A delicious dinner with Kate and Jude

This is the time of the year when all manner of journalistic Panglossian pronouncements are made. The invariable consensus amongst the scribblers is that it has been a vintage year, things can only continue to get better and the glass is ¾ full – la di da. I have been reading top drinking recommendations throughout the press and to say that there is an absence of inspiration is an understatement. Not one journalist to my knowledge has recommended a single wine outside the commercial spectrum. It is as though everyone is so contractually obliged to be as fair as possible that they bend over backwards to reward the run-of-the-mill and the triumphantly neutral. Democracy of choice seems to mean appealing to a perception of what the masses want.

Yesterday we invited our friends Kate and Jude owners of the rather wonderful Green & Blue. Kate and Jude, as well as being very dear to us, are amongst the real good guys of the wine trade. When you are with them their infectious enthusiasm and passion reminds you why you love wine. It is about sharing the excitement of discovery of new flavours (those starry moments when conversation bubbles up and you want to describe where the aromas and flavours of the wines take you).We share the same proselytising zeal to educate and inform, and to expose others to the very wines that excite us so much. We are anti-establishment and have little patience with the mealy-mouthed platitudes that are written in so many columns and books and constitute adverts for the wine industry. The more we read of them the more we see that many of the so-called authoritative voices have become complacent over the years; they don’t want their palates challenged any more than their haughty opinions.

The real wine agenda is our collective mission creep. The popularity of Green and Blue and Terroirs testify that you don’t have to underestimate the taste of the public and now, more than ever, it is time to engage and confront those agnostics and naysayers who think that the only good wines are the ones they have read or heard about. There are more things in heaven and earth etc.

And so to dinner.

My wife and I had been cooking like dervishes with a healthy amount of effing, blinding and the odd burning. I love Indian (or rather) Asian-inspired food, but the talent required to combine the myriad spices in the correct and subtle proportion verges on the alchemical genius.

The meal was epic. I love a table that throbs with colour and groans with variety. My contribution to the feast was a scallop, salmon and mango curry made with a bewildering variety of spices (cumin, coriander, mustard seed, chilli, turmeric) that had a kick like a donkey wearing stilettos. To ameliorate the woof of said curry I made an assortment of raitas and chutneys. After I ravaged the kitchen my wife did battle with a recipe bluntly self-styled as “The Best Aubergines Ever”. And despite deploying the full chromatic scale of oaths and imprecations Emma managed to construct a final dish that tasted every bit as good as it read on the page. The aubergines were perfectly cooked with a touch of crispness and nice give, a chickpea and tomato sauce conferred another texture and a delicate spiciness, the layer of yogurt filled the mouth with creamy coolness and a little dollop of tamarind chutney on top lifted the ensemble with a vibrant sweet-sour tanginess. Accompanying this sublime dish were bowls of fragrant dhal, crisp deep-fried okra and dry-spiced courgettes.

Before tucking into this feast we drank an intense Le Panesa Fino from Emilio Hidalgo with some absolutely delicious lucques olives, anchovies and hard-boiled quails’ eggs. This is the lesser-known Hidalgo, but the wines deserve wider acclaim. Le Panesa is a special selection and has all the complexity and food-friendliness you might expect from a serious wine. Aromas and flavours of cut apple, and bread dough pick up a hint of iodine and almonds in this round sherry.

This incredibly youthful Riesling Grand Cru (2005 yet with a breezy floweriness) has a delicate lemon colour, a restrained nose of praline and vanilla with touches of citrus and minerality, then with aeration notes of yellow fruits billow forth– it is both ample and fresh in the mouth – with a flavour of pineapple and lemon zest – completed by its fresh length, with both salty and chalky nuances. We polished off the last glass and a bit at the end of the meal and the wine had acquired some secondary notes of earth, grilled mushrooms, pollen and pine resin.

