Château Coutet, 2010 Update
This year’s trip to the Bordeaux primeurs was marked by a new experience, an evening spent in the company of proprietors, winemakers, journalists and buyers at the Soirée Ban du Millésime. This celebratory slap-up meal at the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Bordeaux is an annual event, and this year our dinner was accompanied by a plethora of wines, including Ducru-Beaucaillou 1995, Smith-Haut-Lafitte 2003 and Lynch-Bages 1998, to name just three. Not a bad way to mark the passing of yet another week of primeurs tasting!
There were many fine moments during the course of the evening, the epicurean highlight undoubtedly being the setting of a new personal record on number of oysters consumed, all of which were washed down rather nicely by a glass or two of Pessac-Léognan from the 2007 vintage. But from a more cultured viewpoint I particularly enjoyed my first sight of the welcoming committee, a gathering of Bordeaux proprietors looking resplendent in the ceremonial robes of the Commanderie du Bontemps. The majority of these garments were a very regal hue, a deep claret red, although in a handful of cases they were a fabulous golden colour instead, the former the producers of red wine and the latter for Sauternes. There, clothed in the latter, was one increasingly familiar face; it was Aline Baly, of Château Coutet.
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