan of Gratien, a Champagne house not as well known in the US as it deserves to be. My quick note on this wine says simply “meaty and very, very good.”

.

Piper-Heidsieck Rare 2006: “Something special – outstanding,” Ed said of this wine, and I agree completely.

.

Henriot Cuvée Hemera 2005: Another Champagne house better known and more esteemed in France than here, and another long-time favorite of both mine and Ed’s. I found it very elegant; he said it was “drinking beautifully.”

.

Louis Roederer Cristal 2008: What more can one say of Cristal?  This is a great wine that deserves all the praise it gets.

.

.
Pol Roger Cuvée Sir Winston Churchill 2006:  Yet one more of my long-time favorites, always big and elegant. Ed called it “outstanding,” and I agree.

.

.
Bollinger La Grande Année 2008: One of the biggest, deepest wines in the whole lineup. Classic Bollinger, structured and complex, this is definitely a wine that will last for decades.

.

Krug Grande Cuvée 168^ème édition:  Krug achieves with its NV the kind of distinction that other houses match only with their tête de cuvée, and it does it year after year, here for the 168th time. How’s that for consistency?

 

So there you have it, in all its sparkling splendor. The only thing I can add is to wish you all a joyous Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Saturnalia, Yule, or all of the above, as suits your seasonal inclination: May your days be merry and bright, and only half of your wines be white.

 

Mortes pour la France

.

Read Full Post »

Smiles of a Summer Night

Midsummer dinner parties always present problems. You want to keep things simple and light, but you also don’t want to treat your guests as if they were fashion silhouettes who make a meal on a single lettuce leaf and a martini olive. Plus, if your guests have palates, you want to offer them the bounty of the season and also wines appropriate to that bounty: light, but not insubstantial; fresh, but not without complexity. And all the while, you have to offer placatory sacrifices to the gods of the electric grid, so that the power doesn’t go off in the middle of prep or the middle of dinner. Oh, first-world worry worry worry!

Those of you who follow Diane’s blog already know how she recently pulled off this trick. My part involved less work but – I flatter myself – more tact: matching the appropriate wines to those tasty dishes. Hors d’oeuvres are always easy: you can’t go wrong with a Prosecco or a Champagne. This time I opted for Champagne, because . . . well, mostly because I’ve already drunk my lifetime quota of Prosecco this hot summer.

.
I’ve been tinkering with grower Champagnes lately – because they vary interestingly from the Grands Marques norms – and the one I opted for this time didn’t disappoint. Champagne Pierre Gimonnet & Fils, Cuis Premier Cru, Brut NV was an intriguingly mineral-and-white-fruit blanc de blancs: 100% Chardonnay, vintages 2010-2015; disgorged March 16, 2019; dosage 6g/l.For my palatal preferences, blanc de blancs is the ideal summertime Champagne, light enough to titillate, complex enough to hold your interest. This one provided exactly that combination.

Our first course at table was classic summer fare from Naples: zucchini a scapece and a platter of just sliced, never refrigerated heirloom tomatoes surrounding a still-moist-from-its-whey mozzarella di bufala. Naples dictated the wine choice here: a sapid and lovely Greco di Tufo, tasting of its volcanic soils and bittersweet fruit. Ours was from Benito Ferrara, his cru Cicogna, a perennial – and entirely deserving – Tre Bicchieri winner.
.

.
With the pasta, we switched to red wines, and I got a surprise. Fresh fettuccine pointed me to northern Italy, so I chose a Ghemme, one of Piedmont’s subalpine denominations that blends upwards of 65% Nebbiolo (locally called Spanna) with the indigenous Bonarda and sometimes a little admixture of other, very localized grapes. These northern wines emphasize elegance rather than power, and are usually lighter-bodied than more southerly Piedmont Nebbiolos like Barolo and Barbaresco.
.

.
My wine, a 2011 Monsecco, perfectly supplied the lighter body and elegance, but it also offered much greater fruit intensity – cherries! – and depth than I had expected. It got everybody’s attention from the first taste, and kept it. Ghemme and Boca and Lessona, but especially Ghemme, are staging a real comeback, and you should know about them:  they are fine wines, and considerably less expensive than the better known Barolo and Barbaresco.

Diane’s summertime secondo directed me back to Naples, so with it we drank a lovely 2007 Taurasi Primum Riserva from Guastaferro.
.

.
Gorgeous and big and deep, this wine – vinified exclusively from very old Aglianico vines still on their own roots, a rarity even in Campania’s often sandy, sulfur-laced soils – will last for decades more with no loss of vigor or flavor. This too is a winemaker to know about.

For our cheese course, I went back north again, for Barolo this time: a 1999 Barolo Colonnello from Aldo Conterno. I wanted to finish with a crescendo, and this great cru in a great vintage from a great producer provided it.

