Tuesday, October 5, 2010

#120 - Thomas Keller Chicken With An '07 Hubert Lamy "Les Frionnes"


Serious discussions are currently taking place at Food With Wine headquarters over the possible renaming of this here website to The Church Of Thomas Keller Chicken.

It's getting that ridiculous.

This pairing experiment has been settled. It's white Burgundy and its various incarnations.

Other have worked just fine but nothing touches white Burgundy.

This one fell in the upper tier of all wines with TKC and the middle of TKC and WB.

Food: Thomas Keller chicken with Delice de Bourgogne, baguette and asparagus

Mrs. Ney thought it overdone. Maybe a little but the breasts stayed moist while, oddly, the thighs came off a touch dry. We cut to eat at the table (coffee) and it made a difference, mitigating some of that.

Skin again. Skin. Again. Blend of white and black pepper this time with salt turned into skin that tasted like so much more spice than was present. Crunchy as all get-out. Great stuff. And the juice on the plate at the table was drinkable, it was that good.

Delice de bourgogne with baguette because with white Burgundy, it's...stupid good (and was again).

Asparagus drizzled with walnut oil to finish things off.

Again. Again. Ridiculous. Surprising Again. Great Again. Just what we want every time.

Wine: 2007 Hubert Lamy Saint-Aubin 1er Cru "Les Frionnes" ($35 - Howard's on Belmont)

Grape: Chardonnay
Region/Sub-Region/Appellation/Vineyard: Burgundy-Côte de Beaune-Saint-Aubin-Les Frionnes
Vintage (WS): 92 Drink or hold Precise, pure and elegant, with lively structures if harvested late; at worst unripe if picked early

Huge edge of lime acid and a green apple core right out of the bottle. A bit harsh. After an hour decant, it transformed into something nearly graceful, full of minerals and a touch of white flowers. Fruit was less distinct and a bit all over the place but in a good way, offering a blend of citrus, peach, papaya, apricots and apple that gave way to its mineral core that came off more rough but welcome instead of finer and elegant. Huge mid-palate core of nutmeg with a little smoke gave it a darker overall tone. The creamy chardonnay character mitigated its rougher edges on the finish, bringing on a lovely and medium-long finish of stones mixed with white peach creamsicle (especially with the cheese).

Jumped around nicely, complex enough and fell in the middle of our growing white Burgundy world.

We're learning.

Pairing: 90 Settled. It's white Burgundy with Thomas Keller chicken. Testify!

Drinking anything else would seem blasphemous. And the Church Of Thomas Keller Chicken cannot stand for blasphemers.

Best with the cheese with a beautiful, infinitely interesting and longer finish. Better with the thigh for me and somewhat short with the breast. Became smokier with the chicken skin.

As I said, the wine jumped around nicely, offering alternating goodness throughout the meal.

And that's best thing we liked about it. The wine never fell short of "pretty." It may have never wandered into "wow" territory but always acted like it wanted to be accepted into the Church.

The Elders met and welcomed the wine in with open arms.

No comments:

Post a Comment