Wine at Five

The Billecart Story

I realized as I was writing last week’s editorial that giving over a whole section to the wines of Williams Selyem was probably a lost cause – at least for last week. I received over 300 ‘Out of Office’ replies which meant that there were probably over 1000 who had ‘gone missing’. I think that whole ‘Out of Office’ response needs a makeover – personally I liked the automated response that I got….”I’ll be drinking between August 14 – August 21 and will probably be too drunk to respond to your e-mail. However upon my return I shall resume my vaulted position of Chairman. Thank you for your kind understanding.”

I fear that there is a similar exodus this week, at least around Rye, so I shall hold off on the Selyem until next week whereupon I shall write up the tasting notes to accompany the wine. I have it on good authority that the wines are still available but not for much longer. Talking availability, I am very excited about a champagne that we will be receiving in October. For years I have tried to convince the importer to sell me some of it and for years I have received zilch. But the tide has turned and this particular champagne house obviously got fed up with the antics of its US distributor and has, after close to 30 years, moved allegiance to one of my very good friends, Tom Byrnes of T. Edward Wines. The champagne is [drum roll]….Billecart Salmon. It’s been for sale in various New York stores but we have never succeeded in getting any, until now. It will still be highly allocated and whilst I have sent in my wish list I cannot promise that I will receive more than a few cases. If you are interested please let me know so that we can add you to the Billecart list and when we know how much we are going to get we will contact you and see if you still want some. 

During this last week we had the opportunity to taste through a bunch of quite interesting, new, Californian wines. I have been looking to turn over the wines in the $15-$20 bracket but I have been so unimpressed with the offerings that I did nothing the last few months. It’s not that I don’t like Californian wines or that I’m a Francophile snob it’s just that their typicity is nonexistent. A Cabernet should taste of cabernet; it should have resonant structure, black fruit, tannin and a hint of cedar box and graphite – that’s not too pedantic! But so many of the cabernets we tried in this price range simply showed fruit (no idea what kind), alcohol (reminded me of the out of office reply), and lashings of oak nuggets, raw, medium rare and well done. Without sounding too blasé I do think that Bruno and I have some sort of refined taste buds (he definitely has more than I but we won’t go there in this public forum), and so we can usually differentiate between good and downright evil, and most of what we have been offered for tasting this summer has fallen into the latter category. Until now. Over the next few days we should be receiving a bevy of Cali wines priced between $13-$18 (the sweet spot), and covering most of the varietal range. If you are around this weekend and if the wines have arrived in time, pop in and taste some of them – ask for the Messenger, for the Crosby and for the Lockhart.

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This entry was posted by WinebyCai on Thursday, August 26th, 2010 at 11:34 am and is filed under Weekly Re'Wine'der Archive. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.