Dinner with Peter Liem and Friends

Brooklynlady and I left the little daughter with her grandparents in San Diego and went to Portland for two days and one night. It was a real treat to spend adult time together visiting such an interesting city. And by coincidence or supernatural power (you decide), Peter Liem happened to be in Portland for his friend's wedding. Our visits overlapped, and so along with a few of his friends, we met for dinner at the excellent restaurant called Three Doors Down.

Peter's friends are also serious wine folk, so there were several amazing wines on the table. Three Doors Down has a great wine list, but they are friendly with Peter and his group and allow them to bring in their own wine.

When you dine with Peter Liem you can expect to drink good Champagne. We began with the 2002 Champagne Raymond Boulard Extra Brut Les Rachais. Peter brought this over from France, as it is not available yet in the US. This is Boulard's first wine made from biodynamically farmed grapes, and although it's a mere child, it is obviously an incredible wine. The nose is so very delicate with lovely floral and mineral aromas, and beyond that a tightly coiled core of energy that demands many a quiet year in the cellar before it will reveal its true nature. I hope I have the opportunity to revisit this wine one day, it is a sheer and elegant thing of beauty.

We then opened the 2002 Benoît Lahaye Champagne Millésime (another bottle checked in his suitcase). I won't try to summarize Lahaye as a grower and wine maker, as Peter did this so well a few months ago. After the Boulard wine, this one was powerful and intense, but in a good way. The aromas and flavors really spread out and fill the nostrils. This is red fruited juicy deliciousness with a great acidic and mineral spine, and I bet it would be beautiful with something like duck breast and confit. I left this one standing in the glass for a little while and it opened up quite nicely - another one to lay down for some years.

BrooklynLady and I brought along a bottle of 1998 Vilmart & Cie Cuvée Création. We opened this bottle just before our appetizers arrived and much to my dismay, the wine was a bit of a mess. It was positively funky - cheesy, really. Yes, this wine smelled like ripe cheese. We waited a few minutes and aerated, but still pretty funky. Is this normal? Apparently not. The wine was showing "far more evolved than previous bottles I've tasted," according to Peter. That's probably polite for "this is usually very good wine, but this bottle kind of sucks." It was only at the conclusion of our meal when people were chit-chatting over a shared Tiramisu (honestly - the finest that I have ever tasted) that the wine began to show well. Pete (not Peter) poured himself some and said it was terrific. And he was right. The nose was now a generous and clean basket of roasted hazlenuts, maybe some marzipan too. And it crept gently across the palate, elegant and noble. Delicious, and yet very confusing on the whole. Here is Peter's profile of Vilmart, by the way.

And now, red wine. We started with an old wine from northern Piedmont, the 1961 Vallana Spanna Podere Tre Torre di Traversagna. Not a typo - that's 1961. This wine was born 47 years ago. I have no idea how to decipher Italian wine names, so I'll share what I learned about this wine: Vallana is the producer, Spanna is another name for Nebbiolo, and Traversagna is one of the crus in which this producer grows grapes. Thinking about it afterwards, I realized that this might be the oldest wine that I've ever tasted. But in the glass it felt vibrant and young. It had such a lovely perfume, so clean and well defined. Elegant chamomile aromas mingled with well-worn road tar, and beyond that there was something on the nose that the next wine also shared, something that for lack of a better word I will call poignancy. By this I mean that the essence of the wine burst forth from the glass as if it had something incredibly important to say, and it must have your attention. It was just delicious and thought provoking, and I remember what it smells like right now as I type this.

We ended our meal with a Grand Cru Burgundy from my birth year, the 1971 Prince de Merode Corton Clos de Roi. I got lost in this wine - I forgot to eat. BrooklynLady too. She tasted and spat all night like a cautious pregnant lady, but with this wine she drank. And how could she not? It had that same sense of poignancy to the aromas with penetrating animal, caramel, spice, and surprisingly fresh and youthful fruit. So graceful on the palate, such a textural joy. An entire story in the mouth with a strong plot, good character development, and a gentle and profound denouement. This is the whole point of cellaring good red wine from Burgundy, I suppose. A reminder not to touch my 2005's for a long time.

It got late in a hurry and we all had important appointments in the morning, so we agreed to shelve the 1985 Diebolt-Vallois that had been patiently waiting for its cue. We thanked each other for the company and the wine, and careened off to our beds with cherries and earth still tickling our nostrils.