Steven Spielmann
Steven Spielmann
I grilled a two pound porterhouse tonight. I haven't eaten a steak since high school, really. I'm from mostly Anglo-Saxon stock but I hang out with hippies and stoners and feminist poets and college professors and gaming nerds. I hardly eat any meat.
It came accompanied with some fingerling potatoes with butter, olive oil, and salt, chard cooked in lemon juice and olive oil, delicato squash with brown sugar and butter, and a pear and baby romaine salad. I used to make elaborate preparations but I increasingly just want to eat fresh ingredients (all the vegetables outside the salad were from our garden or our farmshare) prepared simply. I feel a little guilty about that but there it is. My wife prepared a nice sherry mushroom sauce for the steaks which required a little bit of actual cooking skill so it wasn't all farmhouse food. But mostly and that's what I mostly like regardless.
We drank this up with a 1969 Charles Krug Vintage Select Cabernet Sauvignon, 12% alcohol, rather like a non-complex but very, very well-balanced Paulliac, but with just a hint of that sweetness which for me distinguishes Napa Cabernet. A bit of cedar, delicious restrained fruit. It was [VERY GOOD] but also very evocative of its time and place.
People should figure out what the Mondavis were using for capsule glue back then and start using it again. That capsule was on tight. I keep finding five year old bottles (recently: Donnhoff, Schaefer, Mugneret-Gibourg, just for starters) with mold starting on the cork. The wine in all those bottles was still fine but come on. This was 40 years old and I needed a knife to remove the capsule.
I suspect the grapes in these vineyards came in for some tough treatment back then in terms of pesticides, etc. But the fruit is fundamentally healthy and this wine has at least another 10 years in it, maybe a lot more.
Part of me feels that bottles like this are evidence for environmental degradation, or global warming or something, that in just two generations we've gone from being able to mistreat grapes quite a bit and still produce wine that tastes like wine to requiring utmost delicacy at every stage to produce anything other than unstructured puke syrup or flavorless battery acid. Surely that's exaggeration but.
Or maybe they just hadn't invented enough ways to screw wine up yet back then.
Anyway, after eating less than half of that (the eyes are willing but the gut is weak) we took a long break and then had some brilliant brillat-savarin and very nice mountain gorgonzola with a 2005 Bastor-Lamontagne Sauternes which is sweet, unctuous, ready to drink, has just a hint of the "blood-orange acidity" winedoctor is always going on about, and is remarkably high in acid. I am drinking a lot of (esp. sweet) wines lately that make me wonder if they have added acid. Some Loire '07's I drank were acidic as hell but the acid fit smoothly into the rest of the wine. These other wines I'm talking about the acid sticks way out. This Bastor is on the border. But it's [ACCEPTABLE-GOOD], which is sometimes all you need in a Sauternes, and it complemented the cheeses very well.
It came accompanied with some fingerling potatoes with butter, olive oil, and salt, chard cooked in lemon juice and olive oil, delicato squash with brown sugar and butter, and a pear and baby romaine salad. I used to make elaborate preparations but I increasingly just want to eat fresh ingredients (all the vegetables outside the salad were from our garden or our farmshare) prepared simply. I feel a little guilty about that but there it is. My wife prepared a nice sherry mushroom sauce for the steaks which required a little bit of actual cooking skill so it wasn't all farmhouse food. But mostly and that's what I mostly like regardless.
We drank this up with a 1969 Charles Krug Vintage Select Cabernet Sauvignon, 12% alcohol, rather like a non-complex but very, very well-balanced Paulliac, but with just a hint of that sweetness which for me distinguishes Napa Cabernet. A bit of cedar, delicious restrained fruit. It was [VERY GOOD] but also very evocative of its time and place.
People should figure out what the Mondavis were using for capsule glue back then and start using it again. That capsule was on tight. I keep finding five year old bottles (recently: Donnhoff, Schaefer, Mugneret-Gibourg, just for starters) with mold starting on the cork. The wine in all those bottles was still fine but come on. This was 40 years old and I needed a knife to remove the capsule.
I suspect the grapes in these vineyards came in for some tough treatment back then in terms of pesticides, etc. But the fruit is fundamentally healthy and this wine has at least another 10 years in it, maybe a lot more.
Part of me feels that bottles like this are evidence for environmental degradation, or global warming or something, that in just two generations we've gone from being able to mistreat grapes quite a bit and still produce wine that tastes like wine to requiring utmost delicacy at every stage to produce anything other than unstructured puke syrup or flavorless battery acid. Surely that's exaggeration but.
Or maybe they just hadn't invented enough ways to screw wine up yet back then.
Anyway, after eating less than half of that (the eyes are willing but the gut is weak) we took a long break and then had some brilliant brillat-savarin and very nice mountain gorgonzola with a 2005 Bastor-Lamontagne Sauternes which is sweet, unctuous, ready to drink, has just a hint of the "blood-orange acidity" winedoctor is always going on about, and is remarkably high in acid. I am drinking a lot of (esp. sweet) wines lately that make me wonder if they have added acid. Some Loire '07's I drank were acidic as hell but the acid fit smoothly into the rest of the wine. These other wines I'm talking about the acid sticks way out. This Bastor is on the border. But it's [ACCEPTABLE-GOOD], which is sometimes all you need in a Sauternes, and it complemented the cheeses very well.