.
The wine was lush: big in the mouth, round and deep, with dark, brooding, still fresh-tasting fruit understrapped by abundant now-soft tannins and generous acidity, it was ready for anything the cheeses threw at it.

Smiles this summer night were abundant, though they bore no resemblance to the ones induced by the Ingmar Bergman movie from which I shamelessly lifted my title.

Read Full Post »

A Paler Shade of Bubble: Blanc de Blancs Champagne

This year’s New York Wine Press annual Champagne luncheon went to the opposite end of the Champagne color spectrum from the Wine Media Guild’s Rosé event in the preceding week. It presented ten Blanc de Blancs Champagnes and one stray-but-interesting English sparkling wine, all surrounding an unusual menu executed by Café Centro’s chef Christina Towers.

This was, quite evidently, an enjoyable and delicious affair, and each of the wines interacted handsomely with the slightly-off-the-beaten-track dishes. Naturally, I had my favorites: I’m nothing if not judgmental, and half the pleasure of an event like this for me is the chance to draw fine distinctions in character and pleasingness.

I insist on “pleasingness,” and not “quality,” because the quality of all these wines was very high, and what I am really talking about is how well, on this one special occasion, each wine seemed to my palate. As I’ve said many times in this blog, that’s all any tasting note really is: None is the sacred scripture engraved on stone that so many consumers take them for. End of sermon.
.

.
.
Of the two fine aperitif Champagnes, I preferred the Deutz – but then I often prefer Deutz, a house much esteemed in Europe but not so well known here. This 2007 showed splendidly, with all the nimbleness you hope for in a blanc de blancs, plus the impressive austerity and subtle power so characteristic of Deutz.

The diverse flavors of the first course could have proven a serious challenge for many wines, but they integrated quite harmoniously in themselves and worked surprisingly well with all three wines. Gusbourne, the English sparkler (for those who may not have gotten the memo, English sparkling wine has been making great advances in recent years), was the lightest-bodied of the three, with juicy wheat-and-yeast flavors on the palate and good minerality.

The Collet also showed as light and wheaty, lean, lithe, and fresh on the palate, with a very long finish – quite enjoyable. The Henriot, a non-vintage Champagne, tasted just gorgeous. Vinified from Grands Crus vineyards, it was classic Henriot – big and structured and graceful. For me, it was the wine of the day. In the New York area, it seems to average between $55 and $65 a bottle, a very decent price for a Champagne of this quality.

The second course again could have presented serious challenges to wine matches, with its pastis-flavored-and-colored risotto, but all three Champagnes responded very well. The nice, substantial Drappier was a touch unusual in that it contained 4% Pinot blanc (not at all discernible  to the taste). The Pol Roger 2009 made the strongest showing of the three, partially because of the good vintage and partially because of its Pol Roger character, suave and authoritative.

The final beef course should have been the most difficult for any blanc de blancs wine to deal with, but once again the Champagnes rose to the challenge. All drank well with the filet steak and the delicious short ribs in crust, though – truth to tell – both the Taitinger ’95 and the Heidsieck ’95 tasted a tad too old. Whether they were in fact beginning to fade, or whether beef just didn’t bring out their best, I couldn’t really tell.

The slightly younger – vintage 2000 – Perrier-Jouet on the other hand was a lovely, floral, elegant Christmas gift, the most enjoyable wine of the flight. Which it ought to be, given its stratospheric price (around $250). And that makes a suitably high note on which to end this report.

A Happy New Year to all!

 

 

 

 

 

Read Full Post »

I’m Blushing

By and large, I am not a great fan of blush wines, but I do make a large exception for rosé Champagne. It’s not just that it looks attractive: Contrary to still rosé wines, rosé Champagnes tend to be a little bigger, a little fuller, and to taste more of the grapes they’re made from than do the basic Champagne blends, or even Blanc de blancs.

That’s because Champagne is a wine of process and only secondarily – in most cases, a far distant secondarily – of the grapes or their terroir. I guess it’s because of the greater assertiveness of red grapes, or maybe because of the necessary fact of skin contact with the musts in the making of rosé, that rosé Champagnes show more of both their grapes and their terroir than does any other kind of Champagne. And there’s no question that – again, by and large – rosé Champagne is the most adaptable with food: It is for me the dinner Champagne.

All of this was forcefully and very enjoyably brought home for me at this year’s Wine Media Guild Champagne lunch, which spotlighted 22 examples of rosé Champagnes.
.

.
The annual event occurred this year at mid-Manhattan’s Gattopardo restaurant, where the excellent cooking has a decidedly Sicilian bent. Not a very natural fit for Champagne, you might think, and you wouldn’t be wrong, but the afternoon’s rosés took it nicely in stride, drinking very pleasantly alongside everything from mini-arancini through rigatoni with eggplant to juicy, tender slices of veal filet, fingerling potatoes, and broccoli rape. Every wine I tasted showed well with these to-them-very-foreign foods. There aren’t many other – probably none, in fact – such characteristically French wines I would try that with.

