Unauthorized

Another superb meal from Baltimore City’s finest chef and a perennial James Beard nominee, Cindy Wolf. (She actually deserves to win the award, but Baltimore doesn’t seem to get the publicity in culinary circles that it merits, especially with Cindy’s cuisine.) The food was flawless, the service impeccable, and it is very easy to understand why this is the Number One culinary destination in Baltimore City, if not in the entire state of Maryland.

We started with a gorgeous bottle of Krug Grande Cuvée, the non-vintage blend, which was superb. Krug’s Champagne prices have gotten out of control, but the Grande Cuvée is still somewhat manageable price-wise. This was a great Champagne with some brioche, nutty, honeyed citrus notes, full-bodied, but remarkably fresh. An underrated wine (and I don’t know enough about how all the top producers did in 2004), Jadot’s 2004 Montrachet was superb – fresh, full-bodied, with lots of minerality and honeysuckle, creamy peach, and white currant notes.

It is was a night for some great Bordeaux. All were decanted several hours in advance and showed beautifully. The 1989 La Conseillante is what I consider at its plateau of maturity, where I suspect it will stay for 10 to15 more years. It was a beautiful bottle, with sweet raspberry, truffle, and a subtle earthiness, perfumed, silky-textured, full-bodied, pure and complex. I have had far superior bottles of the 1990 La Mission than the one at Charleston. Sandwiched between a very sexy La Conseillante and a near-perfect 1983 Château Margaux, it seemed to lack the extra dimension, but this is outstanding wine, with classic smoky tobacco notes intermixed with black currant, fig, and plum. It is full-bodied, soft, much more evolved than the 1989, but a beauty. Nothing was wrong with the bottle, it is just one of those marginal calls that other bottles (and I have had many of them) seemed slightly richer.

The 1983 Château Margaux is the wine of the vintage. Dense purple-colored, with a classic nose of acacia flowers intermixed crème de cassis as well as hints of blueberry, truffle, and licorice, the wine is full-bodied, with silky tannins, still very young, but stunningly complex aromatically, rich and long in the mouth, with a seamless integration of acidity, tannin, and wood. This wine should continue to last for at least another two decades. Another wine of the vintage is the 1979 Lafleur. A freak for the year, this wine has a level of concentration and intensity that transcends anything else made in this vintage. It is one of those anomalies that is hard to understand when you have tasted through all the 1979s and looked at the weather conditions that formed them. This wine, which has thrown a lot of sediment, has a deep ruby/plum/garnet color and a gorgeously sweet nose of almost intoxicating levels of kirsch liqueur and raspberries. The wine is sweet on the entry, full-bodied, still displays some tannin, but is just incredibly complex and is a great, great example of an old-style Pomerol. I am more cautious on suggesting extended aging for this wine, although this bottle seemed to indicate another 20 years is possible, but I tend to think that in vintages like this, it is better to drink them on the young side rather than older. But it is already 20 years old and still showing great. We finished with one of the last of the old-style La Tour Haut-Brions, the 1975. I have drunk a lot of this wine, and while it is not the pure perfection of the 1975 La Mission-Haut-Brion, this wine just oozes smoke and burning embers, black currant liqueur, fig, roasted meats, and spices. It is a decadent, extravagantly rich, still slightly tannic wine (it’s a 1975, remember), but full-bodied and impressive.