Ok, last night I experienced the Maison Borie, if you are ever in Lyon you must try it. The dinner was prearranged and all wines were served blind. I have a terrible cold, luckily most wines had a strong aromatic punch and they made it through...
Chateau de Malle Sauternes 99, served with pan fried escalope of foie gras on a cream of squash. I managed to identify the wine as Sauternes, but having seen the wine list (2 choices) I thought it was Cru Barrejats 96. Wrong. A classic (and often wrong) match, but here it worked well, plenty of acidity and very strong aroma of cooked fruit despite the young age.
Ch. Tour Blanche 1998 with scallops stuffed with raw oysters on thin slices of green apple and a Bowmore whisky cream. The iodine of the oysters went wonderfully with what I thought was a Ste Croix du Mont, but turned out to be another Sauternes, more subtle, more mineral.
Condrieu by Francois Merlin (year?) with sea bass on fingerling potatoes, mussels, cockles. Wow, what a wine, strong fruit and strong floral aromas well balanced (rare in Condrieu) with oak well integrated, a marvel of a condrieu. I identified the appellation, not the producer, previously unknown to me.
Two wines, different matches. Lamarche Canon 2000, elegant Canon Fronsac with tannins very present, needs more aging but the match worked out, rack of lamb with reduced juices and lots of spice. If the Bordeaux (I could not guess beyond the region) calmed the power of the dish, the opposite happened with wine number 2, a bombshell of animal spicy peppery aromas that combined with the sauce to create sheer taste bombardment that lasted for minutes in your mouth. This extraterrestrial wine was a Cotes du Rhone Villages St Maurice, cuvee Renaissance, a GSM made according to the tenets of "cosmoculture" by Philippe Viret. The metaphysics leaves me baffled, but the result is a wine that lets everythign through, totally open, odours wafting around the table even despite the damn cold.
Three desserts without wine, a yellow chartreuse granita served in a cup made of Valrhona chocolate, a glass of roasted peach, biscuits and almond mousse, and a chocolate browny with avocado sauce topped with a mandrake sherbet. I am a dessert man...
Grand finale, Manuel Viron pulls out his friend Jean Louis Chave's 96 Ermitage Vin de Paille, rich amber concentrate of cooked fruit and splendid acidity.
Mike