Two wines we’ve enjoyed this weekend along with Terry’s excellent cooking.
The 2021 Abymes (Terroirs de Jean Perrier, AOP Savoie) complemented Friday’s dry-fried Red Mullet; the wine from Jacquère grapes needed to unchill for best flavour but rewarded with a subtle nose of grapefruit, a taste of melon and pink grapefruit along with mountain herbs, with an after-taste reminding of a swig of Chambéry Vermouth. Maybe more refined than a typical Aprément but that’s from memory not a direct comparison.
The Saint-Estèphe 2005 isn’t the first bottle of this half-case we’ve enjoyed from Château Beau-Site, a Cru bourgeois supérieur in 2005. Terry’s wild boar daube for Saturday included thyme, myrtilles (that I brought back from Corsica) and just a sliver of orange; the daube chimed pleasantly with the flavours of dark red fruits of the wine. We disagreed, I thought redcurrants and he tasted dark cherries, especially the after-taste. The wine from these bottles is developing fairly rapidly so we need to keep drinking the remainder of the half-case before this vintage is lost over the hill.