Great Old Wine and a Spectacular Meal

Last night, my wife and I celebrated our 6th wedding anniversary at one of the best restaurants in America: Talula’s Table, in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. Why is this relevant to a wine blog? Because it highlighted, yet again, how versatile mature wine can be.

As always, the meal there was spectacular (the menu is below). And, as so often seems to be the case, it was the mature wine that was the most food-friendly. All of the wines were excellent, mind you (the 2005 Hartford Court Sonoma Coast Land's Edge Vineyards Pinot Noir is drinking great right now, all sweet ripe cherry fruit, licorice, and forest floor), but it was the 1993 Chateau de Beaucastel Chateauneuf-du-Pape that was the wine of the night.

Not only was this a wine at its peak, but its fully-evolved tannins and lingering sense of freshness made it a perfect pairing partner for much of the meal. And while the wines of the Southern Rhone are known for their power and spice, this one had evolved into something altogether softer and more gentle. It still had the structure to stand up to the venison course, but it also possessed just the right amount of subtlety to work brilliantly alongside the confit of canadian goose, as well as the winter kale soup with Burgundy snail tortellini.

The point is that many pairing rules go out the window when older wines are involved. The magic that time works on the best bottles allows them to match up with dishes they never could have quite so well in their youth. That alone--not to mention their sheer deliciousness apart from food--justifies the patience required to hold onto great bottles in the cellar until they are ready. And to open them at great restaurants, with family and friends, and savor every sip of them.

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2007 Chateauneuf-du-Pape: The Reviews Start Rolling In

I hope the prices of Châteauneuf-du-Pape stay about where they are, because, despite the fact that they’ve gone up in, say, the past decade (and what hasn’t!), they still represent one of the best values at the high-end of the French wine market.

Sure, they’re not bargain-basement cheap; but when considered in light of the prices being charged for top wines from other regions in France (Burgundy is a great example), they’re really quite reasonable. Factor in the longevity of the best of these bottlings, and the return on the investment is actually very good.

Personally, I’ve always felt that Châteauneuf-du-Pape is a great wine to start a collection with. In fact, it’s what I started filling my own cellar with when I decided to buy one and begin laying bottles down for the future. And while I hope to one day be able to dedicate shelves to, say, Romanée-Conti or Latour, I’m very content to keep on building the Southern Rhone end of my collection right now...and for a great price, too.

The New York Times published an interesting piece on the 2007 Châteauneufs today, and it presented an interesting counterpoint to the glowing assessment of the vintage by critic Robert Parker, who said that 2007 is “[t]he finest vintage I have ever tasted in Châteauneuf-du-Pape... In my thirty years of evaluating these wines, I don’t think any vintage has achieved the heights of complexity, richness, and overall purity and balance as 2007.”

On the other hand, Eric Asimov wrote in this morning’s New York Times: “I was thinking about the overbearing side of Châteauneuf recently after the wine panel had completed a tasting of 20 bottles from the 2007 vintage...We found some wines we liked very much, yet on the whole the 2007s left me unexcited. Stylistically, they presented Châteauneuf’s too-friendly side. Châteauneuf is always a big wine, but these wines were huge — full of lush, opulent fruit with powerful, jammy flavors.”

Personally, I find myself leaning toward Parker on this one, though I have not yet had the chance to taste enough of the ‘07s to formulate a formal opinion. (I will in the coming weeks and months, and will report back right here.) Still, from what I’ve tasted, I am very impressed with the vintage. Yes, these are wines with a real sense of opulence, but so far I have also found elegance, detail, and terroir-specificity generally balancing out that richness.

But that’s the beauty of wine: Its ability to elicit passionate, deeply personal responses from consumers, and to keep them arguing even as they sip, slurp, and savor.

(On a less vintage-specific note, I found an interesting video on the 13 grape varieties permitted in Châteauneuf-du-Pape and employed by Château de Beaucastel. It's posted below.)

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Closing the Circle

I received a call earlier this week from a friend of mine who I’ve written about here before—Scot Ziskind, the highly regarded custom storage, humidification, and cooling expert, owner of ZipCo Environmental Services, Inc. and My Cellar wine storage firm. A long-time client of his had recently passed away, and, as per his instructions, Scot was to open his locker, catalog the wines in it, and sell them off, with the proceeds to go to his wife.

Over the course of a couple of hours on a damp afternoon, we unpacked, cataloged, and repacked over ten cases—everything that this man had left of his collection, all the bottles he hadn’t had the chance to open with family and friends while he was still here. (The good news, Scot told me, is that his client had made a point of pulling his favorite bottles to share before it was too late.)

It was a bittersweet afternoon: This, after all, was all that was left of another man’s beloved wine collection, of another man’s passion. There was something touching and surprisingly intimate about the process: With the sale of the bottles he had left behind, his wife would receive a bit of a financial windfall; and on our end, we were handling (very carefully, of course) bottle after bottle that he had chosen himself, each, ostensibly, for a different reason that only he, ultimately, ever really knew.

And what bottles they were. With each case we sliced open, we discovered new, often unexpected treasures. Certain ones, of course, weren’t all that surprising: The bottles of Lynch Bages, the assortment of Ducru-Beaucaillou, the smattering of Cheval Blanc and marquis California producers and Gaja Barbaresco. We even found a single 1982 Lafite, which will benefit his wife immeasurably. But other wines were less expected, and spoke of a man who loved experiencing all that the wine world had to offer just as much as he loved collecting its most prominent examples (there’s often a big difference): JL Chave Hermitage Blanc, Chateau de Beaucastel Chateauneuf-du-Pape Blanc, a couple of older Echezeaux from Mongeard-Mugneret—wines whose value, despite their higher cost, are far more about idiosyncrasy and personal taste than anything else.

In the end, it took just over two hours to complete the project. The sale of the bottles shouldn’t be all that time consuming, either. But despite the brevity of the work itself, there was something undoubtedly intimate about it. I didn’t know the man who once sought out, purchased, and stored these bottles. In fact, I’d never even met him. But in helping to close the circle on his wine life—in helping to do the final accounting of the wines he left behind and, in some small way, contributing to the reward that the wife who survives him will ultimately reap—I feel as if I’m connected to him now in some small way.

Wine, perhaps more than anything else, has the unusual ability to bring people together that way. Even if they never knew each other.

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