What Wine with Truffle?

We have been on a bit of a truffle kick the last few weeks, even posting a vlog on making scrambled eggs with truffle.  And last night, my loved one, DAZ in the Kitchen, made a great pasta dish with chicken, cream, and a mushroom and truffle paste.  It was delicious and will be posted in Daz in the Kitchen soon.

Truffles

Both mushroom and truffle have strong umami mouth taste and feel.  Jeannie Choo Lee, Master of Wine (MW), and expert in Asian haute cuisine (and everyday Asian food fare!) in her book Asian Palate: Savoring Asian Cuisine and Wine, explains umami as follows:

"Umami is a Japanese term that is widely acknowledged to be the fifth taste, the others being salty, sour, bitter and sweet.  It was identified by Professor Kikunae Ikeda at Tokyo Imperial University over 100 years ago. as amino acid glutamate (aka glutamic acid) and later confirmed by research as a type of amino acid that is detectable by tongue receptors.  Rather than having its own recognizable flavor, umami is subtle and expands, creates depth and rounds out other flavors.  It occurs naturally in foods such as seaweed, mushrooms, soy sauce and aged cheese."

She also recommends a full body, aged white wine such as Chardonnay or Semillon to compliment and enhance umami flavors.  We had a 2006 Penfolds Yatarnna in the fridge, pulled it out, matched it up against the pasta and it was a perfect combination!  I love a big, aged Chardonnay with cream sauce and mushrooms and the heightened and enhanced flavors derived from the truffle only added to the flavor (to the point of satiation!).  The meal was magic.

We have used truffle to enhance scrambled eggs as shown in the video and also in quiche.  (If using 100% real truffle, you only need a very small amount which is good because it is expensive!)  With the eggs and possibly some cheese in an omelet or quiche, I would recommend an aged Semillon instead of a Chardonnay.

If you have not tried real truffle, you should!  If you cannot bring yourself to pay the price for real truffle, you can use a truffle flavored oil instead, but there is a drop-off in taste.  With half a teaspoon of truffle added to our scrambled eggs, the finish on the truffle lasted hours on our palate.  It is an amazing ingredient to add to many meals.  And if you are looking for a wine to go with truffle, a big, aged white Chardonnay or Semillon is the way to go.


Steve Shipley
Twitter: @shipleyaust
My other blog (on business, tech, world issues):  Steve Shouts Out!
My Blake Stevens blog: From Blake's Bookshelf 
Still Stupid at Sixty in Amazon Kindle Store

1999 Penfolds St Henri - wow, what a red!

This is one of my all-time favorite red wines.  I started drinking it almost a decade ago and it was great then, and is even better now.  This wine has a few more years before it starts to fade, but I only have two more bottles left, so not a worry.  But if you have some of it in your cellar, you should drink it soon, at least in the next three years.

I had a funny introduction to this wine the first time.  I was in Dallas in 2004 on a business trip with some very senior banking executives and trying to a very large IT contract extension.  There were eight of us eating at a fancy steak house as you can only find in Dallas!  One of my team was a Frenchman, so the client asked him to order some fine wine.  Well this particular Frenchman did not do a very good job ordering the first bottle, and I looked at the one of the key client's face when he took a sip and could tell he was not happy with the wine.  I took the wine list and while not familiar with the Penfolds St Henri of any vintage at the time, I figured a Penfolds red in this price range would be a pretty good wine without me spending several times as much for a Penfolds Magill Estate or RWT.  I ordered a bottle, could tell the client thought I had made a great choice (the smile and thumbs up were evidence enough!), and subtly pushed the bottle the Frenchman ordered down to the other end of the table to be consumed.  And six bottles of 1999 Penfolds St Henri later, we left the restaurant very happy!

I then introduced my wife, DAZ in the Kitchen, to this particular wine about a year later when I found it on the wine list at a restaurant in Sydney.  She loved it and it continued to be a favorite choice for a few years when eating out during the mid-2000s.  And upon returning from Qatar in 2009, we bought some to keep in the cellar as you could no longer find it in restaurants.  This weekend is our 12th wedding anniversary, so we are celebrating by opening one of our last bottles and enjoying tonight and tomorrow night (if there is any left!).

