It's great value when you think about it, although it would be expensive to do it that often. For €75 a pop, myself and Megan attended Meet the Winemaker with Jerome Poisson at Rhodes D7 last week. The price included a champagne reception and five-course meal, with a different glass of wine to try with each dish.
Firstly, three cheers to Gar for getting us a perfect table alongside the wall, in good reach of the waiters but with some distance from the larger groups of tasters. A mixed table would certainly have been less fun, and we got great service.
The star of the evening was definitely the food. I was once told that I would eat tomato and basil off a sock, and the very light dish we opened our feast with did not contradict this theory about my taste for the combination.
Sea bass is my new favourite fish, after trying it out recently and then greatly enjoying the crispy starter at this event. I was less enamoured with the main course, a slow-cooked beef that broke into strings as you ate it and seemed to have had most of its juices systematically removed. Like a poorly-chosen Chinese takeaway dish, you were sick of the sauce before you were full. Nice mashed potato and veg though.
The Franco-Irish cheese plate was reliably tasty, but it came way too late in the day for me to give proper justice to it. I think wine and cheese, or better wine and meat and cheese, works best as a stand alone light meal rather than something tacked on as an extra course. Finally the chunk-filled brulee-type sweet dish was neither good or bad, as I often find with dessert.
The wine itself was a mixed bag. Champagne is a great way to start anything, so no complaints there. Both the white wines were gorgeous in different ways - the Sauvignon Blanc was bright and sweet, while the Chardonnay had a delicious oak-edged and tang-free taste that probably made it the best glass of white I've ever had. (Not that I've had many, such is my taste for red.)
As for the reds, there was a big clanger - the merlot was disgusting. It made my forehead come out in a sweat and was essentially undrinkable for anyone with a brain. The second red, which cost a fortune our sources told us, was absolutely delicious, but fell short of eclipsing the memory of its mucky predecessor. Finally, the dessert wine was, well, dessert wine. They're all the same I think.
Mercifully the speeches were not overdone, and I could certainly forgive the Chile-based French-speaking winemaker for his schoolboyish English. Indeed it's kind of fun to spot an error in English that can be traced back to the way it is said in French, e.g. 'my proper vineyard' surely came from 'mon propre vignoble', meaning 'my own vineyard'.
Mr Poisson also came over and spoke to us, and seemed happy enough with Megan's two-line assessment and my polite smile. Although he did get in his excuse about the expense of the nicer wines a bit early, i.e. almost before we had finished telling him which ones we liked.
After disappearing into the night, I found no need for breakfast and had no urge to drink more wine for some days afterwards. As an experiment in attending wine tastings, I really enjoyed it, though doing the same again in another setting such as a stand-up tasting in a shop somewhere - with an actual requirement for informed opinions - would be another story altogether...
