Does great wine need to be aged?

It’s been an article of faith as long as I’ve been writing about wine that you need to age the best wines in your cellar. We sniff at consumers who buy and crack open a first growth as unsophisticated but maybe they’re the ones who know best?

The event that prompted this thought was a Chateau d’Yquem lunch at Dinner by Heston Blumenthal this week where we were served the 2011 vintages of their dry white ‘Y’ and Yquem itself. One follower on Twitter dismissed it as ‘embryonic’ but I was bowled over. The 2011 'Y' had a luxuriant taste of white peaches, far more seductive than the tricky, slightly oily 1996 we were served with the main course. And as for the 2011 Yquem (right) - it was like drinking a plate of the most perfectly ripe apricots and tropical fruit. Sheer nectar.

The sip of 2011 Le Pin I tasted from the barrel last November was equally delicious - soft, velvety and caressing. Who is to say that’s ‘too young’? Many of its purchasers will drink it the moment it comes onto the market.

Increasingly I enjoy the bright fruit flavours of exuberant young Rioja rather than the wood-dominated character of many gran reservas, and the ‘live’ character of many young organic and biodynamic reds. Age may bring complexity but not necessarily charm.

And there’s something so pure and pristine about a new release of Loire Sauvignon, Chablis or Grüner Veltliner that inevitably gets lost a couple of years down the line.

True it doesn’t always work. The leanness of a young red burgundy can take years to turn into silky sweetness, tannic young Bordeaux can be very unforgiving, and young riesling challengingly sharp and one-dimensional. But there’s a middle way between age and extreme youth. The off-dry Grosset riesling I flagged up the other day as the perfect match for Sichuan food was fantastic 3 years on.

The truth is that a lot of consumers don’t necessarily want complex flavours, a fact that ‘new world’ producers - redundant description but you know what I mean - have been quicker to latch on to than many of those from the classic wine producing regions. Fellow wine lovers will be familiar with the anxiety about bringing out a treasured old bottle for friends who are not as obsessed about wine as they are in case they find the flavours weird rather than wonderful.

The truth is there’s no right or wrong about it. You should drink your wine when you like depending on your palate, the food, the occasion and your bank balance - the ideal solution being to have a case of the same wine to dip into and enjoy at various moments over the years. Unfortunately in my case - and that of most of you, I suspect - that’s not going to be Yquem . . .

What do you think - should great wines be drunk young or should you hang on to them?

Matching sweet wine and Sichuanese food

Can Tokaji – the great dessert wine of Hungary, and one of the sweetest wines in the world – go with Chinese food, asks Margaret Rand? And if it can, would you want it to?

Christian Seely’s answer to both these questions is ‘yes’. He runs the wine division of AXA Millsimes, which owns such properties as Château Suduiraut in Sauternes and Disznk in Tokaj, and one of his big interests is pairing these wines with Asian cuisines.

He’s been hosting occasional dinners of this sort for several years – in London he’s done Suduiraut with Chinese food and Disznk with Indian – and the latest occasion was in Tokaj, where a brace of Chinese chefs, flown out for the occasion, cooked Sichuan dishes to match Disznoko of various vintages and levels of sweetness.

The chefs were Tommy and Andy Shan of Au Bonheur du Palais in Bordeaux. To Seely’s mind this is the best restaurant in Bordeaux and as good as any Chinese restaurant in the world – quite a recommendation. Andy Shan does the cooking; Tommy is front-of-house: gregarious, multilingual and the leader in the pair’s intensive researches into food and wine matching.

He describes their food as Sichuan, with some Cantonese influences. But it’s the strong flavours of Sichuan cooking that make it a possible match for Tokaji. Ask him which other wines he might serve in the restaurant (by the glass, to go with particular dishes rather than all the way through the meal) and he mentions Château de Beaucastel white from the Rhone; white Bandol from Provence; Banyuls; Pouilly-Fumé, especially from the late Didier Dageneau; Loire Chenin Blanc; dry and sweet Alsace from such names as Domaine Weinbach, Ostertag, Marcel Deiss and Hugel; and from outside France, Inniskillen Icewine.

Not all these wines are sweet, but some are very sweet indeed. The sugar is the attraction: it neutralizes the chilli in the food, and he plays with the balance of the two until he reaches a point of harmony.

