Here in the Pacific Northwest, summer has been limping along for a couple of weeks, trying not to give way to full-on autumn. One of the sensations that clearly marks fall for me is the smell of fresh chanterelles sauteing in butter. I picked up some chanterelles over the weekend, and cooked them up yesterday, my first of the season. Seemed a strange contrast with the weather finally returning to full on summer. We had friends over, and served the chanterelles in cream sauce with thyme over pasta. That’s one simple dish that never gets old.
The first wine was the 2009 Biggio-Hamina Deux Vert Pinot Noir. I first had this in the tasting room with Todd a couple of months ago. It impressed me then, and it still impresses me now. Not just me – one of our guests made big wide eyes when she first tasted it. The wine is just hitting maturity, and showed red fruit backed by oncoming forest floor and other secondary notes. Very nice depth to the wine. Enough acid to provide nice delineation, but not enough to offend the AFWE-averse. A great match for the mushrooms.
The second wine was the 2000 Roilette Cuvee Tardive. This wine has been a maturity for a few years now, but shows no sign whatsoever of an oncoming decline. This was the yin to the Deux Vert’s yang: here the secondary notes are in the foreground, and the fruit plays a supporting role. Fantastic aromatics. I’ve had this wine periodically since release, and I think there were only a few years when it was shut down.