Champagne Pierre Jamain, 2004

At lunch a few weeks ago, ACC turned up with this vintage champagne from Pierre Jamain which went down a treat. It was relatively light and elegant and made from 100% chardonnay i.e. blanc de blancs which is a style I like. I understand from ACC that it's keenly priced. A bonus: it comes with a hideous picture of a woman in a bonnet on the metal cap thing. I would have taken a close-up photo but I was worried it would break my camera.

I really must drink more champagne - don't want to end up like John Maynard Keynes regetting his failure to do so on his deathbed. It was interesting to read Jancis's column in last week's FT where she talked about recent developments in English sparkling wines and how they compare to Champagne. I've had the odd bottle of Nyetimber and Ridgeview, and the latter in particular has impressed me, but I always feel slightly resentful that they are so expensive, so it was good to see Jancis telling it how it is: "All in all, I think the best English sparkling wines, the ones listed on the previous page, acquitted themselves well, but the lesser ones did nothing at all for our national pride, especially considering their price."

Beaune 1er cru Clos du Roi, Domaine Martin, 2007

I first tasted this wine at the domaine a couple of years ago - can't remember if it was still in barrel or if it had recently been bottled, but either way I didn't like it and it took some persuasion to get me to try it again. It's come on a long way since then.

The Martins are based in Chorey and are an engagingly small operation - I've blogged about their bourgognes before and am also a huge fan of their Chorey and their Savigny. The Clos du Roi vineyard is at the northern end of Beaune bordering Savigny.

We decanted it for about half an hour. On the nose it had the lovely classic Beaune perfume, and on the palate I found it soft, light and well-balanced with a certain sweetness. It had a great finish and we felt it was drinking well now but would last another 5 years - I've bought a couple more to stash away for a while. We gave it a 9.

G. Miclo Eau de Vie de Framboise Sauvage, Grande Reserve

Apologies for the lack of posts lately - I've been somewhat in the doldrums, but it feels like spring today, time to turn over a new leaf and get back to the blog!

G picked up this Framboise Sauvage from Gilbert Miclo recently and it's quite remarkable. It's 43% alcohol and the bottle is only 50cl but looks bigger, due to the lovely tall shape of it which gives the game away that the distillery is based in Alsace. Having looked at that website, I'd like to visit, not least to get some Gentiane (what am I saying, I don't even like Gentiane)!

It's clear in colour and has a wonderfully fragrant nose of raspberries before packing a fiery punch as it goes down. Oomph. Apparently it should be served chilled but not with ice. We haven't been chilling it but perhaps we should try that.

NB the Tradition range is aged for 2 years, but the Grande Reserve range is aged for 4 years, so it's a bit better and costs a little bit more.

This eau de vie (such a lovely name for a drink) is available from Berry Bros for £23.50 for 50cl. The Kirsch Grande Reserve is also available from BBR but it's £35 which suggests that the Framboise Sauvage is actually rather good value. You might think it looks like a pricing error; I couldn't possibly comment...

Michel Cluizel chocolate

My one-woman online campaign to get "US man survives chocolate ordeal" to the top of the BBC website's most-read list, out of appreciation for the sinister last sentence of the article, has sadly failed to yield tangible results. So as a sort of New Year's resolution I made a vow to eat less chocolate this year, but better.

Waitrose cruelly took their limited range of Michel Cluizel off the shelves a few months ago, so some googling was in order which led to the discovery of the Chocolate Trading Co and since then all hell has broken loose. As any small child could have told me, access to good chocolate means more gets eaten, not less, and before one knows it, one has a fifty quid a month chocolate habit. I like to think I'm doing my bit for the French economy.

My current favourite is Noir aux Ecorces d'Orange, which has little pieces of orange peel incorporated into the chocolate.

Also extremely fine, and slightly crunchy, is the Noir aux Grue de Cacao (cocoa nibs). There are multi-packs to feast the senses and the packaging is smart and colour-coded to enable you to tell your Los Ancones from your Maralumi single estate. The possibility of wheeling out a box of tasting discs at a future dinner is very tempting, and they also sell chocolate mushrooms. I haven't tried those yet, but it's only a matter of time. How cute are these?

Recent drinking round-up!

The other day I indulged in a bottle of this Hidalgo Manzanilla Pasada Pastrana, which I got from Waitrose for the princely sum of what I remember being £11.99 although according to their website it's a mere £11.39. Said website (here) also describes this as "a light and fresh Manzanilla" which is absolute garbage. Were they talking about a different wine?