As he has for the past decade, Ed McCarthy, who has become almost a patron saint of Champagne, gathered and presented the wines, 15 nonvintage and 7 vintage, ranging in price from a low of around $45 to a high of around $300. (In computing prices, Ed didn’t take the distributors’ suggested retail prices but an average of the actual prices he found in local retail shops.)

.
The highest was Perrier-Jouet’s Belle Epoque Rosé 2006, a lovely wine and always among the most costly at these events. Definitely out of my price range, but unquestionably an excellent example of the breed. The best buy of the day was Lenoble Brut Rosé NV, a fresh and enjoyable wine from a small producer – which means that bargain hunters are going to have to work to find it. (Note: All the wines at this lunch are available on the American market, but distribution – especially for those of small production – can be very spotty.)

The vintage Champagnes of course were more expensive than most of the NV, the great majority of which fell into the $50-$60 range. One exception was Moet & Chandon’s Extra Brut Rosé 2009, which retails for about $65, and which Ed admired greatly, calling it “a very special wine,” even though he thought it still too young. At that price, it is a very special wine indeed.

Here is the whole list of the Champagnes in the order of their presentation, starting with the lightest:

 

Ayala Rosé Brut Majeur NV
Henri Giraud “Fut de Chene” Brut Rosé NV
Lamiable Grand Cru Brut Rosé NV
Phillipe Gonet Brut Rosé NV
Boizel Brut Rosé NV
Collet Brut Rosé NV
Duval-Leroy 1e Cru Brut Rosé NV

Mumm Brut Rosé NV
Henriot Brut Rosé NV
Piper-Heidsieck Sauvage Rosé NV
Lenoble Brut Rosé NV
Deutz Brut Rosé NV
Alfred Gratien Brut Rosé NV
Louis Roederer Brut Rosé 2011
Bollinger Brut Rosé NV
Moet & Chandon Extra Brut Rosé 2009
Charles Heidsieck Brut Rosé Reserve NV

Pol Roger Brut Rosé 2008
Perrier-Jouet Belle Epoque Rosé 2006
Taittinger Comtes Brut Rosé 2006
Ruinart Dom Ruinart Brut Rosé 2004
Veuve Clicquot Grande Dame Rosé 2006

 

These wines all showed very well: There wasn’t one I wouldn’t be happy to drink, especially with classic French cuisine. My favorite wines of the day were – predictably: I’m a creature of habit – all old reliables: Henriot, Gratien, and Roederer, followed closely by Moet & Chandon and Pol Roger.
.

.
Ed deserves the last word: His favorites (I infer from his audible enthusiasm: He tried his best to be impartial in his presentation) included Ayala, Mumm, Henriot, Gratien, Moet & Chandon, Charles Heidsieck, Pol Roger, and Ruinart. That may seem like a lot, but Ed really loves Champagne, and the truth of the matter is that he enjoyed every single one we tasted. He is an amateur of Champagne in the most literal sense of the word: Would that every wine lover could experience Champagne as passionately as he does.

Read Full Post »

Prosecco and Champagne: Tasting Beyond the Bubbles

I have been enjoying both Champagne and Prosecco for many years now without ever thinking of making a direct comparison between them. I had, without a lot of thought about it, consigned them each to its own niche: Prosecco light and pleasing and sort of frivolous, Champagne a more serious wine for more important occasions. But I was brought up short recently by an innocent question from a wine civilian about what really was the difference between the two.

I had started giving the stock answer about the different grapes that each is made from, when I realized that in fact I had never drunk them side by side so as to be able to give the answer that my civilian friend was really seeking – the differences in how they taste and how that affects what one ought to drink them with. Not a glaring omission, you might think, except that that kind of side-by-side comparison is exactly what my first book, Mastering Wine, is based on and is what I have always believed is the best basic method of learning about wines. Color me embarrassed.
.

.
To make up for that slip, and with Long-Suffering Spouse as a willing collaborator, I put together a tasting of a representative Prosecco and a representative Champagne designed to explore the two thoroughly: first, tasting alone in the classic clinical way; then with two stages of a dinner – first as apéritif alongside caviar, then alongside a main course of sautéed soft-shell crabs. (No one says a wine tasting can’t be a little self-indulgent.) It would be understatement to say the experiment was very interesting. You can read Diane’s account of the foods here.
.

