Eden Mylunsch
Eden Mylunsch
So the last couple of weeks have kinda sucked for a number of various and sundry (BTW, what's "sundry" anyway?) so what better excuse to invite a couple of other couples over to a friend's house for dinner (yes, she knew about it and was even there)! They're all in the wine biz (one even sell Louis-Dressner stuff in Panorama City and Lakeview Terrace!) so I could get pretty geeky without fear of confusing people due to the wines not exactly dripping with gobs of points.
Started with a non-vintage Ca' del Bosco Franciacorta. It was probably about 8-10 years old and was kinda nutty (hazelnuts, if you want to be specific) and yeasty with a little toast to it. Really smooth and dry, but not exactly "rip the tastebuds outta your mouth" dry. We drank it during the tour of the house, and once we'd sat down in the *********** the bubbles went well with some Consorcio Bonito Del Norte White Ventresca Tuna I'd bought from Darrel Corti a couple of months ago...I'd gingerly placed strips and pieces of it on some slices of toasted baguette with a daub of crme friche and a sprinkling of AOC Piment d'Espelette and some Aguni Island sea salt (from Okinawa).
We kinda blew through the Franciacorta so then moved on to a bottle of 1991 Kalin Cuve LV Chardonnay. I would not be damning this wine with faint praise were I to say that it is the greatest Chardonnay I've ever tasted that wasn't made by someone with the surname of Raveneau or Coche. This bottle was fresh and alive, with a beautiful combination of lanolin and acidity underpinning the hint of Chardonnay grape flavors. I don't recall having tasted this wine before but right now, it's a genuine rockstar wine (not necessarily appreciated by Chris-swilling rockstars, but you catch my drift) and I wish I had more. A couple of the guests are very tight with Terry Leighton and they'd never had this wine, nor had they tasted any of his other Chardonnays that were hitting the heights that this one was. If I were the sort of person who used a 100 point scale, I'd give this one 20 out of 20. Six stars out of five. It's a Craig Dumble-modified Deluxe with Python-pattern Tolex that goes to eleven...
We then adjourned to the dining room, where the salad was served. This started out as a basic green salad, but the avocado wasn't ripe enough to include and Franoise (our hostess and salad-maker extraordinaire) decided that the yogurt she'd normally include in the salad dressing was a little too ripe, so she decided that we should add a dollop of the cucumber salad I'd prepared for the Pork Course to the salad. I was dubious, but it was a stroke of genius. The salad was served along with a bottle of 1993 Tement Zieregg Sauvignon Blanc. I'd sold this bottle to a friend on release - the stuff was like $30 a bottle even back in 1995. He wasn't big on Sauvignon Blanc and he wasn't exactly a fan of white wine anyway so it's slumbered in his cellar, lo these many years. I'd done some inventory work for him earlier this year and he gave this to me as part of my salary. So, let's zip back a few months to when I was attending Vie Vinum in Vienna. I was at the Tement table, speaking to young Herr Tement (son of the guy what made this wine) and we're talking about Sauvignon Blanc and I mention that I've got a bottle of the 1993 and his eyes lit up and he said that this was the greatest vintage of Zieregg that he's ever tasted. This made me feel much better about having taken this bottle in lieu of cash, and last night seemed to be the proper confluence of drinkers to open it. Now, salad is a difficult course to match wine to, and this situation would have been nonsensical, but for the fact that the cucumber salad had a little caraway seed and dill in it. That, combined with the flavors of the bell pepper and different lettuce varieties enabled the Tement to tie everything together perfectly. The wine is subtle at first, broadening with time to encompass all the markers I look for in Sauvignon Blanc - tropicality and minerality at the forefront, but as it opened up it kept changing, sometimes reminding me of Sancerre and others of NZ gooseberry juice. The caraway seeds really tied this wine together. It's showing its age and is not nearly as vibrant as I recall it on release (c'mon, that's over 20 years ago!) but it is a remarkable wine.
There was a promising-looking recipe for pork loin in one of my cookbooks and it said that it would need about two hours in the oven before it was cooked. Fortunately, I was checking it pretty regularly, because after about an hour it was overdone! Horrors!!! WTF, it's not as if they were paying for dinner so I served it anyway, sliced thin and with lots of Franoise's ratatouille, based on a recipe handed down by her mother. With this I poured 1978 Mirassous Unfiltered Pinot Noir. By this time people were getting a little buzzed and the conversation was swirling and the wine was swirling but they weren't paying a lot of attention to the label. This wine was popped and poured and all of a sudden the conversation kind of stopped because the wine was kind of phenomenal. "Profound" might be pushing it, but most people thought it was Burgundy (except for Franoise, who's from there and senses the difference). The wine's age was showing, but in a good way. It was delicate but had a slight roasted character to it on the palate. I remember a fair amount about the different CA vintages of that era, but I wasn't exactly paying attention to Livermore back then. Whichever clone they were using was right at home that year, and the winemaking was pretty perfect. We were intrigued by the fact that the term "Unfiltered" was placed so prominently on the label. To the best of my knowledge, that wasn't particularly common until the mid 1980s. This was the second (and last) bottle of this wine I have and was quite beautiful. It also served well to cover up the dryness of the pork (goddammit, I'd even brined it beforehand!) but nobody seemed to care, because all the flavors on the plate (pork, ratatouille and cucumber salad remaining from the salad) melded together so well with the wine that it was a food/wine zipless fuck, only you knew the names and there were no recriminations down the road (other than not having more Mirassou PN to experiment with).