This wine is aged in oak casks for 12 years which is what makes it a pasada, as opposed to the normal "light and fresh" style of manzanilla which should be drunk young. It costs significantly more than your bog standard Manzanilla, but it's worth it. Powerful and pungent, a glass of this straight from the fridge after a hard day at work really hits the spot. The Wine Society have it for £9.95 - fair play to the WS, their sherry is excellent value. Majestic have also been known to stock it in the past.

Rully 1er cru Les Cloux 2007, Paul Jacqueson. I've blogged about Jacqueson before, who is one of the best winemakers in the Cote Chalonnaise. Previously we had a white Rully from him and gave it a high 8. This was a red, with a lovely light pinot colour, and blackberry and black cherry on the nose. On the palate, it was silky and succulent and had bags of flavour congruent with the nose. Once again we toyed with giving it a 9 but in the end decided it was a high 8. Good value though, because it was either 17 or 19 euros (I suspect the latter) from the shop in Meursault.

A couple of weeks ago we had this Marsannay 2005, Montagne, from Huguenot. I didn't make notes but it was very enjoyable and drinking well now. There are no premier cru vineyards in Marsannay but this was a reminder to self that this village, which is right up the top of the Cote de Nuits near Dijon, produces some very pleasing and relatively good value wines.

Last night I stuck a bottle of our old friend, the Dufouleur Cremant de Bourgogne, in the fridge as an aperitif. We're now on the 2007 vintage and it remains very consistent with a florality and hints of elderflower. Dangerously drinkable.

Last week I treated myself to a bottle of Latour-Labille Bourgogne Rouge from 2005. This wine tends to be very light and in some years I find it's not my cup of tea, but 2005 was a big vintage and one that suits the style very well.

And finally, the jewel in the crown, a red Meursault 1er cru Les Cras 2007 from Latour-Labille. I got to taste the 2008 when I visited the domaine in January, and it was the highlight of the tasting. This was the first bottle from G's case of the 2007 which we have tried and although expectations were high, we weren't disappointed.

We gave it two hours in the decanter and when we poured it into our glasses, it had an amazing dark purple colour, I was surprised by how dark the colour was. On the nose it had wonderful dark fruit and a lovely perfume. G detected parma violets. I'm not altogether sure what parma violets smell like but I think I got the general gist. On the palate, it had a lovely mouthfeel, rich fruit, balance and poise. The finish went on for several minutes. We sat there using words like "remarkable" and "sublime" and there was no doubt that it was a 10. Hurrah!

Although it's drinking now, there's no rush as it has years in it and I hurriedly attempted to stomp on G's suggestion that he share some with a certain bunch of elderly claret-drinkers, by reminding him of my trump card, the Corton from Anne Parent...

In other news, the Wine Society produced their 2009 burgundy offer. "Three for the price of six" was how G described it, spot on. The Domaine Leflaive Bourgogne Blanc is £60 for three bottles, en primeur. Sod that for a game of soldiers.

Also, I have been giving some thought to this blog and have decided that I may broaden it out to include food and drink more generally. But I promise to save the cute kitten pictures for Facebook. Stay tuned!

Premier cru project update

I thought it would be interesting (for me, at any rate) to look back over the premier crus drunk so far and see if any patterns emerge.

To begin with, I thought I'd do a simple analysis of the range of scores and average score for the wines we have tasted from each village. I am excluding faulty bottles, but am including duplicates which received separate scores e.g. if we had wine from the same vineyard twice, but from a different vintage or producer as these are useful data. I have excluded Chablis and Montagny because Chablis is really a different project, and Montagny is cheating. The total number of premier cru vineyards in the village is in brackets after its name.

In alphabetical order:

