A long time ago, you would find me a young and aspiring wine enthusiast, with more enthusiasm than knowledge.
While waiting at the wine store one day, I spied an older gentleman with a few bottles tucked into his cart. I was at the age when I equated others’ advanced age with wisdom.
“How did you learn about wine”, I asked. I had read lots on wine and could name regions, grapes and styles. But reading and knowing are different things.
“Drink it,” he said.
That advice was easily taken, but my wine knowledge wasn’t exactly galloping ahead. I inquired about the wine reviewers he followed, realizing that perhaps the key lay in selecting the right guide.
“Who I read is of no use to you. Find a reviewer whose taste agrees with your own.”
He was that species of crusty character. But far from putting me off, it renewed my faith that he knew what he was talking about. I also held that belief in those days.
In the man’s cart were several bottles of 1989 Chateau Le Gay. For the then breathtaking price of $40 per bottle, I put one in my basket. Never had I bought a bottle above $25.
“I will save this for a momentous occasion,” I thought.
That occasion, not momentous, came almost twenty years later. The Le Gay, a Bordeaux wine from Pomerol, was from the highly regarded 1989 vintage – in my opinion almost as good as 1982, and for some wines, better. It was superb – soft and fruity, pillowy in the mouth with a basket load of berries and gentle sweetness.
Since then I have pursued Chateau Le Gay and drank it whenever I could find it.
There is an unfortunate and bad winery in Ontario that makes wines that are vile, confected and brewed rather than vinified from a mixture of surplus grapes from Australia and California – the kind that arrive in blue barrels. It is called Chateau Gai. Once, when dining with another wine enthusiast and his long-suffering wife, we had a bottle of Chateau Le Gay.
His wife chirped, “Le Gay, isn’t that Canadian?”
We both directed steely stares at her.
The love affair has continued. Each time I see it, I pick up a bottle. I once got a magnum at a good price in Calgary with ten years’ age on it. We drank it at a shore lunch in Northern Ontario with line-caught pickerel (walleye for the Americans).
I drank another bottle with great pleasure at the P’tit Plateau, an excellent little BYOW restaurant in Montréal.
Last month I found the well regarded 2009 vintage at auction and won 6 bottles. It’s young and literally swimming in fruit – typical of those years when France ran after concentrated wines to impress American palates. It was a mistake, corrected gradually over the next ten years. This vintage lacks the acidity to pull off a delicate balance with the fruit at first taste.
But I’m not ready to abandon one of my first loves quite yet. So bought a few 2018 futures of Le Gay. I’ll report on those in due course and recall once again that youthful purchase.