This is not the best vintage, but still an excellent vintage.  The 1996 vintage would have been slightly better and also will last another decade longer, so if you read this review and want to secure some St Henri, either buy the 1999 and drink it soon, or buy some of the 1996 or 1998 which you can drink now and lay some down for later.

The1999 Penfolds St Henri is a lively, fruity wine with blackberry, boysenberry and tart plum flavors.  It also has a lot of spice and goes extremely well with chili infused dark chocolate.  I know that from previous wine / chocolate matching events, but more importantly I know that as my mouth is currently filled with this wine after eating a square of the Lindt Chili dark chocolate!  Wow - what a combination!

The wine also has big tannins and is moderately heavy on the palate.  It is 14% alcohol, but certainly not over the top.  It is a complex wine with a lot of nuance.  It has the mouth feel and slight odor of wet leather.  The finish lasts a long, long time.

We will be making a rice with seared beef dish tonight to have with the wine, but frankly, we will probably finish off the bottle before dinner.  We are two-thirds the way through it already.  It just goes down so easily!

James Halliday has mentioned that compared to the Penfolds Grange, that the St Henri is certainly under-valued given what a great wine it is.  This is a perfect example of wine economics.  I would always take eight or nine bottles of the current vintage St Henri over one Penfolds Grange and that is the current exchange rate between the two wines.  Frankly, it's a no-brainer to go with many bottles of St Henri over Grange.

I will finish this post the same way I started it:   wow, what a red!


Steve Shipley
Twitter: @shipleyaust
My other blog (on business, tech, world issues):  Steve Shouts Out!
My Blake Stevens blog: From Blake's Bookshelf 
Still Stupid at Sixty in Amazon Kindle Store

Impressing or expressing? - a good night out with the guys!

The five of us were all looking forward to a good night out.  One in the group was returning to the US after two years living in Sydney, others reflecting on completing one of the greatest banking IT projects ever run anywhere in the world, which we all touched in one way or another over the last few years, but mostly we just wanted to get together to share some companionship and some great wine.  And what a wine line-up we had!

Owen, David, Mark, Daniel, Steve

We had been planning the evening for about a month, but except for agreeing on the date, no one did any real planning at all!  So we decided to meet at the Small Bar in Crows Nest and take it from there.  Mark and I arrived first, drinking some 2012 David Hook Pinot Grigio from the Hunter Valley.  After a glass each and some nibblies, we got another full bottle as the other guys were arriving.

After some good banter, we all started showing off the wine we had brought along for the evening.  It was suppose to be a 'big red' night and it certainly turned out that way!  As I mentioned, we all apparently wanted to impress, but not in that manly competitive way of "You show me yours, and I'll show you mine!"  It was more about being respectful of each being part of a friendship and wanting to share something special with each other.  The other four in the group had been especially tight over the previous few years and I had only circled in and out a few times, so it was great to be part of the group that evening.  We all knew and enjoyed our wines and made sure we each brought a very good bottle along!

I brought along a 1996 Waverley Estates Semillon to start us off with an iconic Australian white wine which I thought would go with whatever Asian food we decided to eat that evening.  Since the evening was about the friendship and the wine, we weren't sure where we would eat (so we went to the closest place which was the Vietnamese restaurant Phuong immediately next door to the Small Bar!).  In fairness to my friend's taste and Phuong, some of the guys had been there before and it was an outstanding choice.

I felt we should start with one bottle of white wine and I wanted to test and share what I knew would be a great Australian white in the 1996 Waverley Estates Semillon.  Once we got the food ordered (Banquet Menu B, showing again how much effort we would be putting into non-wine related topics!), we got into the red wines.  The line-up was a stunner:

• 2008 Trinity Hill Homage Gimblett Gravels Cabernet Sauvignon / Merlot blend (from Hawkes Bay, New Zealand)
• 1997 Penfolds 389 Shiraz / Cabernet Sauvignon blend
• 1994 Brokenwood Hermintage
• 2002 Penfolds St Henri Shiraz
• 2009 Tyrrell's Johnno Shiraz
• 2003 Penfolds St Henri Shiraz
• 2007 McWilliams Mount Pleasant Maurice O'Shea Shiraz
• 2002 Wolf Blass Black Label Shiraz / Cabernet Sauvignon / Malbec
• Some bottle of Pinot Noir that Mark bought at the bottle shop because for some reason he did not think we had enough wine for five guys!

