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ups and downs
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October 28, 2002
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Scavenging Time
Sometime last week I woke up to discover that the scavenger hunt we agreed to plan had completely taken over my life. Three times as much work as I thought it was going to be, it's begun to consume every waking moment, despite the fact that I'm taking my GRE on Wednesday the 30th, and I haven't even done one single verbal sample test. I feel spread way too thin. I need some downtime. I'll be so glad when this week is over and I've put the hunt and the GRE behind me.
I take it all back
Despite all of the tiresome work on the Hunt punctuated by occasional guilty feelings over not studying for the GRE, the weekend did have a couple of high notes. One was some oh-my-holy-jeebus, eyes-rolling-back-into-your-head, please-god-please sex. Jesus. But, you know, since that happens all the time with me, it's really no big deal.
Vieux Telegraphe
The other high point in anotherwise difficult weekend was this: My friend Eman invited me over Sunday night. He'd finally decided to hold his Vieux Telegraphe tasting. Vieux Telegraphe is a great wine from Chateauneuf du Pape, itself a particularly interesting village in Southern France which you can read more about here. Chateauneufs are, like many wines in the area, dominated by Grenache and supplemented with Syrah and Mourvedre, but as many as thirteen different grapes can be used in the wine, resulting in complex very distinctive wines.
Eman and friends had managed to accumulate bottles from the 1999, 1998, 1996, 1988, and 1980 vintages. I went out on a brief foray for the 1997 and 2000 vintages, but was unsuccessful.
We tasted them in reverse chronological order. I thought the 1980 was a little past its prime, although I warmed to it as the evening progressed. The 1988, I thought, was perfect, and probably represented the wine at its peak. Smooth, placid, and mature, with ground coffee, cola, and toffee flavors. Grenache is such a strange, beautiful grape!
The 1996 was also very good, but didn't show the complexity of the older vintage. The 1998 was huge, unwieldy, and not ready to drink. (Don't get me wrong, though -- I still enjoyed the experience!) It'll be a great wine, I think, in five or six years. The 1999 was...odd. There were definite "eggy" flavors that interfered with my enjoyment of it. I don't know if there was a problem with the bottle -- maybe some hydrogen sulfide? -- or whether this odor will go away as the wine gets older, but either way, this was my least favorite of the bunch.
You can read an interesting article on the producer here.
Kermit Lynch, the importer of Vieux Telegraphe, is an importer of some reknown; see here and here for instance. He's written several interesting books, including Adventures on the Wine Route: A Wine Buyers's Tour of France. He has a shop in Berkeley that I have yet to visit. I've made a mental note to go check it out.
Beef Bourguignon
To accompany these great wines, Eman prepared a huge pot of Beef Bourguignon, using a recipe of his own which featured bone marrow, homemeade beef stock, and a good bit of Cognac. It was fantastic. I now understand that anything that I've every had as "Beef Stew" is but a distant parody of a good Beef Bourguignon. I think I need to experiment with this.
October 28, 2002 in old_site | Permalink