We finished off the evening with a cheese course accompanied by a 1975 Bodegas Olarra Cerro Aon Rioja. This is a Crianza and has done well over its 30+ years in the cellar. Still showing brilliant acidity, a little dried fruit, medium bodied, medium finish, it was stately and elegant and probably on its last legs but a perfect wine to cap off the night.
It was one of those nights that makes me happy that I've got a lot of "interesting" bottles in the lockers, and that I've got the sorts of friends who aren't so set in their wine predilections that they wouldn't be interesting in suspending expectations and tasting some of the weird stuff. Luck played a big role, in that on any given night, any given bottle of older wine is going to be great but the next one could be corked or otherwise undesirable. But last night was pretty transplendent, with good friends, good wine, good food, and the ensuing conversation inspired by the combination.
-Eden (I wonder if I'd sold my friend more than one bottle of Tement? Maybe he needs more cellar work done....)
PS: Now's the time I wish that this board had a preview function....whatever. Here goes nothin'...
Started with a non-vintage Ca' del Bosco Franciacorta. It was probably about 8-10 years old and was kinda nutty (hazelnuts, if you want to be specific) and yeasty with a little toast to it. Really smooth and dry, but not exactly "rip the tastebuds outta your mouth" dry. We drank it during the tour of the house, and once we'd sat down in the *********** the bubbles went well with some Consorcio Bonito Del Norte White Ventresca Tuna I'd bought from Darrel Corti a couple of months ago...I'd gingerly placed strips and pieces of it on some slices of toasted baguette with a daub of crme friche and a sprinkling of AOC Piment d'Espelette and some Aguni Island sea salt (from Okinawa).
We then adjourned to the dining room, where the salad was served. This started out as a basic green salad, but the avocado wasn't ripe enough to include and Franoise (our hostess and salad-maker extraordinaire) decided that the yogurt she'd normally include in the salad dressing was a little too ripe, so she decided that we should add a dollop of the cucumber salad I'd prepared for the Pork Course to the salad. I was dubious, but it was a stroke of genius. The salad was served along with a bottle of 1993 Tement Zieregg Sauvignon Blanc. I'd sold this bottle to a friend on release - the stuff was like $30 a bottle even back in 1995. He wasn't big on Sauvignon Blanc and he wasn't exactly a fan of white wine anyway so it's slumbered in his cellar, lo these many years. I'd done some inventory work for him earlier this year and he gave this to me as part of my salary. So, let's zip back a few months to when I was attending Vie Vinum in Vienna. I was at the Tement table, speaking to young Herr Tement (son of the guy what made this wine) and we're talking about Sauvignon Blanc and I mention that I've got a bottle of the 1993 and his eyes lit up and he said that this was the greatest vintage of Zieregg that he's ever tasted. This made me feel much better about having taken this bottle in lieu of cash, and last night seemed to be the proper confluence of drinkers to open it. Now, salad is a difficult course to match wine to, and this situation would have been nonsensical, but for the fact that the cucumber salad had a little caraway seed and dill in it. That, combined with the flavors of the bell pepper and different lettuce varieties enabled the Tement to tie everything together perfectly. The wine is subtle at first, broadening with time to encompass all the markers I look for in Sauvignon Blanc - tropicality and minerality at the forefront, but as it opened up it kept changing, sometimes reminding me of Sancerre and others of NZ gooseberry juice. The caraway seeds really tied this wine together. It's showing its age and is not nearly as vibrant as I recall it on release (c'mon, that's over 20 years ago!) but it is a remarkable wine.
We finished off the evening with a cheese course accompanied by a 1975 Bodegas Olarra Cerro Aon Rioja. This is a Crianza and has done well over its 30+ years in the cellar. Still showing brilliant acidity, a little dried fruit, medium bodied, medium finish, it was stately and elegant and probably on its last legs but a perfect wine to cap off the night.
It was one of those nights that makes me happy that I've got a lot of "interesting" bottles in the lockers, and that I've got the sorts of friends who aren't so set in their wine predilections that they wouldn't be interesting in suspending expectations and tasting some of the weird stuff. Luck played a big role, in that on any given night, any given bottle of older wine is going to be great but the next one could be corked or otherwise undesirable. But last night was pretty transplendent, with good friends, good wine, good food, and the ensuing conversation inspired by the combination.
-Eden (I wonder if I'd sold my friend more than one bottle of Tement? Maybe he needs more cellar work done....)
PS: Now's the time I wish that this board had a preview function....whatever. Here goes nothin'...