.
To keep the playing field as level as possible, I wanted to use readily available wines. Ideally, I would have liked them to be similar in price, but that proved impossible. No Prosecco in my local markets came anywhere near the price of most Champagnes, so I availed myself of an Astor Wines sale on sparklers to buy Nino Franco’s Rustico at about $15 and Pol Roger’s Brut NV at about $38. That’s close to standard price for the Prosecco and a very reasonable price for the Champagne. Rustico is a DOCG Prosecco Valdobbiadene, which is one the best zones for Prosecco, but it’s Nino Franco’s basic bottling. (The firm makes others, including a brilliant vintage bottling that is capable of great aging, but none was available locally.)  The Brut NV is Pol Roger’s most basic Champagne, so in that respect there was no tilt in the playing field, but I’m afraid the difference in price between the two wines definitely provided one.

So what did the tasting show me? Visually, there’s not much difference between them, both a pale gold, the Champagne a shade darker. Both had lovely fine and persistent perlage, despite the fact that the Rustico was made by the Charmat method and the Pol Roger had the benefit of the full méthode champenoise (not topics that I can go into here).
.

.
The aromas showed more differences. The Rustico was yeasty smelling, hinting of fresh bread, while the Pol Roger was a tad more intensely bready, hinting of toast. Both were pleasing and inviting.

In the mouth, the Rustico tasted light and fresh, with floral and fruity notes, and specific suggestions of apple, while the Pol Roger showed more wheat and less fruit (though hints of pear popped up), by comparison seeming even a little austere on the palate and in the finish. The Rustico finished long, with a touch of elegance polishing its freshness.

This direct comparison was very instructive. Of the two wines, the Prosecco seemed the more direct and – I considered two words here – simple or honest. It was more obviously fruity, though we’re talking about nuanced fruit here, not in-your-face jam. It struck me as more immediately enjoyable, less demanding of attention or analysis. The Champagne seemed less direct or accessible – more intellectual, so to speak. It seemed weightier, more imposing. (The Prosecco had 11 degrees of alcohol, the Champagne 12.5.)

I deliberately used white wine glasses, not flutes, because I wanted to taste the wines and not just the effervescence. As the two wines sat for a while in the glasses and their sparkle faded, the fruit of the Prosecco showed better, while in the Champagne the winemaking came to the fore.

I would say that with neither of these wines is fruit the point. It’s an attraction, of course, but sparkling wines are a contrivance, and the point of the contrivance – at least in my opinion – is lightness and pleasure first and everything else after. Obviously there are outer limits of how much lightness and how much or little of anything else is desirable, and every winemaker and every drinker has to decide what those are for themselves.

Nothing I tasted in this match-up pushed me to prefer one wine over the other. Both offered high levels of pleasure of slightly different kinds, but in fact the two wines surprised me by how similar they were. And those similarities persisted with different foods, both wines tasting equally satisfactory in their own ways with caviar and blini and soft-shell crabs on toast.
.

.
Each dish called up the Prosecco’s light, fresh fruit and the Champagne’s relatively greater weight and depth (the latter, I am certain, the result of being vinified from a blend of grape varieties rather than a single one). So there were no knock-outs or TKOs, just two excellent contenders of very slightly different weight classes, each performing in character in a variety of circumstances. As old carnival barkers used to say, ya pays yer money and ya takes yer choice.

I could certainly have gotten more dramatically different results by choosing different wines – Nino Franco’s impressive vintage Primo, for instance, or Pol Roger’s always wonderful Cuvee Sir Winston Churchill – but I wanted to get as near parity in my selections as I could. Likewise, other palates making the same comparisons might come to different conclusions or perceive greater differences than I did. All I can tell you is what I tasted, and urge you, if you’re curious, to make the comparison for yourself.

Read Full Post »

Vintage Champagnes: Not Your Average Pleasure

As most sparkling wine fanciers know, blends of several grape varieties (Chardonnay, Pinot meunier, Pinot noir) and the reserve wines of several harvests constitute the norm for Champagne, and the reputation of the great Champagne houses stands or falls on the consistency of style and quality they can achieve in their non-vintage product. Vintage Champagnes are an aberration, made only when the quality and distinctiveness of a particular harvest justifies separating it from the house’s norm.

So vintage Champagnes are produced only in the best years – and not all Champagne houses may agree on which those are, so this is the class of Champagnes where the greatest differences from house to house show themselves. For Champagne lovers, this class of wines presents some of Champagne’s greatest pleasures and greatest distinctions.

The New York Wine Press kicked off Christmas week this year with its annual Champagne luncheon, as it has done every year for the past 13. Wine doyenne Harriet Lembeck and Champagne guru Ed McCarthy organized a presentation of vintage Champagnes from 12 great houses, covering 5 different vintages. These were all excellent wines, some of them great, and all had their partisans. Here is the slate of wines and the menu they accompanied.

There isn’t a wine there that I would rate lower than very good; several were excellent, and a few I thought outstanding – but (my usual caveat) that’s my palate and my preferences on one particular day with one particular array of foods. Others thought differently, and every wine had its partisans. With that forewarning, here are my reactions to each wine.
.

