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WTN: 1975 Mouton, Latour, Montrose

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Bill Spohn

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He put the 'bar' in 'barrister'

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WTN: 1975 Mouton, Latour, Montrose

by Bill Spohn » Sat Nov 24, 2007 1:54 pm

There are quite a few very good restaurants in Vancouver. Most people don’t know it, but there is one more than they think, and most days it is just another rather nice unassuming house, occupied by good friends that have a great passion and interest for cooking and wine. When I am lucky enough to go there when it becomes one of the top ten places in Vancouver for fine wine and food (the other nine are commercial restaurants) I never fail to leave sated and impressed with the care with which the food was prepared and the thought that went into the wine matches. I won’t identify the friends, but will say that they are charter members of the WATAPEAS group I founded – the Western All Terrine and Pate Eaters Society, which has a single event each year.

Dinner chez X recently was as delightful as ever, and I’ll describe the food as wel as the wines.

First, there were not one, but five different hors d’ouvres, all painstakingly prepared:

Oat cakes with goat cheese and marinated fig Shaggy Parasol Mushroom soup
Shiitake frittatas Pepperoni cheddar straws Dungeness crab with watercress

1990 Heidsieck Millesime Brut – a great contrast in the two 1990 Champagnes, with this one having a nicely mature yeasty nose showing some complexity, a richer style, with good balance and length.

1990 Piper-Heisieck ‘Rare’ Brut – in complete contrast, this wine was fresher and had clean acidity, a leaner well structured wine that in my opinion worked better with the food. What was even more delightful about these wines was that I have both in my own cellar!

Duck salad with green beans and pine nuts

2002 Zind Humbrecht Gewurztraminer Turkheim – I took a look at this pairing and my first thought was that the course could have been swapped with the next one, but I was willing t submit to experimentation! As it turned out, the wine match was very well thought out. This ripe Gewurz was medium gold in colour, with a good varietal nose, and was fairly full in the mouth, with good body and a touch of residual sugar, although another diner disagreed. let’s say that it was a ripe style, and it went well with the duck salad.

Steelhead trout with creamy pollenta and mushroom jus

1988 Ch. Carbonnieux – colour on this one was heading toward amber and there was a whiff of oxidation on the nose and a bit more than a whiff in the mouth. Once no doubt an interesting wine, this one was still OK with the food, which was excellent, but a fresher vintage would have been better.

Rack of lamb with assorted veggies and tomato chutney

I was delighted to see that we were going to have 1975 Bordeaux, as I enjoy these wines a lot while others will not. In fact I had these same wines in another dinner I arranged in 2000, and here is the preamble to my notes on that occasion:

The 1975 vintage is not one that people with Speculator or
'Parkerpalates' will enjoy. They are framed in a style in which they
will never intentionally make wine again, so in a sense we were
tasting something that has now become a piece of history. The
wines were made from fruit picked perhaps a little early and the fact
that destemming was not then much utilised only added to the tannin
'load' of the wines (now, they would more exactly measure the point of
ripeness of the grapes, and would destem to suit the style that they
consciously strive for). The result is big, hard, tannic wines that
have needed at least a quarter of a century to come around - this
would clearly be economic suicide in today's world of instant
gratification. I daresay that if you put a glass of even a great 1975
Bordeaux in front of a Cal-cab drinker, or a fruit-at-all-costs fan,
they just wouldn't know what to make of it.



1975 Ch. Latour – excellent nose showing cedar and black fruit, decent fruit in the middle, still concealed a bit, I think, by the weighty tannins. The structure is excellent, and it was slightly drying at the end on the tip of the tongue, with a hint of astringency. I felt that this wine was the best, but I also felt that it wasn’t showing quite as well as other times I have had it.

1975 Ch. Mouton Rothschild – while clearly not quite the wine that the monumental Latour is, this bottle of Mouton acquitted itself very well, showing a nose that I kept coming back to as it had a bit more complexity than the Latour, with more open fruit (and a bit of mustiness that blew off) and complexity was there but you had to work at it a bit. I was worried about this wine last time I drank it, wondering if it might be starting to break up, but this bottle was in fine shape.

Reggiano, Tomme, and Beddis blue cheese with fig sausage and fruit toats.

1975 Ch. Montrose – last time I had this it was just getting into drinking plateau (which with this vintage means that the tannin has abated while there is still enough fruit to enjoy the wine). This time around it showed a nose that was positively Rhonish with a funky barnyard thing going on, and this never transformed into the more orthodox cedar and fruit nose that had been typical of this wine in the past. Big, tannic, weighty, but based on this bottle I wouldn’t think it would get any better. When last tasted the tannin seemed lower but I expect that the fruit was just more forward in that bottle.

It is worth restating that it would be a big mistake for anyone to generalize from notes like these. With wines of this sort of age you simply cannot take one data point and expect the rest of the bottles of that wine to toe the line. Cellaring history and bottle variation have a great effect on wines like this. One tired bottle may just be that – a single non-characteristic showing. When you see three or four similar notes then it is fair to deduce a trend.

Finally, Bramley Apple cake with crackly meringue and vanilla bean ice cream

1988 Ch. Doisy Daene (Barsac) – along with Doisy Vedrines, these are the twin Doisy sisters one commonly sees – the other, Doisy Dubroca, seems to be exceedingly rare. Medium colour, a nose that was pleasant but devoid of Botrytis, pretty good mouth feel, sweet entry, and my first impression was that the acidity was too low, but after tasting awhile it seemed OK, so maybe it was alright in the first place. decent but nothing special.

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