When Wine and Food Are Vintage, the Prose Flows

Wine used to be a passion of mine. I tasted a lot, I read even more. But temperance eventually held sway, and the rule these days is, a beer after skiing, wine on only the most special occasions. Does nirvana count as a special occasion?

My wife and I first spotted announcement of a winemaker dinner featuring Chateau d’Yquem, considered by many to be the greatest white wine in the world, in a handout newsletter from Costa Mesa’s Hi-Time Cellars.

The dinner would take place at Antoine in Newport Beach. The menu listed five courses, starting with foie gras, to be prepared by Jean-Pierre Lemanissier, whom local restaurant writers had recently named chef of the year--and at least five extraordinary vintages of the only Sauternes the French officially designate “first great growth.”

My wife ogled the food courses, I the wines; four eyebrows went up and stayed there. Then the orbs below alighted on the $275-per-plate price tag.

Right around that time Barbra Streisand--who’s merely like buttah, mind you, not foie gras-- had no problem charging $350, with no food of any kind. Keeping that in mind, spending less than that on what could be the meal of a lifetime seemed almost feasible.

At least 30 people decided it was worth it.

Even the most jaded wine critics find it hard not to lapse into the purplest prose when writing about Yquem. Observations run from effusive to embarrassingly effusive.

In a recent column, The Times’ Dan Berger quoted the “rarely so enthusiastic” Oz Clarke’s assessment in his “Encyclopedia of Wine”: “Your mouth feels coated with succulence for an eternity after swallowing the wine . . . no wine in the world can touch Chateau d’Yquem.”

Gerald Asher, in his book, “On Wine,” recounts a passage he happened upon in a used-book store, in which a wine writer from an earlier generation tells of serving a red wine connoisseur his first taste of Yquem: “He passed into rapture.”

A pre-dinner champagne reception featured 1976 Salon le Mesnil and 1985 Perrier-Jouet Fleur de Champagne (the flower bottle competitor of Dom Perignon). Several guests retained a glass of the far superior Salon at dinner--as a palate cleanser.

The menu: Foie gras sauteed with sweet corn and Sauternes sauce with the 1975 Yquem. Steamed scallops with a seaweed salad and saffron broth with the 1976. The 1986, sauteed cod with a lobster sauce gratin. The 1988, roasted squab with cabbage and truffle sauce. The 1966 side-by-side with the as-yet-unreleased 1989, orange mousse Charlotte with chocolate crisps.

I went in with as critical a palate as I could possibly muster and upon sampling the first wine of the evening. . . .

I passed into rapture.

Perfumed and intense, pineapples, peaches and hazelnuts, amazingly viscous, young and fresh. . . . “Like a pretty lady walked by,” said Hi-Times Cellar owner Chuck Hansen about the aromas.

The most obvious difference between Sauternes (such as Yquem) and most white wines is that they’re sweet. Not sort of sweet, like “dry” champagne. Sweet as in ambrosial, as in nectar of the gods--gloriously, mind-bogglingly sweet, all thanks to a fungus called botrytis, or “noble rot.” But the differences don’t stop there.

The vast majority of winemakers use machines to pick their grapes; Chateau d’Yquem has them picked by hand, a single grape at a time. Other vineyards measure yield in bottles or cases; it’s been said that each vine at Yquem yields a single glass of wine. Most good white wines can improve for a few years in the bottle; Yquem can keep for a century or more.

Thomas Jefferson bought this wine. He stopped in at the Chateau in 1787 to purchase it personally from the Comte de Lur-Saluces. The count’s great-great-great-grand nephew, the Comte Alexandre de Lur-Saluces, flew in from Bordeaux to attend the dinner.

Back to the first course: Foie gras and Sauternes is a classic wine-food pairing. Lemanissier’s duck liver preparation--the wine he used for cooking was Chateau Suduiraut, among the finest Sauternes next to Yquem--would surely have eclipsed any lesser wine.

Uh, way bettah than buttah.

I was unworthy. A Talking Heads song kept going through my head: “How did I get here?” But as the 1976 Yquem was put before me, I thought, Y ask Y? The wine was massive, tropical, redolent of honeydew melons and orange blossoms, and on another plane.

Satori.

As for the second course, the menu hadn’t even bothered to mention the caviar that adorned the scallops, or the heavenly fried leeks with white asparagus on the side. But it was the 1986 Yquem that undid me. Add vanilla and spice to pineapple and apricots, a myriad of subtle nuances all in action-packed concentrations, and a lingering finish that could be measured in minutes. . . .

Nirvana.

The 1988 introduced citrus notes alongside the apricot. . . .

Tastebud orgasm.

The 1989 was the baby of the lot and had not yet begun to blossom.

By comparison, the 1966 at first seemed like an aging dowager enjoying tea and crumpets, but with the second sip, she’d only recently gone through the change and was still pretty active at the tennis club. On the third sip, she was coolly toodling about town in her convertible Jaguar with her young lover, the tennis pro. . . .

Those unconvinced that they’d get their money’s worth at a dinner like this should keep in mind that the younger wines that were served retail for $200 per bottle--at least $250 in restaurants--while the older vintages we tasted can easily double that.

Most winemaker dinners, however, cost a fraction of the Yquem dinner. To get a realistic handle on such events, I also attended a dinner featuring Beringer Winery at Raffaello Ristorante in Orange; that meal cost $39.

At both ends of the spectrum, winemaker dinners are apparently a win-win-win situation.

For the restaurateur, a room that might normally be vacant on, say, a Monday evening, isn’t.

For the winery, said Beringer representative Mark Pighini, the dinners “show the wine in the light you’d like it to be shown--with food, lots of fun, in a casual but classy atmosphere, as opposed to having it stacked three to five cases high at the end of a supermarket row.”

As for the public, noted Raffaello owner-chef Mario Petillo: “People love the value of these dinners. If you go out and order a dinner like this and pay a la carte, and they open five bottles of wine for you. . . . “ A table mate cited several reasons she attends winemaker dinners. “It’s a great value,” she said, “but mostly it’s meeting the different people. Everybody starts out a perfect stranger, but by the end of the night. . . .”

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Most winemaker dinners at Antoine run less than $100, but Saturday, the restaurant again offers a stellar meal with a $275 price tag: Three vintages each of Chateau Petrus--the pride of France’s Pomerol region, consistently rated among the best Bordeaux--and its sister California estate, Dominus, will be featured.

The cost is a more modest $50 when Eberle Winery and winemaker Gary Eberle are featured at a four-course meal at Sfuzzi Bistro in Costa Mesa on Wednesday. Formerly with Estrella River Winery, Eberle has been producing Chardonnay and superb Cabernet Sauvignon on his own in Paso Robles for more than a decade.