Chateauneuf and Tourtieres: a Xmas story

[Jenise]

So last week a friend who is otherwise not someone into cooking at all made tourtieres, the pork-and-clove meat pies popular in the Frenchier parts of Canada they hail from. I think the pie can come in full-size pies but Agnes makes small individual pies at Christmas for her sister's Christmas party. I look forward to them every Christmas. I happened to drop in while she was making them, and she gave Bob and I a plate of four to bring home. Boy was I grateful to have them on hand a few days later when we got home late and exhausted from a heavy errand day. We enjoyed them hot out of the oven with salad and a 2004 Grand Veneur from CdP, which turned out to be dark fruited and exotically spicy in a way that accentuated the clove notes perfectly--an unusually sensational pairing.

I can't claim to have anticipated that. Yes, any CdP would be a good choice, but this one was singularly special with those little pies and I haven't had a good bottle before--the previous one a year ago was cloudy and ostensibly OTH. That's why on this occasion I brought in my remaining two bottles in case they needed to follow bottle number 1 into the rhododendrons. But wow, as sometimes happens, we hit a goldmine there so the last bottle was still on the counter a few days later when Agnes dropped by on another mission.

So I asked casually if she had any more tourtieres. Yes, she answered, they were going to have them on Christmas Eve, so I sent the last bottle home with them to enjoy with that course knowing it's a few levels above what they usually drink, including the fact that it had some age on it. That is, they're casual drinkers and rarely spend more than $15 for a bottle of wine, but they grew up in Toronto on French wine and I know there's some palate memory here for the style.

This morning I received this note:

"We had the tourtière yesterday, and it was yummy. Then we tasted your wine with it, and the tourtiere was fabulous! Ron immediately recognized the bottle as the style of wine that his research said went best with tourtière. Good start. But what we weren't ready for was that the pie actually tasted better with the wine. I always assumed that a pairing meant it was the other way around! It was a fantastic experience and a great first in wine pairing for me."

Makes me so happy! Maybe there IS a Santa Claus!

Tourtieres are always on my hit list.but alas not this year as my usual Christmas day dinner has been cancelled due to host family illness. Such a pity.

thanks for the trip down memory lane, as a kid we used to visit my aunt and uncle who had this fabulous brownstone in the east sixties in Manhattan..Aunt Juliet was this lovely lady from Quebec who married my Uncle Maurice late in life and they had no children..Her mother lived with them as well..And she always served those delightful little meat pies..I was much too young to drink alcohol at the time but I remember my father also being very fond the pies..Can't remember what uncle Maurice served with them other than the fact that my dad, Uncle Maurice and Aunt Juliet drank something red....