This is anathema to the old British idea of choosing a wine to cut through the richness of a dish. Why, asks Tommy rhetorically, would you want to do that? What you want is complementarity, he says: it’s a response to the global experience of flavours. Red Bordeaux, he reckons, can be good with Cantonese cooking, with its low levels of spice and simple ingredients, but Sichuan flavours are complex and spicy and need something more challenging.

The dishes for this dinner are all classic ones. The Shans have adjusted the levels of chilli, but that’s all; otherwise the recipes are unchanged. And drinking Tokaji with them does at first seem rather odd.

There are two appetizers, beef straw potatoes with sesame seeds, and shrimps with ‘daily’ Jia-chang flavours. Neither seems particularly successful with the Late Harvest 2007, which seems to swamp them with its sweetness; and for the first course we move on to Asz 4 puttonyos 2004; a light year, but one, paradoxically, with a lot of botrytis: the wine is relatively light, with truffley, creamy notes and good acidity.

For us, drinking this Tokaji with beef tongue, and with Pang-Pang chicken with sesame creamed sauce, the sweetness is the dominant factor. For the Shans the sweetness is only part of the picture. Texture is just as vital, and the finely-sliced tongue has a silky firmness that chimes with the wine.

Yes, the sweetness stands out, but it sort of works, in an unexpected way. The chicken is delicate, though, and while the earthy note of the sesame is interesting with the wine the flavours don’t quite meet. The chilli needs to build up in the mouth a bit more; as it does, the wine begins to make more sense.Two sweeter wines follow: 5 puttonyos 2000 and 2001. With these are paired crispy, spicy sweet-and-sour Yuxiang chicken; King prawns fried in the ‘Halook’ wok; and leg of pork braised Dong-Po style (caramelized version). The two wines are totally different, the 2000 full of apricot and pineapple flavours, fresh, clean and focused, the 2001 leaner, smokier and more pungent. One might have backed the 2001 to match the food better, but in fact it’s the 2000 that is superb with the pork.

Texturally the slow-cooked pork is soft and richly fatty; the flavours are complex, with star anise to the fore. It’s a hit. The chicken is also pretty good with the 2000; perhaps it’s the higher acidity of the 2001 that gets in the way? But the dense flavour of the prawns works better with the 2001.

Then even sweeter wines, the 2000 and 1999 6 puttonyos. These are to go with veal with Chinese anise and tangerine peel, and Tsasui caramelized roast pork. The 2000 is pungent, creamy and approachable, the 1999 more linear, with higher acidity; and the veal is dark and caramelized, with a note of star anise. Neither is perfect, but the complexity of the 1999 is quite successful both with the veal and with the hot, pungent pork, and a faint tingle on the tongue from Sichuan pepper helps them to come together.

And finally, the biggest surprise of all: 1993 6 puttonyos with what is described as smoked salmon in red pepper oil. Well, it’s not smoked salmon in the Scottish sense; it is a cube of salmon that has been smoked and caramelised on one side. The texture is soft and melting; and the match is sensationally good. It’s the star of the evening: adventurous, imaginative and spot-on.

All of which raises the question: how do the Shans arrive at these matches? The answer is, via the 23 families into which they divide spices. They taste a wine, and they’re able, pretty easily now, to pinpoint the particular family of spices with which it will go. After that it’s a question of texture and heat.

And it works. I wouldn’t want to drink Tokaji all through a Chinese meal, even one as good as this; but that is not the intention of the Shans, or of Christian Seely. It’s a glass with a particular course that is the idea.

It might be a bit of a problem then switching to something drier – or even something red – for the course that follows, but it would certainly keep one on one’s toes. And it makes Chinese food freshly exotic, so that one can discover it anew – which is rather fun.

Image credit: Leacky Chen from Pixabay

Sweet Bordeaux and savoury food

Last week, the Union des Grands Vins Liquoureux de Bordeaux, the body that represents Bordeaux sweet wine producers, hosted a tasting of wines from six of the appellations they represent to partner savoury and sweet dishes at a lunch at le Cercle restaurant in Chelsea.