Apéritif

Domaine Dehours Brut Rosé “Oeil de Perdrix” 2009
The day’s only rosé wine, and a handsome one: 55% Pinot meunier, 45% old-vine Chardonnay. Lovely color and perlage, distinctive floral/mineral notes on nose and palate. A great start to the day’s “work.”
.

First Flight

.
Moet & Chandon Grand Vintage 2008
A nice, wheaty Champagne with good vintage character. Ed McCarthy thinks 2008, 2002, and 1996 constitute the greatest Champagne vintages of the past 25 years. Most 2008s have not yet reached the US.

Piper-Heidsieck Vintage Brut 2006
Not as big or distinctive as the preceding Moet – that’s the difference of the vintages – but still fine, in the classic mid-weight Heidsieck style

Henriot Millésimé 2006
Robust and fine, with a lot of character – very much the Henriot approach to Champagne.

Louis Roederer et Philippe Starck Brut Nature 2009
This is a lean and muscular wine, not as big as any of the preceding but polished, with a lot of power behind its smiling face. Roederer consistently performs well, and this special bottling is no exception.

.

Second Flight

.
Perrier-Jouet Belle Epoque Brut 2008
Light and bright on the palate, showing clearly the superior character of the ’08 vintage.

Veuve Cliquot 2006 La Grande Dame Brut
Like some other 2006s here, this one showed a little lean (especially in comparison to 2008), but very elegant and fresh.

Taittinger Comtes de Champagne Blanc de Blancs 2006
A goodly number of luncheon attendees thought this the wine of the day. Taittinger’s Comtes is certainly one of the pinnacles of Champagne art, and I thought this example – elegant and big for an ’06 – was excellent.

André Jacquart Le Mesnil Grand Cru Blanc de Blancs 2006
Another blanc de blancs, another ’06, and by the evidence of these two wines I’d have to say that 2006 must have been a great year for Chardonnay. This one was lovely: elegant, distinctive, and very long-finishing. Another great wine.

.

Third Flight

.
Pol Roger Brut 2006
A great house, and always consistent in style and quality. This example was huge and classic, with typical initial austerity followed by a rush of flavors.

Moet & Chandon Dom Perignon Brut 2006
Like Taitinger’s Comtes, Moet’s Dom represents a pinnacle of Champagne achievement. For the majority of tasters, this was the favorite wine of the day. I too thought it wonderful, though a trifle leaner than the Pol Roger – not a defect, but a difference.

Alfred Gratien Brut Millésimé 2000
By far the oldest wine of the day and proof of how well Champagne ages, if any was needed. A big, excellent wine, high-toned and elegant, from a great house not well enough known in the US.

Bollinger La Grande Année Brut 2005
Bollinger is always big – not huge, but solid – and always lovely. This one, the day’s sole example of the 2005 vintage, was rounded and mouth-filling, with the usual Bollinger richness – yet another exceptionally fine wine.

*šššš

And there you have it: quite an extraordinary collection of wonderful wines, any one of which could be the centerpiece of the most important celebration. My New Year’s wish for you all is that you have the chance, in 2017, to taste them all!

Read Full Post »

It’s the Champagne Time of Year

The Wine Media Guild’s annual Champagne luncheon signals to me the true start of the holiday season. It always falls on the first Wednesday of December, and it always spotlights between 15 and 20 excellent true Champagnes; this year, all Blanc de blancs. Curated again this year by colleague and friend Ed McCarthy – author of Champagne for Dummies, among several other books – this event for me is the surest sign that whatever winter and the world may do to us, consolation and pleasure are still within reach.

As Ed reminded us, Blanc de blancs are the most popular kind of France’s festive bubblies in the United States, even though not all Champagne houses make one. Not because they don’t want to, but because they can’t: Not every house has enough Chardonnay to supply its basic cuvée and make a Blanc de blancs. Chardonnay is the backbone of all Champagnes (except Blanc de noirs, of course) and there just isn’t enough of it within the Champagne zone.

That stretch of chalky ridges and hills probably constitutes the northernmost outpost of Chardonnay, and Ed believes that, as a northern extension of the Côte de Beaune and Chablis, it produces some of the finest and sturdiest Chardonnay in the world – but not a lot of it. The best lots, from Grand Cru sites like Mesnil, are especially scarce and very expensive, so a good Blanc de blancs is costly from the get-go. Rising demand for Blanc de blancs Champagnes will not make them any cheaper in the future, because there just isn’t much, if any, land available for new plantings within the Champagne appellation. So enjoy what we’ve got while we’ve got it – which is never bad advice, about anything.

Here, in the order in which they were presented, is the slate of wines Ed and the Media Guild gathered for this occasion, along with their suggested retail prices and selected comments – mostly Ed’s, but a few of mine – about each.

.*

Barons de Rothschild (magnum) NV ($207 for magnum, $99 for 750ml)  An ideal apéritif Champagne, Ed says: My palate agrees.