Except for the 2002 Wolf Blass Black Label which was gifted to Andrew (the guy returning to the US), the 2009 Tyrrell's Johnno Shiraz (which we deemed too young to drink), and the bottle Pinot Noir that Mark bought, we did drink all the wine with dinner.  You can tell because of how careful we were with our plates and food (and this does not show the broken glass on the floor or the mess I made of Daniel's shirt!).

Six of the reds we drank were Shiraz or Shiraz blends - that's heavy lifting for one meal!  We opened with the Trinity Hill Cabernet Sauvignon / Merlot blend and finished with dessert and the Pinot Noir, but everything else in between was Shiraz!  I believe we all agreed that the wine of the evening was the 2002 Penfolds St Henri.  The 1997 Penfolds 389 was absolutely splendid and lasted better than I thought it would.  The 1994 Brokenwood Hermitage was a classic older Hunter Shiraz with great body and finish, but still maintaining  the elegant style of an old world Hermitage.  The 2009 Tyrrell's Johnno Shiraz would have been a delight, but we passed on it as it will last another decade or more and improve with age.  And the 2003 Penfolds St Henri was another wonderful wine.  Each of these reds would usually be considered the featured wine to finish a meal with, but we had no problem over-indulging with all of them!

We then walked in the rain down to Bravo's for some gelato and other desserts where we did finish off the bottle of Pinot Noir that Mark bought before finding our individual ways home.

Great friends, great food, great times and great wine all go together.  We were not trying to impress in a competitive way - just expressing gratitude for each others friendship and respect for each others palate!  It was a rare evening where everything worked - at least it seemed so with that much good wine!

A great wine, but disappointing wine drinking experience

We spent Saturday the week past, traveling and visiting friends in the Blue Mountains and beyond.  It was a great time and we had some great meals, even though it did make for a very long day.  For once, I did not bring the wines and let it up to the hosts to provide the wine to accompany the meals.

During our Saturday lunch, we had some great food starting with three different soups samplers (tomato and carrot, pumpkin, and pea), followed by stir fired veggies and prawns, with a wonderful dessert of chocolate balls and berry ice cream.  Each course had a decent wine to go with it from a white to red to sweet dessert wine.  And as usual the best part of the meal and experience was sharing it with great friends.

We repeated the performance for dinner, but it was a heavier meal with more meat, including a marinated roast beef side, sausages, and stir fired veggies.  Therefore, more red wines were served and the two choices of red were very nice choices.  Unfortunately, the first problem was that the wines were drunk too early in their life.

The wine of the evening should have been a very nice 2007 Penfold's St Henri.  This is an excellent wine and has a 96 (out of 100) rating.  Usually I would salivate over having a St Henri with dinner, but then we are currently drinking the 1999 vintage (I have about 6 bottle left and need to drink them in the next few years to get maximum enjoyment from them).

But I could tell from the first smell and the first sip of the 2007 that this wine was not ready for drinking!  I asked the host how many bottles he had left and he mentioned he had six left.  I told him to wait at least two more years if not up to five years before he drinks the next one.

This wine should be drunk between 2015 and 2024 for peak enjoyment and ideally in the 2019 - 2021 time frame.  While he decanted and even aerated the wine, it did not have much of an effect as the wine structure was just too tight.  And then, the wine was served in a white wine glass used for Riesling or Semillon.  This did not allow the wine to breath and forced an already tight wine into a small area to breathe and drink from making it even tighter.  There are reasons Riedel makes specific wine glasses for Shiraz and other grapes and drinking a Shiraz from a white wine glass is almost sinful!

This was a great wine, served too early and without giving it any advantage to shine.  This was a $75 - $100 bottle of wine wasted.  It still had (obviously) fresh fruit, but was too tight and the complexities of this great wine had not become fully integrated.  I hope the host takes my advice and does not serve up another bottle for several more years.  This will be a great wine over time, but certainly not at its best today when served up in a small glass.

Impact of temperature on wine taste is larger than you think! Part 2 - White Wine

In Part 1, we discussed the impact of temperature on red wines.  We will now do the same for white wines.  The effect of temperature is even more profound than it is for reds.

