Sauternes lovers,
This past Wednesday Feb 14, 2018, I made a long overdue return guest appearance to the Winetasters of Toronto, the premier wine tasting club of the city. They held a special Valentine’s Day event themed around the heralded 2001 Sauternes vintage. Doubling my pleasure was the fact that the guest host is an acquaintance whom I hold deep respect and affection for – Mr. Bill Redelmeir, the founder and owner of Southbrook winery in Niagara. Bill also happens to be a former director of Winetasters, which I was previously unaware of, and a Sauternes fanatic like ourselves.
Bill began by explaining to everyone that the best way to learn about wine is to taste multiple wines side by side. A mistake people often make is to taste or drink a single bottle without anything else to compare it to, which is why a group like Winetasters or even one’s own personal wine group of friends and family are a great opportunity for wine lovers. He then rightfully praised Winetasters as the best place in Toronto to be able to do so and asked everyone to spread the word around.
Bill talked about his love of Sauternes and mentioned his own personal deep collection but admitted he often failed to drink it as often as he should and would like to. Sauternes, he said, is a bit of an oddity in the wine world – people love to buy it, talk about it, analyze it and collect it… but rarely get around to drinking it. He actually polled the audience as to when they last had a bottle in the last year, the last six months, and this past December. On this last one, almost every hand went down including my own went down. The shame. ![[shock.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/0/0b1dcf699ec319f43254f92e3f145786dcd93904.gif "shock"){kind=small}
He then told us a great story to further drive home the point. A friend of his who ran a wine store had an 80 year old customer tell him that he had purchased 3 bottles of the legendary 1967 Yquem and had given 2 away as wedding presents and was just waiting for a special occasion to drink the last bottle. His friend leaned over to the man and said, “Tonight is a special occasion.”
Bill then told us about the importance of sharing wine with people. While people obviously buy wine because they like it, he told us, they also buy wine so that they can place a bottle on the table and then tell everyone their story of the wine: how and why they got it, what it means to them, and why they chose to share it on that particular occasion.
Bill then talked about Sauternes itself. Since 2000, every vintage has played out the pattern of the odd years being great and the even years years bad without fail. 2001 has been regarded as the best vintage since 1989. So what makes a good Sauternes? Botrytis, of course. Botrytis is bad in August but great in September and October. Interestingly, he informed us that the grey rot that vintners hate is in fact the same thing as noble rot. I had actually assumed myself they were different, but no. So what turns grey rot into noble rot? The fall season, he deadpanned.
Not all is milk and honey and roses and botrytis in the land of Sauternes, though, he warned us. The biggest enemy of the Sauternais is rain. Since botrytis breaks the skin of the grapes and allows them to dessicate, it also leaves them extremely vulnerable to the elements. Rain will literally turn sweet dessicated grapes into slime right on the vine. He told us we can expect to have 3 to 5 good Sauternes vintages in a decade.
Sauternes is the stupidest great deal in wine, according to Bill. This is because of the sheer amount of work that goes into making the wine compared to a regular table wine. Several more picking passes and juice pressings are required to produce this magical elixir than, say, a Napa cab or Niagara Chardonnay. In this respect, Sauternes is undervalued and underrated but works out greatly to our advantage as wine lovers.
And with that, we were off with the tasting.