Collet NV ($55)  New to the New York market: a small house, a cooperative, and not very familiar to Ed or any of the attendees. The wine is made from the top 10%, all Grands Crus, of the co-op’s hectares.

Mumm de Cramant NV ($64)  Once upon a time, Mumm de Cramant was one of my favorite Champagnes, but I was disappointed in this bottle, which I thought distinctly short on charm. Ed liked it better than I did.

.*

Henriot NV ($55)  This house is one of my current favorites, and I like almost everything it makes. Today’s Blanc de blancs was no exception. Ed didn’t think it was showing well, but the bottle I tasted was absolutely fine.

Ruinart NV ($72)  Always fine, Ed says, even though this isn’t Dom Ruinart, the house’s top-of-the-line Blanc de blancs. I thought it was lovely.

Gosset Grand Blanc NV ($77)  A great Champagne house that people in the US don’t know enough about, Ed rightly says. For me, Gosset is right up with Henriot among my favorite Champagnes. I thought this Blanc de blancs was excellent.

*

Ayala 2008 ($85)  Another house much more esteemed in France than known in the US: our loss. This was the first vintage Champagne of the lineup. Ed says the three great Champagne vintages of the past 20 years are 1996, 2002, and 2008, and this is one of the best Ayalas he’s had in quite a while.

Philippe Gonet Bellemnita Grand Cru 2005 ($300)  A Blanc de blanc specialist located in Mesnil. This rare bottle, from a single site of old vines, was big and powerful but a little inelegant.

Dehours 2005 ($55)  A Marne Valley grower and passionate Champagne maker: This wine is from a 1.3 hectare site – that’s about three acres – so there isn’t a lot of it.

*

Louis Roederer Brut Nature 2009 ($85)  Another great Champagne house that does everything well, even in California. Brut Nature is relatively new to its line. Big and forceful, it’s a huge wine for a Blanc de blancs.

A.R. Lenoble 2008 ($64)  A small producer in a grand cru village and a great vintage. Ed thinks it a great value.

Bruno Paillard 2006 ($90) Not in New York right now, but coming. Ed thinks it an outstanding wine from a fine house. Its proprietor considers 2006 a Chardonnay year par excellence.

*

André Jacquart Mesnil Brut Nature NV ($70)  An NV Champagne placed among the vintage Champagnes because of its heft. I found it indeed big and fine, classic Blanc de blancs.

Pol Roger 2008 ($110 to $125)  A famous and consistently fine Champagne house, showing a great vintage – “a stellar Champagne,” Ed says.

Taittinger Comtes de Champagne 2006, ($199)  Taittinger largely launched Blanc de blancs in modern times, and this bottle showed the house’s expertise. Consistently classic.

*

Perrier-Jouët Belle Epoque Blanc de Blancs 2002 ($300 to $350)  There was some controversy about this wine, because one or two of the bottles were seriously off. Ed thought it excellent (he got one of the good bottles), though he thinks the 2002s are far from their peak. But oh, that price!

Charles Heidsieck Blanc de Millénaires 1995 ($190 to $199)  A great, long-lived wine, long-finishing and elegant. Some people thought this the best wine of the day.

*

And there you have it: a delightful slate of Blanc de blancs Champagnes, ranging in heft from apéritif style to substantial dinner wines. For me, a perfect kick-off for the holidays. For you, I hope, a dossier of useful information. Joyeux Noël et Bonne Année !

Read Full Post »

Endings, and Maybe Some Beginnings

2016 snuck in on little cat’s feet in my neighborhood, shrouded by soft mist and a rising fog from the Hudson that, along with some pain pills for my outraged hip, had me asleep well before the canonical New Year’s Eve moment of rooting and tooting. This holiday season has been an ambivalent one for me, with unanticipated post-operative pain vying with the unnaturally warm weather to keep most thoughts of seasonally appropriate celebration at a distance. Plus – a side effect of my medications – my appetite and capacity have fallen to next to nothing. So there have been no big, year-end whoop-di-dos here, though Diane and I have managed a few low-key relishings of our survival and mutual company – probably the best way of all to mark the holidays in any event.

For you, o faithful reader, the consequence of all that is that there will be no connected narrative to hold this post together – just a series of musings, prompted by a few of the bottles with which we measured the end of 2015. Milestones, of a vinous and vital sort.

.

Andre Clouet Champagne Brut Rose Numero 5 nv. This year, this lovely bubbly has become my go-to Champagne for serving to guests who drink Champagne and not labels. It has body, it has elegance, it has compatibility with all sorts of canapés and more substantial dishes, and most of all it has the kind of palate-caressing flavor that makes you stop mid-sip and just enjoy. I am usually a fan of rosé Champagne primarily as a dinner companion, but I like this one everywhere. Something about the complexity of its flavor, the paradoxical lightness and weight of its body, reminds me each time I drink it of the excitement I used to feel decades ago when I first seriously began exploring Champagne and discovering, with some naïve amazement, the variety of its pleasures beyond just bubbles. Snows of yesteryear, eh?  A very appropriate sensation for the end of one year and the start of another.

