Please don't be disappointed, it's just a bit of fun to celebrate the restart of the, by now, famous with you evenings at the home of my friends YT and MT, evenings with lovely, mostly simple but amazingly tasty, food and stunning wines, lively discussions and generosity of spirit. In the colder months festivities have always taken place indoors, but when the weather softens we have in the past moved to the balcony - the roof garden of my imagination. This year, of course, Covid-19 cut short the winter YT/MT dining season and, until recently, was keeping the warmer weather version under wraps.Not anymore, amigos! Only a few days ago I had the pleasure of visiting my friends again and, together with two more lucky souls, experience their bountiful hospitality once more. The theme food-wise was simplicity itself, the wines were anything but: unusual, interesting, intriguing, satisfying and luscious, with a tiny drop of rare lightly cask-aged grappa to aid the digestion - the roof garden back with a bang.
The first white wine was one of those beauties that you need to give your palate time to fully appreciate, though your nose will have given you fair warning of the pleasures to come. Made by top Austrian grower F.X. Pichler in Wachau from the Gruner Veltliner grape, this Smaragd Dursteiner Kellerberg 2008 was a study in subtlety, complexity and hidden power in a wine already over twenty years old. Youthfull and fresh in colour and taste, yet with surprising depth of lychee and ripe apricot/melon taste including a metallic note in subtle layers on both nose and palate, this was to me a confirmation of the heights now scaled by top Austrian wines. Pichler's wines are stars in anybody's way of thinking, deservedly, with prices to match, and this is one of the best. The Kellerberg vineyard appears to be uniquely blessed in every way - exposure, gradient, micro-climate, soil - to produce outstanding and complex wines; this was certainly one of them, with the Smaragd designation (minimum 12.5% alcohol) achieved with hard work in a difficult, rainy vintage to give it some extra punch. Wow!
The second wine was from the same area and grape variety but a different grower, sightly older with a very different style: Gruner Veltliner Smaragd Vinothekfullung 2005 Emmerich Knoll. A lovely, riper style, golden yellow in colour and with plenty to chew on, I found this immediately appealing but less beguiling than the first wine, more up front but less complex, somehow a bit easier to approach but ultimately less rewarding. Whilst I wouldn't 'kick it out of bed' it never reached the heights of the Pichler wine for me, though two of my friends present actually preferred this. Super wines both with prices to match, I can only think back to my start in the wine trade, when the Austrian wine scandal with the anti-freeze had just broken and nobody thought much of them or showed any inclination to buy - how wrong we all were, how short-sighted!Only a few days ago I raved about a wine from Bordeaux; today, alas, I cannot do the same. Our third wine was a 1995 Troplong Mondot from St. Emilion, classified Premier Grand Cru Classe B in the local classification and a bottle I would have expected to have been splendid. The 1995 vintage, however, seems to have been difficult in St. Emilion, with tannins remaining hard and the fruit on this showing in retreat, making for a rather hard, untypical wine from a property where the blend is 90% Merlot, 5% each of Cabernet Franc and Cabernet Sauvignon. With the wine too mature for it to have been a phase in the development we either had a hard bottle or the 1995 at Troplong Mondot is ungenerous in character.
Nobody can ever accuse good Sauternes wines of being ungenerous, however, and our sumptuous 1990 Chateau Raymond-Lafon was no exception. Though unclassified, this property has, since it was purchased by Pierre Meslier and his family in the 1970's, been transformed into a little superstar, helped enormously by the fact that Mr. Meslier was at the time the technical director of Chateau d'Yquem, possibly the best and certainly consistently the most sought-after and expensive wine in the Sauternes appellation. Skilfully exploiting both his deep knowledge and connections Pierre Meslier and his family managed to quickly achieve both excellent quality and a glowing reputation, to the envy of some of his more highly-rated vineyards. I was fortunate to attend a tasting in London around the 1980s sometime presented by Madame Meslier, Pierre's wife, and was much impressed by the attention to detail of Raymond-Lafon wines, rating them highly. If they manage to charge more than other, more highly rated and perhaps better, wines is not a point against Raymond-Lafon but against the buyers who support this and allow it to happen, though if the end customer is happy we can say nothing.
Raymond-Lafon is a botrytis wine, sweet, big and luscious, exotic yet earthy, full of notes of ripe white fruits and creme brûlée, the 1990 came from a big, ripe vintage and displayed all of those characteristics while still being full of life, rich but not blowsy. Perhaps it lacked the finesse and complexity of an absolutely top wine from a top vintage, but I 'ain't complainin' - I just love these wines and all they give us! Currently rather unfashionable, difficult to produce and therefore expensive but currently hard to sell at a decent price to make a living - Yquem is an exception, obviously - they are a glorious anachronism and may soon become a thing of the past. I hope I don't live to see their passing, for the world would be a far more boring place without them.
I closed with a rare grappa (a special bottling for a friend of Levi and also ours) from the Levi stable from the time when the old folks were alive. I've raved about these before, as they are rare in their finesse and complexity and may never be equalled or bettered. Like a fine cognac, these are works of art and I am grateful to YT for occasionally allowing me to enjoy one.
Aren't I the lucky one?
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