Fleurie, Moulin-à-Vent, Shanghai Cuisine, and Experienced Wine Guys

The other night I met a friend in Chinatown for dinner and we both brought a bottle of wine to share. This guy is a relatively new friend. He has been in the wine business for a long while now and he has the opportunity to taste an awful lot of wine, new vintages and old. There are only a couple of people with whom I'm friendly enough to meet for dinner and who have the kind of wine experience and knowledge that this guy has.

I've noticed that they all have one thing in common - they always serve or bring one of the best versions of whatever wine it is we are drinking. In other words, if we're drinking Nuits St. Georges, he'll bring Chevillon Les Saint Georges. If we're drinking Vouvray, it's Huet. It's not bluster or anything remotely like that. It's the product of years of professional and personal drinking, thinking, tasting, visiting, and discussing. It's just a matter of knowing, with great experience and conviction, what it is that he actually wants to be drinking.

Anyway, on that night we were eating at a restaurant specializing in Shanghai food. We ate several kinds of soup dumplings and various cold appetizers. I brought a Chablis, the 2008 Gilbert Picq Chablis 1er Cru Vogros, $29, Polaner Imports. I love the Picq wines and this is my favorite of them, and 2008 is an excellent vintage in Chablis. This wine, however, was entirely shut down and way too young. I could have predicted that before bringing it, but I kind of refused to bring yet another Riesling to yet another Chinatown dinner.

My friend brought a bottle of Beaujolais. It was fantastic wine and I learned something fundamental from it about the terroir of Fleurie.

I always thought of Coudert's Clos de la Roilette when I think of Fleurie. My friend brought a bottle of 2008 Yvon Métras Fleurie, price unknown. In a way it's hard to compare the two wines because Coudert is made more in the Burgundian style and Métras is carbonic, but still, the differences in terroir are clear. You've had Coudert's Fleurie - there is a certain density that perhaps you can think past for a minute, and think of the flavor - muscular, dark, smokey, and rich with a strong mineral underpinning, like iron. As I read here, the soils the birth Clos de la Roilette Fleurie actually are adjacent to the the border of Moulin-à-Vent and as in Moulin-à-Vent, they have a lot of manganese and clay. Maybe Clos de la Roilette wines are more representative of Moulin-à-Vent than they are of Fleurie.

Yvon Métras' vineyards are more typical of Fleurie, and the 2008 Fleurie showed an entirely different character from any Coudert wine that I've ever drunk. Yes, the wines differ texturally, but that might have as much to do with wine making as with terroir. The flavors of the Métras Fleurie were entirely different, delicate, bright red, spice-inflected, faintly herbal. The overall package is one of elegance, grace, intensity, and purity of flavor, and I cannot remember drinking a more compelling and delicious Fleurie. It was particularly delicious with aromatic beef, braised with star anise, among other things, and served cold with some sort of aspic.

Maybe from now on I'll think of Coudert's as the finest Moulin-à-Vent that I've ever had.