Wine Love!
By Jonathon Alsop
February 14, 2007
If the object of your affections is a wine lover, you're in luck. People contact me all the time to ask what's a good gift for the wine fiend in their lives, and I always let them in on a secret I'm surprised so few people know. Wine fans want to receive the gift of wine -- it's as simple as that -- not another decanter or velveteen vino sack or any of the other doo-dads and hoo-haws you see in gift shops.
It's never too late to swing by your favorite wine shop, pick up a favorite bottle of wine, and tie a nice piece of Belgian chocolate to it with a red bow.
Now that's true love.
1995 Champagne Nicolas Feuillatte "Palmes d'Or" (about $100, from Pasternak Wine Imports, 800-946-3110)Slowly but surely, the wines from Nicolas Feuillatte (pronounced phooey-OTT, sort of) have supplanted many of my previous favorites because of their awesome quality and amazing prices. Vintage Champagne like this delicious Palmes d'Or is relatively rare in the world of sparkling wine. Most sparklers are marked NV, which stands for non-vintage, because part of the process requires topping up the bottles with a dash of new wine. It can take a couple of years to get to this point, so wine makers are topping up the 2000 with 2002 wines, for instance, and they have to be labeled non-vintage. When you see a vintage Champagne, that means the winery went the extra mile by holding on to a batch of wine for topping up in order to preserve the vintage.
Feuillatte's mainstream sparkler -- we call it Cuvee Nicky around here -- is on the shelf at our local Trader Joe's for only $25 right now surrounded by many inferiors at the same and higher prices. As a former brainless boss used to say, "In my mind, it's a no-brainer."
NV Noe "Pedro Ximenez Muy Viejo" Sherry (about $35 per half-bottle, imported by A.V. Imports, 800-638-7720)Contrary to popular opinion, you don't have to be 84 years old and have blue hair to love sherry. There's a whole spectrum of great sherry, everything from bone-dry white sherry you drink nice and cold with food to the rich, amber dessert sherry most of us think of first.
The name Noe is Spanish for Noah, the first (but hardly the last) wine maker mentioned in the Bible. It's aged an incredible 30 years in American oak, and although it wasn't on the ark, it almost tastes like it. In fact, this sherry is so deliciously extreme it barely tastes like sherry or wine, but like some exotic nectar derived from figs, dates, raisins, and tropical rainwater.
Don't serve it with dessert -- serve it instead of dessert.
© 1988-2012 by Jonathon Alsop
336 Washington St. Brookline MA 02445-6850 617-784-7150
jalsop@invinoveritas.com
Guarantee of Privacy Copyright Reminder