Los Angeles, CA
Tasted Monday, February 19, 2007 by Eric with 1,094 views
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.
A few white as people arrived, munched on sausages, chatted etc.
Our firs pair was our oldest. Pretty impressive given the age.
Powerhouse Pegau. I just love these. Pretty easy to guess the blind pair as 2003 Pegau.
Another great pair right in their sweet spot. Still young and powerful but with lots of secondary notes.
A bit of a mismatched pair but nice wines nonetheless
A weird and random ringer.
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!
A really nice pair of Bonneau wines.
A relatively underwhelming pair of Rayas.
An odd pairing. (Probably the Clos des Papes was intended to be served with the 1990 Pegau Laurence but a bag was shuffled.)
And then a couple of sweeter things, neither of which I got to.
Whew, what a way to end three days of indulgence!
2004 Domaine / Maison Vincent Girardin Meursault 1er Cru Charmes
France, Burgundy, Côte de Beaune, Meursault 1er Cru
Nice minerality and telltale flint.
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2003 Domaine Mouton Condrieu Côte Bonnette
France, Rhône, Northern Rhône, Condrieu
Somewhat underwhelming. Kerosene. Lacks the floral punch I would expect. Definite alcohol notes.
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2003 Domaine Jean-Louis Chave Hermitage Blanc
France, Rhône, Northern Rhône, Hermitage
A rich oily wine but frankly rather flabby and boring. Not at all the revelation I was led to believe I would find. 96 Parker points?!?
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