I rarely write about a set of wines from one meal at home, and as meals go there were only four of us and so we only drank six wines, plus one spirit. But the wines all sang beautifully, and although one or two are well known, none of the wines were obvious.
The food, incidentally, was almost cheese course excepted all vegan. Dosage in is 9. This was most generously brought by our guests. One, in the normally more forward French publication, La Revue des Vins de France, suggested a drinking date from I think it is somewhere between the two in maturity terms, drinking quite nicely now.
There are some very complex things going on β white flowers, bread and lemon citrus to begin with. A stunningly beautiful Champagne. Yet it also has a bit of heft, not that I should use such inelegant language for such a supermodel, but such wines do have a certain size and weight to them before maturity beckons and they shed a few pounds.
This is no lean and mean wine, despite its profound elegance. This is a different ball park, in terms of quality, price and ambition. Take a rare but really good Austrian grape variety, pick it pristine, by hand of course, and give it around three weeks skin contact before leaving it in new barriques for 18 months. Orange in colour, obviously, just below the Lucozade spectrum for British readers, in fact. We drank it with a nice orange coloured soup β butternut squash, fennel and ginger.
Add that to the list of food matches, Red Squirrel! I think this may be onto the vintage now. The only problem, I think he only makes around bottles per year. Well, I used to drink more conventional wines. It was generally held among wine writers that PJA went through a less exalted patch during the s. By the s things were less even. In the previous decade Fleet Street wine bar and merchant, El Vino, were selling through their s stocks of La Chapelle at very reasonable prices, and I bought a good string of vintages.
