I wanted to hold a meal built around two years that I consider among the greatest of the entire modern era of wine: 1811 and 1865. Many reasons have led me to hold a special love for these two vintages. I then added other wines so that the meal would be coherent.
The meal takes place at the restaurant Plénitude Arnaud Donckele in the Cheval Blanc Paris hotel. We worked on the menu with the chef and several members of his inner circle, determined to take every risk and to dare unusual creations so that this meal would be truly out of the ordinary.
The wines were chosen mainly according to the bottles of 1811 and 1865 that I owned. Having learned that a German Riesling from 1811 was coming up at auction, I decided to acquire it, and I did indeed win it at a Dutch auction house.
I then made a few additions. First, I placed a Champagne Dom Ruinart 1990 at the start of the meal, because the Cheval Blanc hotel was about to host an event in honour of Ruinart: the wink seemed amusing to me. I also added, for the pleasure of it, a Romanée-Conti 2011, so that two reds served one after the other would be two hundred years apart, since that is precisely the gap between the Lafite 1811 and the Romanée-Conti 2011.
Finally, as I thought that moving from some wines to others might be tricky, I added a magnum of Dom Pérignon 1988 served throughout the meal, so that everyone could, if needed, refresh their palate and find their bearings. With the Port preceding the Château-Chalon, for example, the Dom Pérignon would be entirely in its place.
I arrived at the restaurant at 9:30 am to open the bottles with Chloé, a sommelier who has already helped me at previous meals. Opening the wines was fascinating. The scents of the different wines reassured me: not a single bottle shows the slightest problem compared with what one could expect from its smell.
A very particular remark must be made about the Château Lafite 1811. When I bought this bottle, the question that immediately arises is: is it a genuine bottle or a fake? And the answer would come at the moment the wine was opened. When I drove my corkscrew into the cork, I realised first that it could not date from 1811, but that it was extremely old. This is corroborated by the fact that the back label of the bottle states that the wine was recorked on 29 November 1876. There is therefore complete consistency between the cork I pulled and the history of this recorking. So the bottle is necessarily authentic. The smell struck me as having a wild youthfulness. We shall see at the table.
This lunch is the 316th of my meals. There will be twelve of us. There will be an American friend from Oregon, a loyal friend from the Dominican Republic who is in fact the only one to have attended both the 315th meal at the Appartement Moët Hennessy and this one, a Belgian professional diver and nine French guests. Six of the participants are newcomers.
Everyone is on time, some even very early. The menu created by Arnaud Donckele and his team is: Small amuse-bouches / Mussels, brioche, caviar for a « moromi » soup / Langoustine, sea apple, seaweed for a « champenois » velouté / Scallops, abalone, aster for an « iodine iridescence » broth / An elegant hush! for a hunter / Sea woodcock, tortellini, crocus for an « Audouze » sabayon / Peat-smoked plume of grouse / Pine morel, comté, arbois for a marbled « sotolon » cream / In the shade of an apricot tree for a double « crocus of the Orient » sauce / François Audouze financier.
A short explanation is needed about the name Audouze appearing twice on this menu. While we were preparing the menus, Clément, the executive chef of the Plénitude restaurant, always smiling and fond of a joke, said one day: « If we keep putting the name Audouze every time we create a dish, soon there will be nothing but Audouze dishes, and what use will we be then? » Which of course made us all laugh.
My dinners traditionally begin with a standing introduction around a champagne. The Champagne Dom Ruinart 1990 comes from one of the finest years of this champagne. Everyone is struck by its roundness, its complexity and its presence in the mouth: it is absolutely excellent, and surprise could be read on every face. How can a champagne they consider old be so expressive? It will receive few votes in the final ranking, but that is common at my dinners: when more than ten wines follow one another, those drunk at the start of the meal are often forgotten.
We sit down at the table. The amuse-bouches served to us have a bewildering delicacy of taste, and the chef’s talent shines in each of these flavours. The Champagne Krug Clos du Mesnil 1979 is very impressive. Powerful, long and complex, it has an extraordinary presence and stands up to all the flavours arising in each of the small dishes. It is remarkable. To my taste it is the greatest of the Clos du Mesnil and also the oldest, since it is the first year of this cru.
The langoustine arrives, miraculously cooked, and we will share two wines with this dish. The Dry Alicante Blanc 1865 is, contrary to what I thought, a fortified wine, and therefore much richer and more alcoholic. It may not have been the right choice, but its very pale colour in the bottle did not let me imagine such richness. Alongside it, the Château Lafite Rothschild Blanc 1935 is a wine of infinite grace, delicacy and length. Everything separates these two wines, and yet one moves easily from one to the other. The langoustine pairs ideally with each of them, despite the considerable power of the Alicante.
The scallop dish now welcomes two wines that seem to have nothing in common: the Champagne Juglar Baltic Sea circa 1820 and the Riesling Bassermann-Jordan 1811. The dish is delicious.
The Riesling is astonishing, because its taste resembles nothing we know. It is very dry and yet very long, with at times a sweetish note. It seems paradoxical, but that is how it is. It is an unusual taste, but a fascinating one. And the length impresses me. It is impossible to give it an age.
The Juglar 1820 surprises me deeply. I had drunk one a few years ago and had been moved to think that, because its freshness had remained intact, I was drinking the wine an enthusiast would have tasted in 1840. This one is the complete opposite. Rich, powerful, intense, it has infinite length and is ageless: if it were presented as a champagne from 1960, no one would be shocked. It is an extraordinary champagne, almost unreal, and I did not expect to find so much coherence and so much gourmandise in a wine recovered from the bottom of the Baltic Sea.