In general whites are stored in quite cool temperatures.  My long-term whites like my long-term reds are stored at 14 degrees Celsius (57 degrees Fahrenheit).  But then I have usually about 6 - 8 'ready-to-serve' whites in my kitchen refrigerator which are stored at 2 degrees Celsius (36 degrees Fahrenheit).  This is too cold a temperature to serve most white wines.  In general, excellent white wines (Montrachets and other aged Chardonnays and Semillons) should be served at 10 - 14 degrees Celsius (50 - 57 degrees Fahrenheit) to really release their great flavors and bouquet.  Typically good white wines (Most other Chardonnays, Rieslings, Pinot Grigios, etc.) served at 7 - 10 degrees Celsius (45 - 50 degrees Fahrenheit) and bad white wines as chilled as you like!

Boxed white wines and lower quality white wines are usually served very cold as they are lacking flavor anyway.  What most 'bad' white wine drinkers are looking for a a refreshing, cool drink and lots of alcohol!  But if you want to get the most flavor out of a white wine that it has to offer, then you should warm it up a few degrees.

In the past, I made the mistake of storing and serving my white wines too cold, especially if I took an excellent white wine directly from the fridge.  Now I tend to take the wine out of the fridge for about 15 minutes to let it rise in temperature a few degrees and become more flavorful.  This is often accomplished by putting the bottle in a carrying case to bring to a restaurant and the time it takes to get to the restaurant is perfect in terms of the wine being a few degrees warmer.  Or if I am going to serve it at home, I let it sit on the counter for 15 minutes before serving it.

For an excellent white wine, especially a great and aged Chardonnay, I now let the wine warm up to about 12 degrees or so.  (Note that I do not actually take the temperature of the wine, but rather just feel the bottle and compare the bottle to room temperature.)  A bottle such as a great Montrachet or the Penfolds Yatarnna deserve this type of treatment and you will definitely notice the improved bouquet of wine in your nose and taste of the wine on your palate.

I love taking a sip when it is still 'too cold' and swirling an excellent white wine around my mouth.  The body temperature of my mouth warms the wine almost immediately and over several minutes, you can pick up a variety of different tastes that keep changing over time.  It is an amazing experience and worth savoring!

Champagnes and sparkling wines are usually served even more chilled than while wines.  For low-end sparklings, you can serve them at 4 - 6 degrees Celsius, but good Champagnes should be served at a somewhat higher temperature.

While difficult to discern by other than expert tasters, Chef de Cave Richard Geoffroy relates the different experiences he has had with the 1996 Moet and Chandon Dom Perignon Champagne:

• at 8°C, mineral and a little closed, perfect with an oyster tartare
• at 9°C, moderately open, to be matched with crayfish
• at 10°, complements wild salmon magnificently
• at 11°, chardonnay's butter notes appear, volume amplifies
• at 12°, delicate mushroom aromas appear
• at 13°, pinot noir aromas, tannins! serve with a lamb tajine
• at 14°, smoky flavours and yoghurt aromas are revealed
• at 16°, aromas of meringue and walnuts, amazing intensity - magical with a tarte Tatin with candied violets

Most of us could not discern such differences in flavor, but some can.  However, we can all learn from this and be appreciative of the difference a few degrees makes!  BTW, if you want to do this experiment with a bottle at each degree between 8 and 16, it will cost you about $2,400 at $300 per bottle!

You deserve the enhanced flavor of letting a great white wine warm up a few degrees towards room temperature to enhance the taste.  A number of people will take a great white wine directly out of their long-term cellar at 14 degrees Celsius (by now you should know this is 57 degrees Fahrenheit!) and serving it.

Right way - no ice

If you have removed white wine from the fridge or a Vintec where it has been stored 'cold,' and once it has warmed up a couple of degrees to release the flavors, you should place the white wine in wine storage container without ice (like in the photo to the left).  This ensures the wine stays at the right temperature for a long time (hopefully long enough to finish the bottle!).  If you put it in an ice bucket, it will return the wine to close to freezing, choking off the flavor.  Therefore, I never use ice in any manner with good white wine.  (Or you may consider just using a few cubes to counterbalance the room temperature.) If you are drinking bad white wine, then use all the ice you want, as you want to hide the poor flavor!

