Sunday evening we invited our winemaking friends Laurent Barrera and Emmanuelle Dupéré and as usual we ended up with quite a lineup… you can see some pics on their own Nowatlover blog

Starting with Champagne “Les Rachais”, the new cuvée from my friend Francis Boulard of Champagne Raymond Boulard, one of those wines that act as terroir enhancers, you have never tasted anything like it, my impression is iodine, salt, seawater, oysters with lemon juice, some people have a hard time with it, I just love it, end so does everyone at the table, made from his biodynamic vineyard (undergoing conversion), I would love to actually try it with oysters…

Next, four bottles get served blind at the same time, we are told that one is a very expensive super-something wine worth over 60 Euro, and that they all have something in common.

N° 1 – pleasant fruity red with a nice grenache colour
N° 2 – this must be the big one, beautifully constructed deep rich persistent red with beautiful subtle oak, very round and excellent balance, hints of cocoa, definitely a southern wine, could be a Chateauneuf. I happen to know that Laurent and Emmanuelle just came back from Vinisud where they met Hervé Bizeul, so my suspicion is that this is the mythical Clos des Fées
N° 3 – this is another beautiful wine, very light on the oak, subtle, superb balance, a huge aromatic charge, it is completely different from the previous one yet provides almost equal pleasure, also southern, somewhere around the Rhone…
N° 4 – “quel animal!”, this wine appears to be an old style Bandol, with all the leather and horsy stuff except that it appears to be exhibiting these qualities prematurely, it is a young wine. More likely to be Brett on an excessively long leash…

So #1 is the Clos de la Procure base wine that Laurent and Emmanuelle make, a low priced quaffer for every day safe use 😉

#2 is indeed Clos des Fées, one of the two wonders of Roussillon, not quite the top cuvée (I believe “La Petite Siberie” now goes for over 200), but fantastic. The next day, it has taken on a definite chocolaty tone – should I accompany it with nearby Maury 😉

#3 is Dupéré Barrera‘s star “Nowat” wine, made entirely by hand – Nowat = no use of electricity 😉 This is incredible value at 22€, probably ine of the best wines in Provence. Of course I have tasted every Nowat wine since their inception a few years ago, this one is probably their best, with Grenache Syrah Carignan and … Cabernet Sauvignon. Why is it that Cab tastes so good when it comes from a sunny place like this? Why plant it in Bordeaux 😉

#4 is the wine from the monastery of the Lerins island just a few miles off the Cote d’Azur, where Laurent and Emmanuelle spent last weekend. The monks there practice the old “ora et labora”, although by their reckoning they do very little “labora”, not even working the vineyards themselves, even the vegetables come from a supermarket, and the food is apparently very disappointing, thick earthly stews. The subject of organic wine growing makes the monks chuckle (would God’s own vineyards be sprayed for pests?), this stuff is high tech picked by imported labour (they labora while the others ora). They ora so much they have no time to clean some of those bretty old barrels. Interesting but not great…

So what did they all have in common? The vintage, 2003 😉

As we sit down for dinner, I pull out a very special white, the Sassaia 2003 by Angiolino Maule of La Biancara, this man works wonders with the Garganega grape, his biodynamic whites are a welcome change from the drab world of italian whites (hey, I’m italian, I can say that if I want to!), he manages to get the kind of balance one would expect out of a great Loire wine, with flavours made interesting by a hint of oxydation, and of course a very minimalist use of SO2. Had his Recioto di Gambellara last week in Paris, this is one of Italy’s few interesting sweet white wines. The Sassaia (not Sassicaia, there must be a joke in there) goes very well indeed with Cathy’s famous chick-pea and porcini soup.

We opt for reds #2 and #4 to accompany a guinea hen prepared by Cathy with jerusalem artichokes and plenty of other winter vegetables, these are great wines to eat with, the Clos des Fées enveloping the food with its silky coat, the Nowat working in an equal but opposite way, bringing out the flavours of the meat and the vegetables. The guinea hen is our statement of solidarity with the poor fowl breeders who are hit by the avian flu catastrophe (30% drop in consumption in France, 70% drop in Italy!).

A pear and chestnut crumble with a dollop of creme fraiche completes the evening, with a mysterious bottle served blind, a botrytis that was initally identified as one of the Sapros group, most likely in the Sauternais area –> this is Virtu Noble Semillon, a botrytized semillon that Lord St Helier graceously left with us during his recent memorable Tour de France, and as always with special gifts I try to save them for evenings when we have good friends over who can really appreciate them. Well done, apricots, wax, citrus and all, superb acidity, never cloying, a very fine sticky mylawd…