originally posted by Kay Bixler:
77 points is pretty good, right? Almost 80 and that's a B.
Thank you for chiming in.
Come on VLM, Jay, Brad,.sasha, Sharon, Don and everybody else, what wine went down your gullet tonight?
Had the lovely Sophie in town last night. We had a couple of fantastic wines.
1996 Vilmart Creation was still bubbly, but becoming reserved. Nice toasty-ness with baking spices and some tertiary notes starting to emerge underneath. My last bottle of 1996 Theise grower stuff from years ago.
A bottle 1997 Mugneret-Gibourg Clos Vougeot was stunning, a transcendent bottle. The last time I had this was over a year ago with Eric A. when he was in Durham. That bottle, opened at the table, was very much meh, although it did start to show a little bit towards the end. Now, was this wishful thinking on my part or a real phenomenon? This time, I came home for lunch and opened the bottle, so it had about 6-7 hours of air by the time we drank it. There are a couple of philosophical wine questions wrapped up in this bottle. The first is the whole long aeration thing. I'm skeptical but figured WTF. Second, I'm feeling pretty ambivalent about wine these days, especially the idea of having a (relative) lot of it.
The first question was answered with an emphatic yes. I really would love to better understand the chemistry of what's happening here. Could you Corovin a little bit of wine and then test it so you know exactly how long (within 90CI of course) to open it beforehand? Would that ruin the poetry or would it help every bottle show its best? Do we really want every wine experience to be its best? One question answered, a couple more spring up.
It was the second question which has been vexing me. I've been hemming and hawing making lists to send to Jamie, then never sending them. Do I really need all this wine or could I just buy on the spot market what I want? The answer is that if you want to drink great bottles of the kinds of wine I like, you have to have a cellar. There is a secondary market for Burgundy of course, even for Mugneret these days. However, I would say at least half of the Burgundy I've bought has some sort of storage issue. If there is any wine up the side of the cork, chances are that it's fucked. Maybe drinkable, but that isn't really the point, is it? This wine was pristine and everything you'd want from a maturing Clos Vougeot. Silken texture with meaty, mineral, earthy notes with whisps of fruit gliding in and out like the flashes of a native brown on the Clark's Fork (a river runs motherfucking through it bitches). There was that ephemeral umami like sense that you only get with maturing Burgundy. There was the mix of silkyness of palate, autumnal notes with fruit that you only get with well stored Burgundy. If the bottle of 2005 Grezeaux I had about a week ago wasn't enough to answer the "what's the point question" this bottle was Q E fucking D.