The Romanée-Conti Domaine de la Romanée-Conti 2011 now arrives with the dish of this elegant bird. This wine has extreme freshness, and yet it does not create such a spectacular gap with wines two hundred years older than itself. The dish is divine and the Romanée-Conti has joyful, benevolent subtleties.
Arnaud Donckele knows that one of my whims is to serve red mullet with the Pétrus at my dinners, and he agreed to take up the idea for the Château Lafite 1811. The chef therefore imagined a very special interpretation of red mullet for this wine.
When I raise this wine to my lips, I receive something like a sledgehammer blow, as if an enormous weight had fallen on my head. I believe that great wines are made for eternity and that, if they die, it is almost always the fault of the cork. That is my theory. Now, we have just had a perfect Alicante, a perfect Lafite Rothschild Blanc 1935, an absolutely perfect Juglar, a Riesling of fine liveliness, and here now is a Lafite of unheard-of youth. There will be other wines afterwards, but at this moment all those we have drunk have proved miraculous, and my head is almost spinning. What is incredible in this wine is the presence of fruit. How can a 215-year-old wine keep fruit of this level, with such length and such astounding precision? I had a terrible time collecting myself, and I think everyone noticed.
The Porto Da Silva 1865 is rich, coherent and long, with superb power. It is a great Port which, it too, is ageless, for its strength remains smiling. The pairing with the grouse is absolutely perfect.
Serving a Château-Chalon after a Port is almost a provocation. Yet when we discussed it while preparing the meal, it seemed obvious to us, and we smiled at our own audacity.
The morel and comté with the Château-Chalon Perrigny 1865 is one of the finest pairings of the meal. The Château-Chalon is very pleasant, less powerful than other 1865s I have been lucky enough to drink, but of fine length, and the combination is so successful that the wine displayed infinite charm.
The Château d’Yquem 1865 was recorked in 1990. Its colour is beautiful, and its scent was one of the most beautiful of the bottle-opening session. It is served with an apricot dessert. This is probably the only dish that calls for a small remark: this very rich and intense dessert clearly dominates the Château d’Yquem, which was therefore not shown to advantage as much as it could have been. But no one could have imagined that the 1865 could be so light.
The François Audouze financiers, as the menu calls them, accompany two very different brandies. The Fine Champagne Château de Lafot 1865 is all subtlety: very long, very fine, very feminine. Alongside it, the Cognac Roi de Rome 1811 is of unheard-of richness and great power, and of course it crushes the young fine champagne. Taken separately, each would be judged extraordinary, but there had to be a winner, and it will be the Roi de Rome.
As we drank fourteen wines, I asked each guest to choose their six favourite wines, instead of the usual five, and to rank them from 1 to 6. Five wines were ranked first: the Château Lafite 1811 with seven first-place votes, the Champagne Juglar Baltic Sea circa 1820 with two votes, then the Riesling Bassermann-Jordan 1811, the Porto Da Silva 1865 and the Château-Chalon Perrigny 1865 with one first-place vote each. That seven guests should agree on the Lafite 1811 is an exceptional success.
The overall ranking of the table is as follows: 1 – Château Lafite 1811, 2 – Champagne Juglar Baltic Sea circa 1820, 3 – Château Lafite Rothschild Blanc 1935, 4 – Romanée-Conti Domaine de la Romanée-Conti 2011, 5 – Champagne Krug Clos du Mesnil 1979, 6 – Château-Chalon Perrigny 1865, 7 – Riesling Bassermann-Jordan 1811.
My ranking is: 1 – Château Lafite 1811, 2 – Champagne Juglar circa 1820, 3 – Château Lafite Rothschild Blanc 1935, 4 – Cognac Roi de Rome 1811, 5 – Champagne Krug Clos du Mesnil 1979, 6 – Château-Chalon Perrigny 1865.
A small amusing anecdote. I saw that the Romanée-Conti was collecting many votes. I said to those who had chosen it: « In a meal where what matters are the oldest wines, why vote for the Romanée-Conti? 2011s can be found everywhere and one can drink them every day. » Everyone looked at me with a smile and one guest said: « Of course, we drink Romanée-Conti every day! »
Throughout the meal, we could see that Arnaud Donckele’s cuisine reached a level clearly beyond anything we had done together until now, and I sensed an extraordinary motivation in him. He even insisted on taking the floor to speak about these rather rare events that we have brought about together.
He recalled a memory I had forgotten and which is rather amusing. We met for the first time at a four-hands dinner between Arnaud Donckele and Arnaud Lallement at La Vague d’Or, in Saint-Tropez. I had brought a Dom Pérignon 1973 which the three of us shared, and I had told Arnaud Donckele that I found his cuisine extraordinary, but that it would not work with my wines. I was no doubt particularly bold to tell him that.
We then absolutely wanted the first meal organised at Plénitude to be a joint work. It is not impossible that my remark spurred him on and brings us today this absolutely transcendent result. I sensed a great deal of emotion in his speech, delivered in front of the whole brigade of some thirty people, who felt that this meal mattered to the chef as much as it does to me.
The emotion was very great at this meal and all the guests felt it. I would never have imagined such success from all the wines, which showed that they were ageless. That is what I have always claimed, and this demonstration was so powerful that it almost « knocked me out ».
Long live Arnaud Donckele and long live old wines.