Dear Readers, best wishes for the New Year!
I’m not very fond of self-referential blogging but want to say on this festive occasion how rewarding it has been to run this blog and receive comments and encouragement. As I’ve topped 10,000 visits to this modest diary in exactly one year of sharing my wine and tea drinking with you, it’s proved a great experience overall.
No big New Year’s Eve celebrations chez Bońkowski this year: we’ve been babysitting and so Champagne has been limited to a few glasses of the Pierre Moncuit Grand Cru Blanc de Blancs Cuvée Pierre Moncuit-Delos – a crisp, driven, even slightly greenish Chardonnay that proved just a bit too young (though with over two years of disgorging), and a babysitter’s best friend – Moscato d’Asti. Paolo Saracco’s 2009 is a gorgeous glassful of fresh grapes, citrus and spring flowers, with balanced sweetness and great acidity, too. With 5% alcohol it was harmless to down the bottle between two, and that’s a great asset on New Year’s Eve if you ask me.
It’s my personal habit to open the best sweet wine I have (or one of the best) on New Year. Dessert wines lend themselves well to the relaxed late-morning pace I adopt on this day. This year, it was the Alois Kracher TBA No. 3 Scheurebe 1996. The late Alois Kracher was one of the greatest champions of botrytis wine in the world. Whatever the vintage, grape variety, and sweetness level he always managed to make a wine taste balanced and complete. This bottle is no different. It pours a deep amber and opens with an exhilarating liquid peach gelée nose, followed by lovely notes of toast, poppy seed and minerality. It’s really positively Tokaj-like both in the bouquet and the very good acidity that enlivens this 150+-grams-sugar wine. The palate is expansive and mildly mature, with that unmistakeable autumnal, fallen-leafy, honeyed character of great botrytis wine, and a finish that is growingly dry. It’s an auspicious wine for 2010. Happy New Year!
Disclaimer:
Source of wines: Moncuit Champagne – sample from the producer, Saracco Moscato, Kracher TBA – own purchases.
