Welcome to the BKWine Brief nr 54, January 2008

The long sleepy days of Christmas and New Year are over for this time and hopefully you have enjoyed one or two nice bottles. At home in Paris we celebrated new Year in style with a 1969 Chapelle Chambertin Grand Cru from Jean Trapet. The wine was magnificent (as was the view over the Eiffel Tower) – one of those you will remember and treasure for a long time. Maybe some of you will have a white month in January. I have heard that some do. And I don’t mean drinking only white wines. But that might just be a very good idea.

White wines go excellently with many food and at least gives you the impression of being lighter… Why not with some shell fish, which we have plenty of at the market now in winter time. And they’re a perfect match for many cheeses. And bring out the more powerful oaked whites to the meat, or the ones with higher acidity (Alsace, Loire,…) to the Asian inspired cuisine – that we should eat more often. I just read how healthy it is with ginger and other exotic spices.

In a single week I’ve had the bad fortune to have three corked wines which is a lot even for me because even though I drink (sorry, taste) quite a few wines it is rarely that the wines are corked. And it is always such a disappointment when a wine is corked!

But all the same I am quite a fan of natural cork and have fully bought in to the story that it is an environmentally friendly alternative – saving the cork oak forests in Portugal, and using a recyclable (or should I say reusable) material. It’s difficult to say how many wines actually are corked. Some say it’s less than 2%, others say it is as much as 10-15% (but then I suspect they have been paid by the plastic stopper manufacturers). And the fact is that cork is popular with consumers in most countries. Apparently they don’t want to trivialize the wine experience with a screw cap but want it to be a bit of a special experience to open a bottle of wine – with a plop… but I do admit that it can be very convenient with screw cap. Sometimes. Oh well, luckily there is no law against wavering.

We're soon off for our first tour of the year: Truffles, Foie Gras and Wine in Périgord. That will be exciting. Not that it will help recovering from Christmas and New Year excesses. If you'd be interested in that tour I', afraid I have to say that it is rather fully booked at the moment but judging from it's success it is likely to be back on the program for next years truffle season, so look out for it next February.

Early summer we're doing another tour that I hope you'll find tempting too: "Three Classics" starting with Champagne and then taking you to Chablis and finishing in Beaune, the heart of Burgundy and one of the centres of French gastronomy (well, there are several) and home to some of the grandest Grand Crus in France... Time to book your place now perhaps?

I wish you all a nice January, with or without wine, red or white, natural cork, plastic cork, or screw cap…

Britt

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