I attended a very interesting dinner tasting recently put on by Albert Givton, who has been the source of so many fascinating wine experiences.
We started with a couple of fine white Burgundies (all wines tasted blind)).
2000 Ramonet Chassagne Montrachet 1er cru Morgeot – nice vanilla and lemon nose, excellent fruit on palate, and good length. Enjoyable wine.
2000 Ramonet Chassagne Montrachet 1er cru Les Caillerets – a slightly heavier, oakier nose with more mineral, sweeter entry, and a long lush finish.
Served with seafood terrine with celeriac remoulade and crispy capers (sounds like a saucy film, doesn’t it?)
1980 Chave Hermitage – a couple of wines that might be iffy from most cellars but with much better chance coming out of Albert’s very cool cellar. This wine was never much good – bad vintage and all of the other Hermitage from the vintage that I have tasted were a waste of a good bottle. Except for this, which tells us that there is excellent winemaking technique at work when you can make a palatable wine from a dud year. I didn’t hold out much hope and was very pleasantly surprised. It was a decent elegant wine and presented almost like an aged Burgundy. I’ve seen similar good results from Chave in 1987, another weaker vintage.
1979 Chave Hermitage – better vintage and so I had greater expectations. Another elegant wine with a bigger and pepperier nose and slightly low fruit levels. Still showing some tannins, this wine was very decent.
We then mo0ved into red Burgundy with a quail stuffed with pork belly and a pancetta green onion terrine – some big flavours.
1988 Robert Chevillon Nuits St. Georges Les Chaignots – a sweet slightly candied Pinot nose, medium bodied wine with acidity a tad high, average length
1988 Robert Chevillon Nuits St. Georges Les Pruliers – similar nose, with a little bit of barnyard mustiness, a slightly oily mouth feel, more tannins and finishing shorter. I’d say this was a perfect example of the difficulty with the vintage. The wines were generally quite tannic so it meant long hold times, very similar to what happened with the 1975 Bordeaux. The problem is that cabernet deals much better with retaining fruit in the tannic examples than Pinot does. This wine is an example of the leaner less successful style, while the Chaignots fared a little better.
We moved on to more 1988 Burgundy with beef tenderloin (or lamb chops is you so chose).
1988 Dom. Lamarche Vosne Romanee La Grande Rue (not made a grand cru until later) – a nice cherry nose on this one, sweet entry followed by good fruit levels, some tannin, and a pleasant sweet finish. A winner.
1988 Rousseau Rouchottes Chambertin Clos des Ruchottes (grand cru) – a similar fruit driven nose, but weightier and more serious, and a nice smooth entry. Supple wine on palate with significantly more complexity than the Lamarche wine. very good.
We then did a few other interesting wines.
1977 Beaulieu Vineyards Cabernet – this wasn’t the Georges de Latour, but rather than normal cab, probably worth $5 at the time, and it had survived amazingly well, given that it wasn’t from Albert’s cellar. Big sweet nose, dark colour with a clear rim; both told us we had moved to a new continent. Moccha vanilla nose, balanced, clean and long. Amazingly good considering this was a grocery store wine, most of it being no doubt drunk up the day it was purchased!
1986 Ch. Mouton Rothschild – people were all over on this one and out of 12 people, only I was saying I thought it was even French, and I was being challenged on that. Medium weight, sweet fruit nose, balanced and with lots of tannin remaining, excellent length, but with none of the usual clues that would point this group of expert tasters to France, much less Bordeaux. WTF? Anyone else getting this sort of odd results with this wine?
1999 Signorello Padrone – this wine was contributed by Ray Signorello, who had also kindly donated the Mouton. It is their top wine, made from a blend of cab, cab franc and merlot. Darker than the Mouton, big nose of smoky cassis and mushroom with a decent aliquot of wood added. Excellent fruit concentration on palate (they crop at only about 1.25 tons per acre) and good length. Nice wine for the end of the meal.
1978 Quady Lot #2 – these old Zinfandel Ports are wonderful wines and it was a coincidence that I had bought both this and the Lot #1 years ago when I was down racing in California. My bottles were drunk up long ago but it was nice to taste this again. It would probably have been well over the hill by now from a normal cellar. It retains good colour, nice fruit in the nose, not too hot, but the heat came in on the finish with some good fruit in between. Pleasant wine with cheese.
1978 Quinta do Noval Nacional – an even rarer wine made from grapes grown in a prephylloxera vineyard in very small amounts. Paler in colour, browner in colour, and a sweeter nose, very sweet in the mouth – this would vie with any Grahams, and with a very long finish. Good wine, although I have to wonder why they declared it. A rare wine you don’t get to taste every day!!
Absinthe – this bottle was Portuguese from around 1934 before that country banned production. You hear about Absinthe being a bit like Pernod, but it isn’t true. Pernod in modern form is mostly an anisette liqueur, while Absinthe is much more herbal. In fact the nose on this was a bit bizarre – Kiwi boot polish with underlying hints of fennel and other herbal aromas. It doesn’t go milky like Pernod does, and the licorice and herbs were also on palate. It wouldn’t be my drink of choice, but it was an interesting experience to taste it. None of the participants demonstrated any behaviour that was more bizarre or mad than they normally do, so I guess you’d need to keep up an intake over some time to attain the levels of wormwood dementia alleged to occur from this beverage.