Wrong! Do not use ice!

We may not all have the discerning palate of Richard Geoffroy, but we can still greatly enhance our white wine tasting experience by making sure we are storing and serving the wine at the right temperatures.I have learned that there is great benefit in warming an excellent white wine up a few degrees before tasting it.  Do some comparison testing and see if you do not agree!

And if this all seems just too hard, then for white wine, take it out of the fridge for 20 minutes before serving it and leave it at that.  That is as good a rule of thumb as any.

A disappointment, but one moves on!

Last night, my lovely bride and I drove to the Hunter Valley and arrived in time for dinner at the Blue Thai restaurant which we really enjoy.  The food is great and the crowd is certainly interesting and entertaining as the restaurant abuts a trailer and camping park.  It is a BYO restaurant, which is a concept I always like!  There were several cartons of box wine sitting on other tables (why come to the Hunter Valley and get box wine?!?!) and I expect there were not many other bottles over $10 in the restaurant that night.

Yet, Thai food has such tremendous flavors and deserves to be paired with good wine.  We usually bring a Gewurztraminer, Semillon or Riesling.  Tonight we brought along a bottle of the 1995 Penfolds Adelaide Hills Semillon Trial Bin.  I have four bottles of this, but had not had much interest in trying one as it was an inexpensive wine I purchased back in 1997 in Melbourne.  It had not been cared for well either in that it made a trip across the ocean to the US in 1998 when I moved back there, and then a trip back home in 2000 when I moved here permanently.  Fortunately, most of the wines that made the journey over and back did not suffer much (the better ones were stored in Styrofoam cases) , but some of the cheaper ones were affected.

Recently, I have come to realize that the 1995 Adelaide Hills Trial Bin was one of the wines that was an experiment as a possibility for Penfolds White Grange (according the the public, not Penfolds) which ultimately resulted in the Yatarnna Bin 144 Chardonnay.  Plus some of the wine auction houses I was talking with expressed interest in selling this wine at auction and that peaked my curiosity.  I decided it was worth trying a bottle to see if it was still good.  After all, it was selling for between $25 - $30 per bottle on the secondary market.

Crumbled cork

Halliday reviewed this wine a long time ago and said it was drinkable until about 2003 and here I am thinking about trying it almost a decade after that.  Yet, I have had many aged Semillons that have really stood the test of time.  However the bottle I opened last night, had not!  It was unfortunately corked.  I used the standard cork screw from the restaurant, but the cork just crumbled.  I then drove home to get my Ah So cork screw.  The Ah So cork screw is about the only way to get old cork out of an old bottle.  It is designed to be able to get old and soggy corks out of the bottle, and I may have had some luck had I started with this, but the cork was so soggy and cushy that I could not get a good grip on it.  It was the first time ever that I was not able to remove a cork with the Ah So, and had to push it into the bottle.

I was still hopeful because the wine had a beautiful golden color to it, and their was no obvious fault when visualizing the wine.  However, it had lost much of its flavor and had a metallic taste to it.  It tasted like someone had squeezed a melon onto a piece of sheet metal and licked it.  (I am imagining this is what it would have tasted like - I have not actually done this!)  You could tell this was a fine wine in its time, but had oxidized too much.  I still managed a few sips with dinner to try to figure out what it would have been like without the fault, but we left 2/3rds of the bottle and mostly had water with dinner.

I am hopeful that the remaining three bottles of this wine may have traveled better than this one did.  Cork variability can be quite large.  Recently about two weeks apart, I had two bottles of the 2003 Blueberry Hills Pinot Noir and the second one was significantly better than the first one (as described in post).  Since both Pinot Noirs had been stored properly and in exactly the same manner, the difference could only be attributable to the difference in cork structure.  Therefore, I will try each bottle of the 1995 Penfolds Adelaide hills Semillon Trial Bin and hopefully one or two of the remaining three bottles will be real gems!

Bin 144 Yatarnna - Penfolds White Grange

With the great success of Grange over many years, Penfolds has always been interested in the concept of the creating a 'White' Grange.  The Penfolds Bin 144 Yatarnna is as close as they have come and it is commonly referred to as White Grange.  It is made from reserved Chardonnay grapes and usually cost around $130 per bottle.  I was very fortunate to pick up several dozen of the 2006 Yatarnna for a good price when some were found and treated as excess stock by the dealer.

