Some friends who run the local Thai restaurants recruited me to help them choose wines for their BTG program. This consisted of tasting 4 different Chardonnays with 16 different Thai dishes and choosing the one that went best with them. Given that Chardonnay would be one of the last wines I'd serve with Thai food, this was a pretty thankless task (there were also two Aussie Shirazes that we evaluated as well, with even more dire results) with the eventual "winner" being a 2011 Coppola "Director's Cut" Chardonnay that drew many of the dishes to a draw and actually went surprisingly well with Tom Kha Gai. (The 2011 Drouhin St. Veran, by contrast, went miserably with the food, despite being all of our favorite on its own).
Having taken one for the team, I then opened a couple of wines that I'd lugged along for just this reason:
2009 Frantz Saumon Montlouis 'Mineral +' was absolutely beguiling, lithe and mineral (duh!) and bearing no imprint of the year with racy acidity and no sense of ripeness. It went fabulously with the food and disappeared instantly.2010 Dashe Zinfandel L'Enfant Terrible McFadden Farms was also quite splendid, despite the leaky cork it sported. I'd brought this along as a red wine likely to go with Thai food, and the assembled tasters agreed. It was quite lush yet restrained with a nicely acidic spine. I thought that it showed significantly better than it had last year, too. The fruit was still on the red side of the spectrum but with enough plummy character to convince you that it might indeed be Zinfandel. The restrained alcohol was evident in its ability to pair with some seriously spicy food.
Last night with leftovers, I opened my first bottle of 2011 Marcel Lapierre Morgon (sulfured) and was impressed with its lightness and red fruited character. Lush yet light on its feet, this hit the perfect balance between structure and accessibility, though no doubt it'll age another 5-10 years. Jean and I both felt that it was the most pleasant edition of this wine for perhaps the last decade. Jean's reaction ("Buy a case!") is indicative of the enthusiasm generated.
Mark Lipton