Unauthorized

By far the best restaurant within twenty minutes of my home is the Oregon Grille, a steak and seafood restaurant in an historic old inn in Hunt Valley, Maryland.  The chef that made the Oregon Grille famous, Mark Henry, has retired, and the new chef is feeling his way, changing the menu ever so slightly and showing more creativity, while still paying allegiance to the classic, unadorned dishes that make this restaurant so popular locally. The Oysters Avery is a great substitute when the season for soft-shelled crabs has ended. (It usually runs between May and the end of August.) They also have the best beef in all of Baltimore, dealing with a company out of Philadelphia, and the beef is beautifully aged and very flavorful. Their prime rib, which is slow-cooked over the course of the entire day, is top-flight.

As for the wines, it was a great showing for just about every wine except for the Ridge Montebello, which seemed blatantly oaky for a wine that is already 24 years of age. We started with one of the new boys on the block in terms of top-quality California wines, the 2005 Tor Chardonnay Torchiana. It displayed beautiful tropical fruit, orange rind, and some light minerality in a pure, complex style. This was a great vintage for cool-climate varietals in northern California, and Chardonnay Pinot Noir did exceptionally well in this vintage. My last bottle, and perhaps one of the best I have had, was the still very young 1996 Marcassin Estate Chardonnay, their debut wine from this Sonoma Coast vineyard. This wine tasted more French than the Domaine Leflaive Puligny-Montrachet Les Pucelles, which we had in the same flight. An exquisite nose of crushed rocks, quince, white currants, and orange blossoms was followed by a full-bodied wine with striking minerality, great acid, and a terrific potential for further development. This had been perfectly stored since its release, and while I have had a couple of corked bottles out of the case I was able to buy on the initial release, this was one for the memory books. The 1999 Marcassin Estate Chardonnay, which was brought by someone to the restaurant, was clearly shaken up and had a distinct haze to it. The wine probably wasn’t showing at its best, but was still full-bodied and ripe, with lots of honeyed tropical fruits intermixed with hints of pineapple, lemon custard, and smoky oak in the background. The Domaine Leflaive 1996 Puligny-Montrachet Les Pucelles was superb, and it is still a youngster. This is a vintage where so many domaines in Burgundy started to have fatal oxidation issues, but Domaine Leflaive seems to have had none of those, certainly not in my experience. This wine was young, crisp, with lots of minerality and fresh white currant, peach, and honeysuckle notes, but it is still a baby in terms of its development.

We then moved to an extraordinary mini-vertical of the very limited-production Château Lafleur. The 1985 was a beautiful wine – elegant, mid-weight, with sweet kirsch licorice, and truffle notes, a deep ruby color to the rim, and still a late adolescent in terms of its evolution. Unfortunately, it had to come before a monument to Pomerol and to Bordeaux, the 1982 Lafleur. This is a wine that is an epiphany in a bottle – when you get a good one, it is about as profound a red wine as anyone can ever have. This wine had it all – sumptuous and opulent, with extraordinary perfume, silky tannins, unreal concentration, yet an ethereal character and sublime personality. This is everything a great wine can be, still young and capable of lasting another 20 years, but why wait? A much more rustic, but still potentially perfect wine, and an “outlier,” as the writer Malcolm Gladwell would say, is the 1979 Lafleur. The wine of the vintage and something that completely transcends anything else produced in that year, it is very concentrated and dense, with almost a taste of cherry cough syrup intermixed with crushed rocks and roasted meats, with huge body, tannins, and power. It is an amazing wine that will never have the finesse and charm of the 1982, but is so impressive on so many different levels, it is another tour de force. We then took a break and transitioned into another monument to modern Bordeaux, the 1989 Haut-Brion. I have had the good fortune to have this wine at least four different times over the last twelve months, and this was one of the great bottles. Still very young, but just beginning to display some of the hot rocks/burning ember/scorched earth nose along with asphalt and unreal levels of sweet black fruits, it is very full-bodied and rich. The extraordinary intensity of fruit seems to hide what are relatively elevated tannins, but this is a modern-day version of the 1959 and should ultimately eclipse that wine. I can’t see it hitting full maturity for at least another decade, but this is the real deal.

After that, we decided to do a mini-California flight, with the 1996 Shafer Cabernet Sauvignon Hillside Select showing very well and completely dominating an oaky, disjointed, and disappointing 1985 Ridge Montebello. We ended with what was not really a dessert wine, but which could have been, an almost port-like 2001 Martinelli Zinfandel Jackass Hill. This was an extraordinary wine, offering up notes of caramelized figs, forest floor, charcuterie, smoked duck, and gobs of fruit. An amazing Zinfandel, it is probably a love-it-or-leave-it sort of wine, but no one was complaining at our table that evening. It was in a class by itself, and of course, takes Zinfandel to another world.