During the 1990's, Penfolds tried a number of 'trial bins' in an attempt to create a White Grange before settling on Yatarnna.  And to be honest, Penfolds was looking for an iconic white wine to match Grange, but never really had to the intent of marketing any wine as White Grange.  This was a moniker of wine writers around Australia.

In 1992, Penfolds started creating a number of trial bins to create an iconic white wine.  I actually have four bottles of the 1995 Penfolds Adelaide Hills Trial Bin Semillon, which I bought in 1997 in a Melbourne bottle shop.  I have not tried one yet, but am now excited to find out if this wine was a mistake or not!  I was only spending between $12 - $18 per bottle then for wines I did not know anything about, but wanted to try.  (In 1997, I did pay $200 per bottle for several bottles of the 1992 Penfolds Grange which were released that year.)  Therefore, I am certain I did not pay more than $18 for the Trial Bin Semillon I picked up.

One of the characteristics of Grange is that is was built to last a very long time, and I expect they wanted to have the same characteristic for an iconic white.  Therefore, Semillon certainly would have been a good choice of grape to experiment with.  In selling off wine recently and thinning my stock, I had the four bottles of the 1995 Penfolds Adelaide Hills Trial Bin Semillon on sale for $10 per bottle!  Fortunately, nobody bought any.  I will be trying a bottle soon to decide if I have an unknown gem here or not.  If so, then I will gladly share the remaining bottles with some great friends, and if not, we will use the remaining bottles for cooking wine!

But back to the Penfolds Bin 144 Yatarnna.  This is one of the finest Chardonnays you will find in Australia.  I still like my Montrachets a bit better, but the Yatarnna is a great Chardonnay.  I am currently sipping a 2006 Yatarnna which is stunning and one of the better vintages.  (The first vintage of Yatarnna was in 1995.)  It has powerful lemon flavors and some peach and grass flavor.  It is mellow but with a slight edge and crispness.  This wine should drink well for another five years or so.

I selected this wine to go with my wife's homemade chicken pot pie which is in the oven now!  I am looking forward to that combination and am sure she will have an upcoming recipe in her blog "DAZ in the Kitchen."  This mellow, yet robust wine will match beautifully win the chicken pot pie.

I have been upset at some of the commercial finanglings of TWE with the Penfolds brand, and have sold off most of my Penfolds inventory, but I have a dozen of this great wine left.  My wife has an easy way to tell if a wine is outstanding or not, and that is to 'not notice' that the bottle has been emptied so quickly when it it just the two of us drinking it, and that always happens with the 2006 Penfolds Bin 144 Yatarnna!  In fact, my wife just took a sip and stated, "You see, this wine does all the right things.  You sip it, it hits my palate perfectly and goes right down without thinking about it."

While I find fault in some of TWE's commerical approaches (TWE owns Penfolds), I cannot fault Penfolds for the passion they have always exhibited in making great wines and the 2006 Bin 144 Yatarnna is one of them!

Five best wine meals ever - Part 1

I have had some great wines in my lifetime. Most have been memorable of their own accord. But the memories that last forever are when you have a line-up of great friends, great food and great wine, all which match perfectly. The memories of those times are enjoyed forever!

Over the next few weeks, I will be describing each meal, the event that warranted it, the friends involved and the wines, all which made the evening special. But the ranking to make my Top Five all-time wine drinking meals is judged on the wine itself and the wine line-up being truly great. While the friends and food added to the evening, they did not contribute to how that evening ranked - only the wine counted!

