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Wineaux: Brooding on a $250 bottle
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We drank a $250 wine last week. And we didn’t even know it. It’s a long and not exactly riveting story, so I won’t bother you with details. Let’s just say, the wine was good. Very good. But $250 worth of good? How would I know?
(To put this in perspective, wine maven Jancis Robinson writes that for Christmas she and her husband drank a bottle worth thousands. They purchased it, however, decades ago when it sold for only $700. They bought a case.)
We knew our wine had been expensive (maybe $60 we thought), certainly more than we’d ever spent on a bottle, and it occasioned several comments over the course of the meal. We speculated, for example, on the exact grape blend and it was my next-day’s research into the blend that led to the discovery of the real price. But the wine didn’t elicit undue excitement while we were drinking it and we were just as enthusiastic about the little dishes we were consuming.
Wineaux: Warming reds for cold nights and the new year
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By now you’re surely set for your New Year’s Eve celebration, whatever that might look like, but if not, I hope you’ll grab a bottle or two of one of the sparkling wines I recommended in my last column.
For New Year’s Eve itself, we’re drinking a bottle of Nyetimber Brut from Sussex in southern England; it’s an area now rivaling Champagne for sparkling wine, thanks in part to global warming. Nyetimber’s 2004 Classic Cuvee beat world-famous Champagnes in a blind Paris tasting, and head winemaker Cherie Spriggs was named Sparkling Winemaker of the Year at the International Wine Challenge 2018 the first winemaker from outside Champagne to win this award.