Had a couple over last night to celebrate our shared wedding anniversaries. They are casual wine lovers: good palates but not geeky. They are Canadian with a second home in my neighborhood. I prepared three courses.
No food to start, but opened with:
Pierre Peters Cuvee de Reserve Blanc de Blanc Brut Grand Cru dgt December 2017
David, take me to school. On CT there are multiple listings which might all be the same wine. 3000+ bottles of this as an NV, and less than a hundred as a 2017. There are also listings for it as a Grand Cru. I can't figure this out. Which is the most correct? Meanwhile the wine: concentrated and rich, amazing aromatic nose, yeast, red apples, brioche, all that. I just swooned over every drop. Now I know why you talk about this wine the way you do. MUST. BUY. MORE.
Our first course was seared foie gras and sauteed kumquats on toast set atop a modest 'salad' of shaved raw brussels sprouts and frisee, all doused with a tangy mildly sweet dressing flavored with toasted sesame oil, apple cider syrup and garlic.
2007 Karthäuserhof Eitelsbacher Karthäuserhofberg Riesling Spätlese Mosel Saar Ruwer
Rich yellow color. Coconut notes dominate with ginger ale, tangerine and tangy mango. Drinking very well now, but has plenty of structure for further aging. A good jmatch for the foie if seemingly a bit OTT for my tastes, and a treat for my guests who have never had a white wine with any real age on it.
Our second course was a lobster and tarragon risotto.
2016 Greywacke Sauvignon Blanc Wild Marlborough
Tropical fruit and wild grass with lime peel and an odd but welcome camphor thing that picked up the tarragon particularly well.
The third and final course was coffee-crusted prime Tomahawk ribeyes. Two inch thick steaks coated in coffee and flame grilled on the Kamado, one per couple on pewter platters, topped with a cascade of buttered peas, pea shoots and sugar snap peas flash-fried in gin. Our friends have never had mature Bordeaux before, so I chose one that would be older but wouldn't test them with full tertiary.
2001 Château Monbousquet St. Émilion Grand Cru Red Bordeaux Blend
Really fine. Well developed, opulent and lustrous, great mouthfeel. A toasty note in the wine really accentuated the coffee in the steak, or was it the coffee that made the toast apparent? Whatever, our friends loved it. They got that this wine was in a place they've never tasted before and that it was superior for that steak. They have wine with food, but they don't really look for this kind of stuff when they eat and drink, and it was a revelation.
Emboldened by that, I decided to push their boundaries a bit further so after dinner I opened this:
1995 Château Mazeris Canon-Fronsac Red Bordeaux Blend
Fantastic showing. Medium garnet red, secondary and tertiary notes of canned Queen Anne cherries which was a childhood treat for me served by my grandmother and also well known to my friends who grew up in BC on canned fruit out of season. If you don't know, 'Queen Anne' in Canada is equivalent to our Ranier. Canned fruit is no longer the neccessity it was in our childhoods so none of us have had it in years, but this wine took us all right back to childhood. That, then, opened up Jim's fond memory of the aromas in his grandfather's basement, a man cave place thought they didn't call it that then which he hadn't thought of in years and didn't realize he'd even noticed. Dust, cigars, old things combined with the thrill of being allowed into Grandpa's sacred place--it was all in that wine along with sasparilla, caramel and allspice. He'd never had the experience of wine that wasn't just flavor but which provided an intellectual and emotional journey, too. Going through that with them was one of the coolest experiences I've ever had serving wine.