In this post, I will provide the event, and the list of wines. In subsequent posts, I will describe the friends and food that matched the wine that made those evenings special. My Top Five evenings (in reverse order) are the following:

#5 evening - My 59th birthday - November 26, 2011, at The Cut Bar & Grill

• 2005 Tyrrell's Vat 1 Semillon
• 2000 Waverley Estate Chardonnay
• 2000 Houghton Museum Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon
• 2000 McWilliams Mt Pleasant Maurice O’Shea Shiraz
• 1975 Lindemans Porphry

#4 evening - BPAY Architecture and Support team reunion - August 29, 2012, at The Cut Bar & Grill

• 2009 Bouchard Pere & Fils Puligny Montrachet
• 2007 La Belle Voisine Nuits St George
• 1990 Lindemans Limestone Ridge (Cabernet Sauvignon / Shiraz blend)
• 2000 McWilliams Mt Pleasant Maurice O’Shea Shiraz
• 2006 Chateau Reuissec Sauternes

#3 evening - My 58th birthday - December 2, 2010, at The Cut Bar & Grill

• Pommeray Brut Champagne NV
• 1998 Tyrrell's Vat 9 Shiraz
• 2001 Yalumba Octavius Shiraz
• 1981 Penfolds Grange
• 2005 Château Haut Bergeron Sauternes Dessert wine
• 1997 Château D'Yquem Sauternes

#2 evening - Deanna's 41th birthday - March 17, 2012, at home with Jay Huxley Masterchef cooking

• 1998 Pommeray Louise Champagne
• 2009 Hugel Alsace Riesling
• 1990 Waverley Estate Semillon
• 2007 La Belle Voisine Nuits St George
• 2005 Chateau Brane-Cantenac (Margeaux)
• 2005 Château Haut Bergeron Sauternes
• 1997 Château D'Yquem Sauternes

#1 evening - Deanna's 40th birthday - March 19, 2011, at Lindemans Winery

• 1998 Pommeray Louise Champagne
• 1987 Lindemans Padthaway Watervale Riesling
• 1990 Waverley Estate Semillon
• 1996 Wolf Blass Grey Label (Cabernet Sauvignon / Shiraz)
• 1996 Lindemans St George Cabernet Savignon
• 1995 Yarra Yering Dry #1
• 1971 Lindemans Limestone Ridge (Cabernet Sauvignon / Shiraz)
• 1971 Penfolds Grange
• 1971 Château D'Yquem Sauternes
• 1957 Lindemans Vintage Port

While we have had some evenings (such as our anniversaries) where the wines have been just as spectacular, they were limited to two bottles. What made the Top Five truly stand out was that we had more friends and more wines to sample, enjoy and compare.

I am actually not sure if I can write about the great time we had for Deanna's 40th birthday without passing out as just writing up the list has me quivering! I am uncertain if we will ever be able to top that evening, but my 60th birthday is coming up in a few months, so we do have a reason to try! Hopefully, I can use that night to knock off the current #5 and possibly reposition a few of the other four spots!

Worse than Penfolds or not?

Yesterday, I wrote with some angst against Penfolds for having on offer a dozen bottles of wine for $168,000 per bottle.  But his may be even more insane.  A vacuum cleaning company trying to sell 100 gold vacuum cleaners for $1 million dollars each!   What is happening in the world today?  I was under the impression things were a bit tough, but I guess not for everyone.

It is sure nice to know that if I am at the right people's home and I spill some crumbs from my Ritz crackers while swilling their $168,000 bottle of Penfolds, they can quickly get out their $1 million dollar vacuum cleaner and get rid of the crumbs.  Seriously, if I could afford a $1 million vacuum cleaner, I would probably have a maid or cleaner, and in neither case, want to tempt them with stealing my $1 million vacuum (or my $168,000 bottle of wine)!

Penfolds, you disgust me!

A friend posted this Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) article and I went ballistic.  This really upset me, far more than selling Grange or their other select wines to the Chinese at $1,000 per bottle (and as I understand it, 90% of the total allocation was snapped up by the Chinese, making it close to impossible for long-term lovers of Penfolds premium wines to get any).  Who the hell would pay $168,000 for a bottle of any wine, except some dumb rich Chinese guy recently into buying up good wine to impress his friends?

Please be certain that I am not ridiculing the Chinese here, as I think their appreciation for fine wine, and their ability to grow fine wine has greatly improved in recent years, and I am excited about their growing presence in the ownership of wineries in the Hunter Valley.  The first Chinese female also recently received her International Masters of Wine (MW) certification.

But who other than a newly rich Chinese would actually buy this and for what purpose?

