WTN: Christmas dinner with colleagues

[Brad Ballinger]

Went out to a dinner with co-workers in my department. I picked a place that I knew would let us bring our own ($11 corkage per bottle, which ended up being waived). My co-workers have a casual interest in wine, and one of them may actually try to learn more about it. I decided to go all French.

2004 Francis Blanchet “Cuvee Silice” Pouilly-Fume. Blanchet produces a number of Pouilly-Fume wines – a Vieilles Vignes, a Cuvee Calcite (beginning in 2005), a Les Pernets (beginning in 2005), and a Cuvee Silice. Silice is named for the type of soil (silex) the vines grow in, which has a high degree of flinty minerality. In short, this wine was a wonderful, quintessential Loire sauvignon blanc, with a strong mineral backbone, grapefruit pith, green gooseberries, and some herbaceous elements. Bright, lively, saliva-inducing acidity. Stony finish.

2004 J.L. Chave “Sybele” Crozes-Hermitage Blanc. This wine is made from a blend of marsanne and roussanne (don’t know the proportions). This was a more difficult wine for the newbies to embrace, but one of them liked it quite a bit. More woodsy and spicy than the Pouilly-Fume. There was decent lemon and melon fruit, but the fruit had to fight through some spice, earthiness, and resin for attention. There was a roundness to the texture that helped bring balance to the wine as experienced in the mouth, but the wine appeared austere on the finish.

1999 Domaine Moillard Chorey-Les-Beaune. Bottle signed by Jeanne-Thomas Moillard in 2004, FWIW. After about 30-45 minutes to open up, this wine was positively singing. Queen Anne cherries, a small amount of spice, decent acidity. May not have had the amount of secondary element development some might crave, but it hit on all the cylinders it brought to the party.

1995 Pichon-Lalande, Pauillac. Since one of my co-workers spent some time in Bordeaux, I had to bring a Bordeaux wine. Omigod. I split of case of this on pre-arrival with a friend, and this was the first one I’ve opened thus far. It is doing quite well, and no one could be blamed for opening as many as they want right now. There’s rich layers of cassis, coffee, chocolate, and a touch of mint. Some of the earthy components are just started to share the stage, and the wine should develop nicely over the next 3-5 years. Tannins are fine, and well-integrated. Very balanced wine.