Notes on a Commanderie de Bordeaux dinner Nov. 1, 2003
Held at the Four Seasons in Vancouver.
Krug Grand Cuvee - this NV Champagne has wine as old as 6 years when it is blended and bottled, and this one was at least 3 years old, so we were looking at perhaps up to 10 years in total. This was evident in the nose, which showed some nice yeasty complexity. It seemed to have some colour to it, but the lighting conditions were inadequate to allow me to say for sure. A very enjoyable Champagne that merited better than the "shrimp or some sort of seafood in a tart shell" amuse bouches they paired with it (they had more Costco than Cannes to them).
The first course was to pair two wines from Lurton, which it did, but not the intended wines as instead of a Rochmorin we received a Couhins Lurton. I told the cellar master, who was sitting at my table, that he had committed a 'Graves' error, but he adeptly passed the blame on to the former cellar master (also at my table) by saying that the cases had somehow been mislabelled.
1998 Couhins Lurton - a Graves made from 100% sauvignon blanc, it showed some ripeness in the nose, and some flavour interest, but was a bit acidic at the end.1998 Ch. La Louviere - this wine outclassed the other one (as one would expect based on price). Very smooth and bright in the mouth, much softer than the previous wine. I enjoyed this quite a bit, and more so as the nose started to open up a bit in the glass.
The cellar master pulled out a brown bag and poured something blind for our table. I guessed a sauvignon blanc based wine with a nice lemony nose, but thought that it could be an Antipodean offering given the balance and high level of acidity. When advised that it wasn't from New Zealand, I guessed a
2001 white Bordeuax but could venture no further than that. It turned out to be 2001 Ch. de l'Hopital, and very decent it was.Served with a decent crab salad with thin slices of lobster (mis)labelled as 'carpaccio'.
1990 Haut Marbuzet - this St. Estephe was quite delightful - all of the wines were very good for this event. A lush nose of oak and sweet fruit, and rich and plush in the mouth with good flavour and very good length. The tannins are soft and this wine is ready to go - it won't improve with ant further age. Tasty!1990 Phelan Segur - this was also a very good wine, in a slightly leaner style with slightly harder tannins, and so it suffered a bit in comparison - I think most of the tasters would have given the nod to the first wine, but this wine, served on its own would have provoked no complaints at all. Perhaps a slight an unobjectionable very slightly green note on palate.
These wines were served with a red wine braised monkfish, about which I have a couple of comments. First, people insist on trying to be au courant by serving fish with red wine. IMHO, you can achieve a match that is fairly inoffensive to both wine and fish, but it is still, at best, like going to the senior prom with your first cousin. The sin was exacerbated in this case by the kitchen's apparent inability to cook a piece of fish until it was merely tender. They soldiered on until it took on the consistency of chicken. Bad show.
1982 Branaire Ducru - the lighter of this pair in colour, with a warm vanilla nose showing no particular single fruit note, but rather a homogenised generic mature Bordeaux sort of nose. Very soft in the mouth and medium long in finish, a claret on the plateau of drinkability.1982 La Lagune - I have this in my cellar and was interested to see what it was doing. There was some bottle variation, and maybe one corked bottle, but I managed to get a glass from a good bottle, and very good it was! Darker by a considerable margin, it showed much sweeter fruit in the nose than had the Branaire, and a juicy sweet impression on the palate that was most welcome.
Served with a duck breast on a pear/potato gratin. I had been preparing myself for further gustatory mediocrity, after the kitchen's fumble with the fish course, but was absolutely delighted to find that this course was perfectly prepared (the duck breast was more tender than that monkfish had been) , very tasty, and complemented the wines wonderfully.
This delight was somewhat balanced by the first indication of a deficiency in wine service. I had noted the rather clunky glassware and forgiven it as something that one puts up with at large hotel restaurants, but when I went up to do duty at the decanting table (the benefits of sitting with the cellar master are that you get to taste a few other wines; the burden that comes with that is that you are commandeered into helping with wine service), all was not well. They were only able to muster 5 decanters when we were serving 6 bottles of wine (disgraceful in a major hotel, IMO), the person in charge of serving the wine once I had decanted it showed a dismaying inclination to amalgamate part decanters together without a thought for tasting to see if one or the other were cork tainted, and they had no method of labelling decanters to be sure wines were poured in the correct order. In fact I was directed to pour one wine and after I had done a couple of bottles was told that it was the other one that was needed first. I lined the ones I had decanted up in front of their respective bottles, but even so had to grab a wine waiter as they just picked up the wrong decanter and went to pour out of order.
I also had the opportunity to taste some of the blind wines that were offered up to the candidates for four inductees to the Commanderie (I didn't get to taste the New Zealand Cabernet that our diabolically tricky leader had given to one poor chap).
1986 Grand Puy Lacoste - what a lovely wine, and what better counterpoint to the 82 to be served with the next course? I got cedar and vanilla in the nose, a very well integrated wine with good balance, and the tannins surprisingly soft for the vintage, though they could do with maybe 3 more years. Good show!1982 Canon - this St. Emilion was a hard one to guess blind. My friend the inductee offered me a taste in return for some opinion on what I thought it might be. He was touting for an 86 or 88; I responded that I didn't think the tannins were as hard as that and suggested maybe an 89. We were both very surprised when it was revealed to be a 1982! The sweet fruit, the vanilla and cedar and the good body were no surprise, and the colour might have been a hint had we had sufficient lighting to evaluate it, but what was surprising was the structure of this wine - it seemed still youthful and clearly has a long future ahead. A real treat to taste this one.
We then went on to the next course - and more incompetent service. The waiter was running low when he came to me. Instead of pouring the last of the decanter into my glass and getting a new one for the next person, he (presumably on autopilot, in "make the bottle go around the table" mode) poured me a half glass and gave the other half glass to the next person. While he went to get another decanter, I gave the wine he had poured a sniff. He returned and proceeded to pour the other half glass into my glass of the OTHER wine, and when I advised him that he had just mixed the two wines in one glass, he blamed me for having my hand on the other glass. To top this off, he had advised the table that the wines were switched around when they weren't. May Bacchus (I'm not sure if there is a deity of proper wine service, so he will have to suffice) save us from such incompetence in future!
1982 Grand Puy Lacoste - for me this was the wine of the evening. Smoke and sweet currant in the nose, with excellent concentration of flavour in the mouth and a firm but supple tannic backbone. No rush, but lovely now. I was delighted to see I have a couple of bottles of this in the cellar, and maddened at what kind of idiot I am to have only bought two when the price was $21! I should have laid down cases of this!1982 Montrose (from magnum) - interesting nose, almost Rhonish, with leather and salty/herbal elements. The wine is perfectly mature, but has time left and drinks very well right now.
Served with cheese.
1989 La Tour Blanche - this wine seems not to have moved an inch (that's for the Americans - we would of course say 'a millimeter') since the last time I tasted it about 4 years ago. It is perhaps showing darker colour today, but the honey and nut nose with a hint of fig is the same, and the sweet but not too sweet medium to heavy weight in the mouth hasn't changed. I wish I had some in my cellar!