Cassoulet

Tonight was a classic "duck dinner"--as in, cassoulet. Seven of us got together for a fun dinner and wines. We started with some vintage champagne from 1998 and 2000 vintages. We then shared in this beautiful dish, paired with 1998 and 2004 Rhone wines, and a 2005 Madiran. We followed this with a salad course (very European), paired with a 1999 German Riesling Kabinett. Dessert was a chess pie, paired with an AMAZING 1969 Tokaji Aszu. What a dinner! And great company. I gained a number of fascinating insights tonight from all of this.

First, duck confit, pork belly, and sausage, paired with beans, baked for a couple hours with copious duck fat is downright amazing. And, perhaps, requiring some statins... :-) It pairs extraordinarily with a 2005 Madiran, which is still a baby. The 2004 Ste. Anne CDR-St. Gervais was beautiful, lighter, more acidic, and rather "feminine", if you can really use that to describe a wine. The 1998 Cotes du Rhone shows that a good vintage and a good producer (Grand Prieur) can lead to amazing aging on an inexpensive wine such as this.

Second, this riesling was amazing--it had such a nose of petrol/gasoline (in a very good way), and a crisp, acidic cut, with a long mineral finish. This blew me away.

Third, drinking a 43 year old sweet wine is an experience of unforgettable proportions. This goes down as a 10 most memorable wines of life. This Hungarian wine had incredible acid (STILL), great minerals, a somewhat oxidative note of good dry sherry or Madeira, nutty, sweet, mild fruit, and an ongoing finish.

I am fortunate enough to get to taste and drink a lot of good wine--even quite a bit that borders on great. But I am seldom so surprised by so many bottles in one setting; I seldom learn as much in one setting; and, rare indeed is a bottle that I will be remembering for years to come. To find two of those in an evening--that is extraordinary. Now, most of my favorite wines come from France, as do virtually all of my most memorable wines. So, to have two in a row that were NOT from France--surprising as can be.

Pork tenderloin

Pork tenderloins are nice in two ways--they're a good "blank canvass" that are highly flexible for a variety of flavors, and they cook in about 30 minutes. Now, I think if I bought heirloom pork tenderloins, I'd probably get substantially more flavor and the like out of the cut of meat itself. This I would like to do from time to time. But on a day to day basis, these are a cheap grocery store meat for weeknight eating. Tonight, I used a "Bavarian-style" seasoning, along with salt and pepper, to season the cut, before browning and roasting. I used some cherry-balsamic sauce from Zingerman's for added flavor. Brown rice and broccoli rounded out the meal, with a Dr. Heyden Riesling Spatlese. Tasty, easy, good for a weeknight. As blackberries were on sale at the grocery tonight, we shall do a blackberry sauce with the other one. That might call for a pinot noir-bourgogne... or I reckon a riesling should work, too.