Sauternes and Barsac are the best, and best-known, Bordeaux appellations for sweet wines, but there are in fact eleven, producing vins liquoreux (sweet wines) and vins moelleux (medium sweet wines) from Semillon (60-80%), Sauvignon blanc (20-40%) and, in the better wines, Muscadelle (2-5%). The Semillon provides roundness, the Sauvignon Blanc light, fresher notes, and the Muscadelle an aromatic fruitiness.

An essential element to producing a good sweet wine is botrytis, or noble rot. Late in the autumn, the spores of a tiny fungus attack very ripe grapes, high in sugar content, shrivelling and discolouring the fruit, and in the wine enhancing the aroma and flavour and increasing viscosity. Sweet wines without botrytis lack distinction; wines that have noble rot have a clear aromatic profile, lusciousness, and in the best examples, complexity and longevity.

Our first wine, a Premières Côtes de Bordeaux NV, was served as aperitif with crudits and a yogurt dip. This simple, medium sweet wine was agreeably refreshing and pleasant with the vegetables and dip.

At table we moved to a Premiers de Loupiac, 2004 to partner fennel confit, orange vinaigrette and rocket salad. The slightly botrytised wine, easy and light, matched both rocket and caramelised fennel well. The chef had, for me, introduced too much orange into the vinaigrette and that did not enhance the wine. Other vegetables with a sweet note, such as asparagus, fresh young peas or in winter a dish of braised parsnips would go well with a Loupiac.

The next course, foie gras confit, fruit jelly and lemon granite was accompanied by Château de Cérons, 2001 and Château Crabitan-Bellevue, Ste-Croix-du-Mont, 2001. The two wines were markedly different in style: the Crons was full-bodied, luscious, apricotty on the nose and quite long; the light, minerally Sainte Croix du Mont was stylish, but had a harshness on the finish. Both accompanied the foie gras well; the granite was not, in my view, a good addition to the dish, and did not go well with either wine.

A salt cod roulade with carrot and tarragon, accompanied by a Château Peyruchet, Cadillac, 2000 came next. For me, this was the most successful pairing. The wine had lusciousness and also good acidity to support the judiciously tarragon-flavoured cod and the sweet note of the carrots.

Next came roast quail, apple and quince puree and grapefruit with a Baron Philippe de Rothschild, Sauternes, 2001. My serving had little apple and quince, and no evident grapefruit, but rather an excess of red capsicum, not usually a good companion to wine. This was no exception, but once the bits of capsicum were set aside, this luscious, honeyed wine, with a fine vein of acidity was a good foil for the quail. Poultry of all kinds marries well with sweet wines; one of the most famous dishes of the region is roast chicken liberally basted with Sauternes, and then served with a bottle of the same wine.

The dessert, mango and coconut rice sushi, served with Château Haut Bergeron, Sauternes 2003 was a disappointment. The coconut rice was quite mismatched with the wine, and the lime flavours were too strong to match its gentler citrus notes. The lightly botrytised, luscious wine, concentrated and full-bodied, would have gone better with an apple tart or a ripe peach. A subtly flavoured oriental chicken or fish dish could also have accompanied this wine at an earlier stage of the menu.

This might seem a startling suggestion, but with some thought and experiment, the sweet wines of Bordeaux can provide unexpectedly successful partners to savoury dishes from Asia and from closer to home. In the 19th century it was common for a Sauternes to be served with a fish our poultry course in the middle of an extensive dinner. Our palates may be unaccustomed to such combinations, yet the overall success of this lunch shows that the pairing of sweet wines with savoury food does work, and with good quality wines, there is no danger of palate fatigue as you move through the menu.

Le Cercle is at 1 Wilbraham Place, Chelsea, London, SW1X 9AE. Tel: 020 7901 9999. All the wines mentioned cost under £20 and are available in the UK.

Jill Norman is as acclaimed as an editor as she is as a writer. She created the Penguin Cookery Library in the 1960s and 1970s, worked with Elizabeth David for many years and is literary trustee of her estate. She has since become a Glenfiddich trophy winner in her own right, and is a leading authority on the use of herbs and spices as well as having a long-standing interest in food and wine matching. Her most recent books are Herb & Spice (Dorling Kindersley) and Winter Food (Kyle Cathie)

Photo by Ramon Perucho