.

Villa Bucci Verdicchio riserva 2006. No point beating around the bush here: This is flat-out a great white wine and a textbook example of how white wines can age. I am constantly amazed that Verdicchio hasn’t really caught on in this country. It is an excellent grape variety, and the best examples from its homeland, Italy’s Adriatic-facing Appenine slopes in the Marche, show not only the variety’s intriguing flavors but also the land’s distinctive minerality. This bottle partnered brilliantly with Diane’s sea scallops Nantais to create one of the best wine and food matches of our holiday season. Ampelio Bucci, the genial and devoted caretaker of his family’s ancestral properties, consistently produces what is always one of the best (very often, the best) Verdicchio of them all. His wines have been constantly reliable over years and years, always big, elegant, and distinctive. One of the New Year’s resolutions that I know I’m going to keep is that our home will never be without some.

.

Chateau Les Ormes de Pez 1989. What memories this wine evokes!  This was one of the first small chateaux I tasted back when I first began learning there was more to Bordeaux than shippers’ Medocs and out-of-my-financial-league premiers crus. Les Ormes de Pez was and remains a classic, even though only a cru bourgeois. Every time I drink it, it reminds me why I love St. Estephe. It has all the elegance and balance that the great wines of Bordeaux specialize in, and on top of that the lovely little rasp of the (to my mind and palate) utterly distinctive St. Estephe terroir. I still don’t understand why no St. Estephe wine was ever named a premier cru. What are Cos d’Estournel and Montrose – chopped liver? They cost, of course, many times what Les Ormes de Pez does, which is still a bargain in current releases. We used to buy the ‘66 for $3 a bottle; now that’s around $100 if you can find it – and if I could find it, I’d happily pay the fee. $100 is cheap these days for Bordeaux. Pity what’s happened to Bordeaux prices.

.

Barbi Brunello Riserva 1977. This part of this post, alas, is a funeral service. This bottle was dead, deeply, profoundly dead, though remembered with great fondness. The bottle had been recorked at the winery several decades ago, but it couldn’t survive in my less-than optimal storage. Or perhaps it had just reached the end of its natural span. It’s always hard to tell with a wine of this age.

This was the last bottle of a case of Barbi 1977 Riserva that I received somewhere back in the mid-to-late ‘80s as part of my winning the Barbi Prize for journalism about Brunello di Montalcino. It was a great honor and a grand occasion: Francesca Colombini Cinelli herself, the grande dame of Montalcino winemaking, travelled to New York to make the presentation. 

The wines drank wonderfully for years, with all the paradoxical muscle and grace, smoothness and asperity of classic Brunello. I guess I kept this one just a bit too long. They will all be remembered – and missed.

.

I had a similar experience a few days earlier with a 2002 Moreau Chablis Grand Cru Les Clos, a wine that by all rights should have been splendid. But no: this bottle was as oxidized as a wine can get. A lesson to me for 2016: Drink my older wines while they and I both survive.

.

Let me finish up this hail-and-farewell with two producers whose wines will be around for a long time to come, Vallana and Produttori di Barbaresco. Both are Piedmont producers who have long been important in their zones and increasingly so on the American market. Both are some of the finest bargains in the entire wine field, offering top-flight examples of their denominations at what are very affordable prices.

First up: we drank a Vallana Spanna 2011, a mostly Nebbiolo wine from the northern Piedmont, still in its youth. Back when Vallana made its first entry in the US market, in the 1960s and 70s, its Spannas were famous for their ageability, and many 10- to 20-year-old bottles were available. Such is not the case now, but the wine still shows all the capacity to age that it ever had. And if palatal memory doesn’t deceive me, the Vallana fruit, as cultivated by the Vallana grandchildren, Francis and Marina, now is even more ample and more refined, with a mouth-flooding juiciness that makes the wines supremely drinkable at any age. This particular bottle of Spanna was the last I had on hand, but my top New Year’s resolution is to fix that ASAP.

Finally, a bottle of Produttori di Barbaresco Barbaresco Riserva Montestefano 1999 rounded off our holidays – in a literal sense, since it was the wine that we drank with a New Year’s Day dinner. By now, everybody who knows Piedmont wine should know that the Produttori di Barbaresco consistently offers the unquestioned best value in the Alba zone. Its many cooperating growers between them control huge swathes of Barbaresco’s best vineyards and crus, and under the direction of Aldo Vaca, as knowledgable and understated a winemaker as any in Piedmont, the results are always worth drinking – in difficult years, sound and durable, in great years, off-the-charts wonderful.