• Aloxe-Corton (14): still to get off the mark
• Auxey-Duresses (9): tasted 2 and both were a 7 so you do the math
• Beaune (41): tasted 17 ranging from 6-10, average 8.8
• Blagny (7): tasted 3 ranging from 7-8, average 7.7
• Chambolle-Musigny (24): tasted 4 ranging from 8-10, average 9.0
• Chassagne-Montrachet (55): tasted 12 ranging from 8-10, average 9.3
• Fixin the drains (5): tasted 3 ranging from 6-8, average 7.3
• Gevrey-Chambertin (26): tasted 8 ranging from 8-10, average 8.8
• Givry (16): still to get off the mark
• Ladoix-Serrigny (12): tasted 5 ranging from 7-9, average 7.6
• Maranges, good with blancmange (7): tasted 2, which got a 7 and a 9, so average is 8.0
• Mercurey (32): tasted 3 ranging from 7-8, average 7.7
• Meursault (25): tasted 6 ranging from 7-10, average 8.5
• Monthelie (12): still to get off the mark
• Morey-St-Denis (20): tasted 6, ranging from 8-9 average 8.5
• Nuits-St-Georges (41): tasted 18 ranging from 6-10, average 8.3
• Pernand-Vergelesses (8): tasted 4 ranging from 6-8, average 7.3
• Pommard (28): tasted 4 ranging from 8-9, average 8.3
• Puligny-Montrachet (24): tasted 7 ranging from 8-10, average 9.1
• Rully (23): tasted 2 ranging from 7-8, average 7.5
• St-Aubin (17): tasted 7 ranging from 7-9, average 7.7
• Santenay (12): tasted 6 ranging from 7-8, average 7.8
• Savigny-les-Beaune (22): tasted 9 ranging from 7-10, average 8.0
• Volnay (36): tasted 12 ranging from 7-10, average 8.4
• Vosne-Romanee (14): tasted 5 ranging from 8-10, average 9.0
• Vougeot (4): tasted 3 ranging from 9-10, average 9.7

Some points to note:

We haven't tried wines from Aloxe, Givry or Monthelie yet, so these must be high priority for searching in future. I have actually been looking out for premier cru Aloxe when in Beaune but I haven't seen it anywhere.

I thought it was quite interesting to include the range of scores, as well as the average. Some villages begin at 8 and scale the giddy heights up to 10 while others begin at a disappointing workaday 7 and go up to a mere pleasing 8. As we get more data these scores will become more reliable, and I will be able to split them into reds and whites within a village, although this will probably only be interesting for Chassagne.

Speaking of which, I still can't quite believe how many premier cru vinyards there are in Chassagne. There was one night we were looking at the yellow book with the maps in it, and suddenly realised there were a whole load on the map that weren't mentioned in the text, which I had used to make my list. I also can't believe how many there are in Mercurey, Givry and Rully, and how little I know about them (I suspect there may be a good reason why...)

At some point, when I have figured out how to paste Excel into Blogger, I want to do an exercise to compare quality with price. The Vougeots, for example, were in the region of £45, whereas many Beaunes are around £30, and much Côte Chalonnaise stuff is below £20. I would be interested to know where can the best value be obtained. But first I need to brush up on my statistics, which are somewhat rusty these days.

Chassagne-Montrachet 1er cru Les Blanchots Dessus, 2001, Darviot-Perrin

On Friday night we cracked this open and I was delighted to find it was ok, after a duffer a few weeks ago. It was the most amazing beautiful gold colour, with a luscious texture and good weight - it was 13.5% alcohol and had lovely legs, ahem.

We decanted it just before serving and it was quite cold but it had that classic, buttery, rich, posh white burg nose. On the palate, it followed through and was delicious, classy booze. G had a cold but even so detected that it had a herbacious quality. I hate to use the word eucalyptus because I don't like eucalyptus, but it had a pure, tube-cleaning quality which was not unattractive. To sum up: just what you want in a white burgundy.

The only other wine I've had from Darviot-Perrin was a red Volnay La Gigotte 1999 (some mystery over the monopole status of that vineyard, yet to be clarified) which we gave an 8 back in November. It was good but not stunning - this was better.

We looked up the vineyard in Coates. I was delighted to discover that it's right next to Le Montrachet. Says it all really. I was very lucky to get this at auction for a fraction of its real value. I don't know much about the 2001 vintage for whites but this was fully mature yet not in any sense over the hill - drinking perfectly now. A solid 9. The good news: I have another bottle!

In other news, on Wednesday I finally got to go to Les Deux Salons, a relatively new Parisian-style brasserie near Charing Cross. The ambience was great, the tables not too close together, the waiters efficient and friendly and the interior beautiful with wonderful fittings and a lovely tiled floor. I would give the food 7 or 8 out of 10 - my friend had the burger which was a little too rare for her tastes, while I had the belly of pork petit salé aux lentilles, which tasted good but required a certain amount of deconstruction on my part. Instead of pudding we had a glass each of ice cider from Quebec, which was interesting and we had no regrets, but at £14 a glass (ouch) not something we'd rush to have again. I will definitely be back to investigate the menu further!