Penfolds is targeting a few 'dupes' here who want to look good with their very rich friends in return for $2 million more in revenue.  I am pissed at Penfolds for even releasing this, and am going to dump all of my Penfolds wine.  If you want an inventory of my Pendfolds wine and what I was currently selling it for anyway, let me know and I will knock and 25% off the price if you buy a half dozen or more.  Or if that is not enough, make me an offer as I am ready yo unload.

You can email me at 'shipleyaust@yahoo.com.au'. 

Penfolds, you disgust me!

How much should a good bottle of wine cost?

The first answer is "Probably more than you are paying for it!"  However, there is such a glut of good wine on the market, and far too many grapes being produced that the cost of a good bottle of wine is relatively inexpensive.  Of course, now that the Chinese are becoming significantly more prosperous in this - the "Year of the Dragon", and believe they have or are acquiring a taste for good wine, they are buying up the very top end of the market which will certainly push up prices for that segment.

The Chinese are also buying up a lot of wineries and parcels of land that produce grapes around the world and more wine will find its way to China over the next several years.  This will reduce the global glut somewhat.  But by looking around, you should still be able to buy very good wine for under $10 per bottle and even cheaper.

The average bottle of wine in my cellar is around $40 - $50 per bottle, but then I have some truly great wines in my cellar, and many of them have 10 - 20 years of aging built into them so I have a large stock of great wines which are drinkable today.   Yet, I also have a large number of outstanding wines I paid less than $20 per bottle for.  I have very few wines I paid over $100 per bottle, as I find it is just not worth it except for very special occasions to drink a bottle of wine that expensive.  You just do not need to.

Blake Stevens, in his recently published book (which I have reviewed) "Still Stupid at Sixty" has a Chapter entitled "Don't Overindulge in Passions".  The point of the chapter is that we can get carried away with our passions and really overspend because we want to treat ourselves to the very best.  He believes that for most things that can be purchased, for the very, very best (measured as being 100% of possible capabilities and quality - assuming you can actually measure these traits at all!), you are paying 10 time more than if you accepted an alternative that was at 99% and that still costs 10 times what the alternative at 95% of capability and quality would cost.  He says this applies to jewelry, stereo systems, and wine among other things.  It is easy to spend $1,000 for a bottle of wine and for that price, it better not just be excellent, but it should also be rare and have collectible value.  But I can find wines for $100 per bottle that almost all people would say was as good or better than the bottle that cost $1,000.  And I could buy bottles of wine for $10 that many if not most people thought was as good or nearly as good as the bottle for $100 or even $1,000.  I think this is true and it is why I have very few bottles anywhere close to $1,000 per bottle (Only two which were used for my wife's 40th birthday party!).  Do not overspend on wine!  I believe for most people, they do not need to spend over $20 per bottle and there are a number of annual reviews by wine critics that recommend the best buys you can get for under $20 per bottle.  This is a very safe way to buy wine that you know will not disappoint when you open a bottle or bring one to a party.

Two years ago, we did a tasting comparing wines that were made half of the Shiraz grape and half of the Cabernet Sauvignon grape.  We tasted a line-up of Penfolds Bin 389 with vintages from 1995, 1996, 1997, and 1998 and a Wolf Blass Grey Label from 1996.  The Penfolds Bin 389 would have fetched $35 - $50 when they were sold and more now.  The Wolf Blass Grey Label was bought for $16 per bottle (I am so glad I bought 3 dozen of those, but I only have one bottle left!).  However, the group of very discerning wine palettes that evening pick the Wolf Blass as the best wine, even though it cost half or even a third of what the Penfolds Bin 389 vintages cost.

An American friend of mine who had been living in Australia for two years at the time had dinner out with my wife and me and another colleague visiting form the US.  I brought two bottles - one white and one red - to the Indian BYOB restaurant we were eating at.  After finishing both bottles and still having a decent amount of food to eat, my American friend who had been in Australia for two years and I went to the bottle shop next door to get another couple of bottles.  I asked him if he had any favorites he wanted to drink and his response was "Steve, when I arrived in Sydney two years ago, I decided to pay about $30 per bottle and I thought the wine was really good, so then I backed off to about $25  - $28 per bottle and still thought it was really good and then backed off to about $20 per bottle and it was still really good.  I am now down to about $8 per bottle and still think it is really good!  Therefore, you pick something out you like!"

Like I said - and especially in Australia - you can get some really good wine for under $10 per bottle.