TN: Summer Whites with Lunch

It being summer, the theme for our tasting lunch was white wines, so of course the weather saw fit to rain and we held it inside! Some very interesting wines, though.

1998 Tyrell’s Vat 1 Semillon – remarkable wine, still a light clear yellow colour, and with a citrus and wet concrete, well balanced and still seeming fresh. A bit of lanolin developed in the nose with time. Excellent showing and no one thought it was anywhere near that old.

2014 Tyrell’s HVD Vineyard Semillon – more lime than lemon in this nose and a similar balance and mouth feel. Lengthy clean finish. Excellent wines.

2021 Famille Peillot Roussette du Bugey Altesse de Montagnieu – similar clean fresh fruit nose – mostly pear and a hint of honeysuckle, and a fair bit of honey. It was clean on palate with good minerality, light on the palate. A pleasing wine.

2017 Vincent Paris Granit Blanc – my wine, as I am a fan of what this producer has been doing with syrah in Cornas. As whites are not classified in that area it is labeled as an Ardeche blanc. A lot more colour than the previous wines with an interesting nose of cheese, fresh pastry and some smoky apple. On palate it is well balanced and shows clean acidity and some spice. Interesting wine that I like much better now than I did when I bought it a few years ago – the aging was beneficial.

2020 Pášxa White Wine Rockgarden Vineyard – another Rhone blend, with 57% marsanne and 43% roussanne, similar colour to the Paris wine, and a nose of smoky oak and light dill plus with time some pear. Very interesting and tasty wine that drank more like a chardonnay than a Rhone blend. Excellent length.

2019 Domaine Michel Juillot Mercurey Blanc – more apple and pear notes in the nose plus some salt and smoke – quite good and with time got even better, seeming to put on weight. Performed above my expectation (this was also my wine).

1999 Ch. Musar Blanc – your only chance to sample the Obaideh (2/3) and Merwah (1/3) grapes! This was very hard to place and we thought it might be a white Rioja with some age. Some roasted nuts in the nose and well balanced with medium long finish.

Muscat de Rivesaltes de Lesquerde Cuvee Reservee – made in a small area on the Mediterranean near the Spanish border, this non-vintaged wine was dark amber and had a sweet muscat nose but wasn’t overly sweet on palate. Nice long smooth finish. It never seems to change in the bottle – the 15% alcohol no doubt preserves it! Worked well with cheese.

2002 Ch. d'Yquem – best for last – a light amber wine with a truly excellent botrytis nose with, interestingly, hints of tobacco and dried marmalade and some nutmeg and cinnamon. Impeccable balance with only light sweetness level. My best guess was Suduiraut, not expecting an Yquem to show up for lunch. Great end to a fun tasting.

Great notes, Bill, I don't have much to add. A very interesting tasting, with many somewhat unusual/non-typical wines.

Having two Hunter valley semillons was a pleasant surprise to start the tasting, as I am a fan of these wines. Th 1998 Vat 1 was my wine, and I too was amazed at how young this seemed - when do these wines develop secondary let alone tertiary flavours?

Jenise's Altesse was almost impossible to guess - once she mentioned it was near a mountain range, it clarified things. You don't see these often in our market. Refreshing yet serious. The Vincent Paris Granit Blanc was a little easier, as it tasted like a Rhone blend, but the 66% viognier didn't really show on the wine (in a good way). The Pášxa was a lovely wine, but I also thought it seemed more chardonnay-like than Rhoneish, with a fair bit of oak still. The Mercurey chardonnay was a good village level wine, with a medium bodied palate with nice elegance. The 1999 Musar Blanc brought us to another non-typical white. It was the last of the 9 bottles I bought of this wine - I wish I had bought way more! Every bottle has been different, but this bottle showed pretty well though didn't quite hit the heights of some other previous bottles. This is another wine that lasts a long, long time.

The Rivesaltes was a lovely dessert wine, and again was a wine you don't often see or taste much. I thought it would be hard to beat this wine when the final wine was poured, but that was quickly provided wrong. An obvious sauterne, with the tobacco and orange botrytis notes among a kaleidoscope of other mainly tropical flavours and considerable complexity, and like Bill, I was thinking Climens or Coutet, but then when I sipped this excellent wine again, I thought, maybe, just maybe, because of the complexity and balance, could it be the Y'quem? Many thanks to Jenise for bringing this wine, it really was an outstanding wine with incredible balance and power. I could still taste it about 15 minutes after I left the event. Going out with a bang indeed!

Great notes, especially on the Tyrrell’s. I’ve only had the Vat 1 once, in a restaurant (in BC, actually, IIRC), and adored it, and have looked for it since to no avail. But the whole lineup sounds delightful.

[Jenise]

Bill and John, you pretty much covered everything I had to say about the wines. The Tyrells were truly memorable. John's '98 was definitely my WOTN, and Dave's reminded me very much of an Italian Arneis--how do you hide Semillon like that? Truly WOW wines, both of them.

John, your Musar really threw me. I opened a '97 once at a lunch and it was very golden. Yours was a pale tea color, had no yellow to it. Instead pinkish--rose gold maybe, but not gold. I'm not sure I've had an aged white that color before.

And kudos to you for connecting the dots on my Y'Quem, that was exactly the way to go about it. I was amused by that tobacco note--we were all in agreement that it was not cigar tobacco, but cigarette tobacco from an unlit cigarette. That smell when you open the pack--I loved that most of us (who had ever smoked anyway) agreed on that, though Dave smelled Camels where I smelled Viceroys.