Rocking out with Rhônes at Chez Leve

Los Angeles, CA
Tasted Monday, February 19, 2007 by Eric with 1,094 views

Introduction

For our final event it was time to crank up the tunes, break out the aprons and do some cooking at Chez Leve. Jeff had a pretty inspired menu in mind. We started out with a tasting of various grilled sausages along with mustards. Then we sat down to a Gumbo featuring Andoiullette sausage (whoops, wrong kind of sausage but still delicious) and confit duck legs. We spent about two days making the roux and then the gumbo and were pretty sure we had screwed up—but it was damned delicious, smoky, coffee and chocolate. Wow! After that we grilled some of the 60-day dry aged steaks from Bryan Flannery. Best darned Ribeye I have ever tasted along with a crazily marbled and flavorful tenderloin tail. The strip was cooked too much, so it was hard to judge.

Apart from the starters and the dessert wines, all of the other wines were served blind in pairs of brown bags. Jeff even went to some lengths to pour wines out of their original bottles if it was clear that the capsule (e.g. the distinctive wax on the Marcoux VV) would be a giveaway.

Flight 1 - STARTERS (3 Notes)

A few white as people arrived, munched on sausages, chatted etc.

Flight 2 (2 Notes)

Our firs pair was our oldest. Pretty impressive given the age.

Flight 3 (2 Notes)

Powerhouse Pegau. I just love these. Pretty easy to guess the blind pair as 2003 Pegau.

Flight 4 (2 Notes)

Another great pair right in their sweet spot. Still young and powerful but with lots of secondary notes.

Flight 5 (2 Notes)

A bit of a mismatched pair but nice wines nonetheless

Flight 6 (1 Note)

A weird and random ringer.

  • 2003 Château de Fonbel

    France, Bordeaux, Libournais, St. Émilion Grand Cru

    Perhaps a nice wine, but thrown into the middle of a lineup of Chateauneuf-du-Pape, I certainly don't have the palate to switch gears and wrap my head around this.

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Flight 7 (2 Notes)

I came back from cooking to find a pair of wines in my glass. One sniff of each made it obvious this was Beaucastel, such a great pair of wines!

Flight 8 (2 Notes)

A really nice pair of Bonneau wines.

Flight 9 (2 Notes)

A relatively underwhelming pair of Rayas.

Flight 10 (2 Notes)

An odd pairing. (Probably the Clos des Papes was intended to be served with the 1990 Pegau Laurence but a bag was shuffled.)

Flight 11 (2 Notes)

And then a couple of sweeter things, neither of which I got to.

Closing

Whew, what a way to end three days of indulgence!

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