Started with the 2000 Trimbach Riesling Cuvée Frédéric Emile Vendange Tardive, which was quite rich and developed with a lovely combination of honeyed sweetness, precise fruit and minerality. Fantastic depth and length here with the acids slicing through the sweetness on the back end and the wine finishing just barely off dry (despite the 24 g/l residual sugar indicated).
The 2008 Meulenhof Erdener Treppchen Riesling Spätlese Alte Reben one-star followed this, and had its work cut out. Very fresh and floral with bright primary Mosel fruit and minerality, nice acids though without the depth and length I've found in a lot of other Meulenhof wines. That's nitpicking though, this is delicious wine that's very refreshing and paired nicely with the food, except
Onto the 2008 Frank Cornelissen Etna Susucaru, truly natural wine that really ought to be fully representative of the soil it's grown in (and the bacteria that helped), produced with zero sulfur, zero manipulation of any kind (other than the act of actually picking and fermenting the grapes and bottling the final product) - the poster boy for natural and authentic... so why the hell is this sealed with a PLASTIC CORK? The wine itself is nowhere near as bad as I feared; fairly cloudy with a lurid orange-pink colour that resembles a fruit cocktail you'd buy in a beach resort in Bali that could easily be served in a fancy glass with a little paper umbrella and a wedge of fruit. It also tastes very much like that with various fruit flavours ranging from pomegranate to grapefruit and not much beyond the fruit - but given that the last Cornelissen I had smelled like equal parts candy and shit, this isn't necessarily a bad thing. Not bad, but not particularly interesting beyond the weirdness value. Then again Spencer and David seemed to like it a lot more than I did, so maybe I'm just not enough of a hipster.
Or I was too distracted by the Burgs ahead...2004 Domaine Truchot-Martin Morey St. Denis 1er Cru Les Blanchards
Truchot. Whoa. This may have suffered from unfairly raised expectations, as the '04 Clos Sorbes and the '04 Morey St. Denis Vieilles Vignes that David has opened with me in the past year were both astounding wines. It didn't hit the heights those bottles did (and that's really an unfair comparison, but I took my first pour with those reference points in my head), but it's still a gorgeous wine with gentle red and dark fruited flavours over savoury earthy flavours and a herbal quality underneath that gave it a nice sense of freshness and complexity. No shortage of acids here either, very elegant, precise and a real treat.
1999 Maison Leroy Beaune 1er Cru Bélissand
Mmm, beautiful perfumed aromatics with violet and rose petal accents on top of spice and black cherry, polished and silken in the mouth though not quite showing the same expressiveness and depth this had aromatically. Delicious wine, though still very young.