Most wine journalists would agree with that assessment, just as most wine journalists have a kind of mental reservation that limits the praise they confer – maybe because it’s a co-op, and there is all the glamor of the single grower/artisan as opposed to the supposed “industrial” operation of a co-op. Let me start 2016 by saying that’s nonsense: The individual growers of Produttori di Barbaresco, and the winemaking skills of Aldo Vaca, between them make wines that stand on a par with any from the Barbaresco zone. These are simply great wines at great prices. My intention is to get more of them.

And so we turn the page from 2015 to 2016 – a look back, and a peek forward. Good luck and good wine to all of us! I have a feeling we’re going to need both.

Read Full Post »

No, I Haven’t Forgotten Champagne

The holidays were already upon us, and I hadn’t done any of my obligatory wine-journalist holiday Champagne stories. But there it was: The day of the New York Wine Press Holiday Champagne Luncheon had arrived. Sixteen prestige cuvée Champagnes were served. The Brasserie made special efforts this year to present a lunch even better and more elegant than usual, because this – our 13th such feast – was our last at this near-historic location: The Brasserie will close after Christmas.

It’s hard to exaggerate just how extraordinary an event this was, with so many examples of such high-caliber Champagnes over several courses of dishes chosen to show them at their best. And I – poor I – had had hip replacement surgery just 2½ weeks previously, and at that moment was taking strong painkillers as well as antibiotics, with which I had been strictly cautioned not to drink alcohol. So what did I do?

Sip and spit, my friends. Sip and spit. And occasionally swallow, when I just couldn’t stand abstinence any longer.

So here I am, keyboard in hand once again, heroically beating down my post-operative pain so as to altruistically – I do it all for you, my loyal readers, all for you – and conscientiously report on the best of these best bottles. Believe me, this was hard work. I didn’t enjoy it at all. Honest.

A lovely menu, as you can see, and an imposing array of wines. Bargain hunters might as well stop reading now: All these wines are expensive, some almost prohibitively so. The Perrier-Jouet Belle Epoque Blanc de Blancs 2002 – a brilliant wine from a superb vintage – topped the scale at a suggested retail price of $367 a bottle, and the Pol Roger Sir Winston Churchill was next at $250. Clearly, these are not quaffing or clambake wines, but the most special bottles for the most special occasions.

To a certain extent, tasting wines of this caliber becomes an exercise in looking for flaws, so you can find a reason, after allowing for the differences of vintage and house style, to prefer one wine to another. I can’t say these were all flawless wines, but I couldn’t find one that I didn’t like. Most were big, but their heft was uniformly worn gracefully, so all seemed supple and live on the palate. In fact, the oldest wine in the set – the Henriot Cuvee des Enchanteleurs Brut 2000 – seemed among the freshest of them all, a big, elegant, complex wine, with years of life seemingly left in it. Henriot has long been among my favorite producers, and this particular wine was probably my favorite of the day.

.

Flight One

In the first flight, I ever so slightly preferred the Lamiable Les Meslaines Grand Cru 2008, though Ed McCarthy, who selected the wines for the occasion and commented on all of them, thought it a bit too young – which it no doubt is.

.

Flight Two

The second flight was more challenging. These wines were all a touch fuller and more complex than the first flight. I couldn’t name a clear favorite and dithered back and forth between the exhilarating Piper-Heidsieck Rare Brut 2002 and the forceful Veuve Clicquot La Grande Dame 2006.

.

Flight Three

The next course and flight again ratcheted the heft and complexity stakes up a bit higher, each of these four wines being so distinct from the others as to make comparisons pretty pointless. I found the Cristal surprisingly light (for Cristal), the Comtes de Champagnes funky in the nose though lovely on the palate, the Belle Epoque complex and intriguing but not as full as I would have wished for, and the Mesnil sur Oger marked by very unusual – and a little unsettling – fresh hay and wheat scents. I’d love to have another go at this flight on a medication-free day.

.

Flight Four

Of the final five wines, there is very little I can say. They are all great Champagnes, all classic, and all showed superbly with the rare duck breast. Bollinger, Pol Roger, and Krug are the heaviest hitters of a line-up of heavy hitters, while the Dom Perignon and the Cuvee des Enchanteleurs showed overwhelming elegance and complexity. As I said before, my palate tilts toward the Henriot house style, but there isn’t a one of these wines that I wouldn’t happily drink at any opportunity. Maybe to celebrate when I finally finish rehab . . .

I would be seriously remiss if I didn’t acknowledge here the splendid work done this year, as every preceding year, by Harriet Lembeck, chair of the New York Wine Press, and Ed McCarthy, its “Champagne Procurer General,” and Sharon Colabello, the Brasserie’s Director of Catering. That team did a wonderful job in putting together this seamless, informative, enjoyable, and thoroughly impressive occasion.

“Happy Christmas to All, and to All a Good Night!”

Read Full Post »