As I draw close to the end of my eventful Presidentship, I am terribly excited to present to you, in our ever pursuant endeavour to delight our membership, the theme for the President’s Dinner 2012.
The wine theme follows a subject that we have discussed a few times in our Managing Committee meetings and have finally been able to bring to fruition with this offering from our most magnanimous member, Nihal Kaviratne that displays his gravitas as a person, a wine collector and indeed the gravitas in his cellar. We are presenting 6 Parker Perfect wines, i.e. – 6 wines that Parker has scored a 100 points, since the commencement of his legendary and sometimes controversial 100 point scale in the 70’s.
Adding to the allure of these wines will be a first showing, in Bombay, of Le Cirque, the New Delhi branch of this famous New York eatery, housed in the spectacular, new Leela Palace Hotel in the Capital. We have our fellow committee member, Aishwarya Nair’s, unlikely-to-be-repeated-gesture, to thank for this. Chef Mickey Bhoite from Le Cirque, has worked intensely with Nihal to come up with a very carefully considered pairing.
We will start with the only non-100 pointer wine of the evening, the Salon 1996, a Great vintage for Champagne, in which Parker scored the wine at 97 points…only! As this is also a special serious wine we dispense with our traditional format of aperitif style stand-up service and will instead sit down to be served along with a specific set of 3 non-vegetarian and 3 vegetarian canapés.
The venue is Stella at the Leela Kempinski at Sahar on Saturday, March 24, 2012.
The first course of a Porcini Risotto will be accompanied by the first 100-pointer, the super-second Pauillac Chateau, Pichon Lalande from the legendary 1982 vintage.
A pair of Tempranillo’s, the 2004 of the El Pison from Artadi in the home of the varietal in Rioja faces off against the 2008 of the Cayuse Impulsivo from the most unlikely place in the world to find a Tempranilllo effort, let alone a great one like this, from Walla Walla AVA in the Columbia Valley in Washington State and will together look for pairing from a choice of Duck Jambonette or Veal Saltimbocca and a Vegetable Tian.
The nuanced, elegant, and complex Sine Qua Non from California Syrah, considered by many the greatest Syrah from the new world, justified by this perfect scoring example will accompany an aromatic, robust Lamb Chermoula from Chef Mickey’s kitchen. We may then seem a little unconventional in reaching out to a dry white at this point against a selection of cheeses. This is one of the rarest of the rare to be accorded a Parker 100, a 2009 100% Roussanne from Vieilles Vignes (old wines) on a patch of land belonging to Chateau de Beaucastel in Chateauneuf du Pape in the southern Rhone, which in these times of google maps is at a secret location not even known to the neighbours. The intense richness and structure of this wine will allow us to go straight from those big structure reds directly onto it.
We finish with Chateau Climens 2001, the only one of the top wines from Sauternes and Barsac that we left out from our line-up in the last event. It is a Chateau that often stands up to challenge the sheer loft presence and dominance of Yquem in the appellation and is often regarded as being more elegant.
With the exception of Pichon Lalande which produces about 15,000 cases a year, the others produce between 500 and 1500 cases per annum which tells us how rare these wines are and then having them all at once does make it rarer still. Furthermore Parker has accorded a perfect score of 100 only to 256 in the history of his 100 point scale. Of these only 35 are white (16 dry and 19 sweet), the rest red. Need I say more!
With regards,
Ajit Singh
President