Dinner at Spencer and Sarah's, with a roast pork tenderloin, potatoes and some really great wines.
1999 Prager Riesling Smaragd Wachstum Bodenstein
In a great place right now - the fruit's still rich and bright but augmented with mature smoky, savoury herbal and fusel notes. There's a wonderful polished texture in the mouth, bright acidity and impressive length.
1989 Château Pichon Longueville Comtesse de Lalande
Very much wow stuff. Hard to really put this wine into words - there's amazing depth and complexity here, an array of developed tobacco, graphite, cedary and green herbal flavours around a core of pure red and dark fruits with all the flavours coming together seamlessly in a medium weight, polished whole. The structure here's incredibly fine grained, giving it a remarkably finessed textural quality, and it's a wine that's wonderful to sit down with and explore over a few hours.
1994 Quilceda Creek Cabernet Sauvignon
The recent Quilceda releases that taste like oaky blueberry syrup seem even more horrific and grotesque after tasting this. Power conveyed with a sense of restraint and a finessed, silky texture; floral, smoky, tarry and cedary notes combining seamlessly with pure red and dark fruits and a ripe blueberry note that gives it away as a Washington Cab. Fantastic wine with great balance, depth and persistence, though it suffered a little following the 89 PLL.
1981 Château Lynch-Bages
Classic Pauillac flavours of graphite, savoury earth, tobacco leaves and mature red fruited flavours on an elegant, lightweight frame. This isn't about power or concentration, but conveys flavours with a lightness and finesse that I rarely find in modern Bordeaux.