Buttoned-down fault-finders and prosaic palates will take one look and slam down the taste shutters when they encounter the Dinavolo, a wine so extreme that it comes back at you and seems so utterly reasonable that you wonder why ever doubted its wonderfulness. To appreciate the wine, however, you must cast aside (childish) prejudice and enter a whole different idiom of wine making. Aged four months (you read that correctly) on the grape skins, the colour of the wine is hazy “amber-cider” or lava lamp, and the nose is powerfully exotic and evocative. Imagine perfect peaches left on a window sill in the late summer sun and smelling their skins as they warm up and reveal their fleshy, textural, plumptious treasures. Initial flavours suggest ripe apricots as well as cider apples and red pears; the wine is clean and vinous with a good yeasty bite, warm fruitskins, beeswax, dry cinnamon, oatmeal and apple acidity to complete the wine. Amazingly youthful and not just alive, but actually living. Dinavolo reminds me of so many things – real bread baking the oven, a ripe wash-rind cheese oozing flavour, cloudy apple juice with all the good bits floating in.  As we were drinking this I was thinking that we were fortunate that our mentalities and palates hadn’t become pasteurised by over-exposure to correctly manufactured wines. Or perhaps we just got bored with meretricious crap.

Those whose profession is boxing off wines would also presumably do a double-take when confronted with a twinkling, pink-tinged Poulsard (otherwise known as Ploussard). I have heard supposedly reputable experts on wine airily declare that the glory of the Jura is white wine and that the reds are as insignificant as they are insubstantial. This shows not only a lack of taste but a serious cultural misapprehension. The whites (or rather yellow wines) are the art of the possible and an improbable triumph. They are wines without compare. The reds, however, capture the spirit of the region in a profound way. They are lithe, lean, earthy, crunchy, mineral, rasping, occasionally angular, but my, how pure – and what delicious food wines! From ethereal Poulsards through aromatic, medium-bodied Pinots to rustic, musky Trousseaus we’ve drunk Jurassic reds that seem to be the very distillation of rocks and fruit. And some of the wines age with amazing grace.

Jean-Francois Ganevat’s L’Enfant Terrible from 50 year old Poulsard vines conveys skittish aromas of morello cherry, redcurrants, wild strawberry and quince. I have described it in other pages as rose-hued, slithering hither and thither across the palate with the slicing angularity of a razor blade dipped in pomegranate juice or cracking whip flavoured with raspberry liquorice.

The current killer bee in my bonnet, as some of you dear imaginary readers know, is that people will taste inarticulately (as it were) and then make a sweeping assertions about a wine or wines in general. Some of the most thrilling wines in our portfolio have been dismissed as “cranky” or “expensive for the price” by people who never made a beautiful thing in their lives. Those same people are enthralled by ostentatious labels, the Guccis and Pradas of the wine world. The Goutte d’O, a wine with O reputation, shares many of the characteristics of the other wines mentioned in this article. The adept taster will discern an intellectual and emotional dedication to purity and a refusal to clothe the wine in flattering garments. The wine is what it is, unmitigated and unmediated. This truthfulness is a genius that is not sufficiently recognised by tasters who want to assess wines for what they are not.

Firstly, it conveys balance and tension; it would so easy for such a wine to be alcoholic and overblown or just ridiculously concentrated.  However, the long slow fermentation and soft pressing gives an expressive supple mouthfeel. Secondly, the minerality is very fine; it is not obvious, but contained within the fruit expression of the wine. It is a food wine, that acidity overlaid by dry chalkiness would be a good match for local goats’ cheeses or Comté or meaty river fish such as pike or eel.  A beautiful Chenin rippling with tension, possessing an exceptional, precise minerality, unveils subtle aromas of poire william and shaved quince, dried fruits and herbs. Goutte d’O is an oblique reference to purity of the endeavour.  Or maybe this Jacques Brel song:

Des éclats des vieilles tempêtes
Plus rien ne ressemblait à rien
Tu avais perdu le goût de l’eau
Et moi celui de la conquête.

As always my palate eschews bombast seeking the kind of wine that insinuates itself totally into my affections so that I can sample over and again. And drink the bottle. In fact I love it so much that I am actually reluctant to retaste it in case the reality can’t live up to the weight of expectation. Yes, that’s it; I don’t just admire these wines or desire to be impressed by them, I love them for what they are…