That’s crazy! Like I said I haven’t been in a while. Scott stopped cooking on Mondays and Brett left so the couple times after that were just not as good. Nothing like you apparently went through.
I always got better than I gave so it didn’t bother me.
A bunch of us are going Monday.
Now that I’m home, I’ve had a chance to retaste the Combe Aux Moines and the Esmonin CSJ.
The Combe Aux Moines is significantly improved. The reduction has mostly faded away. Primarily red-fruited, some spice and floral notes, lots of acid, medium bodied, smooth and silky until fine but drying tannins show up. It’s not fantastic, but I like this.
I wish I could say the same for the Esmonin CSJ, The grainy oak tannin is maybe less noticeable, but there is a LOT of vanilla on the nose here, along with a lot of very sweet blue/purple fruit and some spice. The palate is rich but still showing a weird bitter vegetal quality on the back end from the stems. Blind I would probably guess this is CA syrah that saw some whole cluster. I still don’t like this very much. At least at home I have a dump bucket.
We drank an 02 Esmonin CSJ a fee weeks back it sounds similar to your 2009. Cologne-like oak and dark fruit with jammy edges. Conversely, at the same dinner, we drank the 95 Dauvissat LC and it showed terrific, our bottle was singing. Thanks for the notes above.
If there was fizz, that sounds like a secondary fermentation – entirely consistent with low sulfur but also evidence of oxygen. Since reduction is a function of lack of oxygen, I’m not sure fizz and reduction are consistent, but someone with more knowledge of wine chemistry can opine on that.
In any event, I would wonder if the off-putting aroma was more a function of fermentation in the bottle than of conventional reduction.
Does this restaurant treat its customers like crap every night of the week, or just on “no corkage fee” Mondays?
Bruce
I think the fizz is a result of Fourrier’s practice of bottling the wine with significant dissolved CO2 as a substitute preservative for sulfur. I’m drinking the last of the bottle now and both the fizz and reduction have largely disappeared.
Corey – Of course, I forgot about that.
The one time I went there – with David – a year ago, it was fine.
Indeed, I was quite grateful to the sommelier for granting my request for a taste of someone else’s 1979 Eitelsbacher Karthäuserhof Kronenberg Auslese #13, since I have a bottle and wondered how it was coming along. (The answer: Beautifully!)
No complaints at all! ![[cheers.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/0/0ff9bfcdb0964982cd3240b6159868fbdf215b1a.gif "cheers"){kind=small}
I wonder how the “someone else” felt about that, lol
Maybe that was Keith’s bottle!
Please refer to Keith’s post above.
I know Keith and if I’d seen that it was his bottle, I would have insisted on more than the nip I was given.
David pointed this out to me, and I think it’s worth nothing in this thread that re: the Esmonin, it’s interesting not just how high the critical scores are, but how bizarrely off-base Meadows’ tasting note is (linked earlier in the thread). The wine he described and the wine we had have almost nothing in common with each other.
You mentioned “bottles were opened away from the table”, perhaps they switched the wine on you? However, I’ve also had some 2009s at local tastings that were opened in front of me that showed atrociously and could not have been more different than the Meadows notes (i.e. Pavelot SLBs, dreadful stuff), so who knows?
They took the bottles away, opened them, and brought them back – the wines weren’t decanted. So unless they poured the wine out and poured different wine into our bottles, which seems unlikely, there was no switcheroo. And the wine we drank matches pretty well to some of the other critic’s notes (like Tanzer’s), so I’m pretty sure we had the right wine. I thnk it’s more likely Meadows’ wine got switched than ours did.
Hey, just a minute chaps. I’m no particular fan of Meadows, not because he doesn’t do what he does well but because what he does is not IMHO very useful-but it would be ridiculous to expect a recently bottled and shipped red Burgundy to taste as it did from the barrel.
What Tom said. If Meadows’ note is on a barrel sample and not a finished wine, you’d expect a vast difference–this is true with all wines but especially true with wines living in toasty new oak like Sylvie Esmonin’s which won’t stop doing its work on the wine just because a critic tasted a sample and scored it.
Then why do Meadows’ eventual bottle scores fall into his barrel-tasting range 99.99% of the time? I must be missing something here.