The wine: Domaine Begude “Etoile” Chardonnay, 2015, Limoux
The details: 13%, cork, around £14
Date of pairing: Saturday 6th May 2017
When a customer tries to tell me they don’t like Chardonnay, I tell them they haven’t found their Chardonnay. If you even remotely enjoy white wine, there’s a Chardonnay out there for you. The beauty of this grape is its versatility whereby decisions made by the winemaker and location it was grown produce wildly different resulting wines.
Some of us lucky ones enjoy all manifestations of Chardonnay and this oaked number from Domaine Begude is one of my particular favourites. Fermenting the wine in oak provides the unmistakable buttered toast scent with a fairly intense lemon character too. On tasting the wine, these aromas develop into flavours that remind me of lemon drizzle cake with pineapple and orange blossom. While the wood character is strong, making for a robust, creamy wine, it isn’t overpowering and those citrus flavours really ring through. Overall, the flavour profile reminds me of comforting breakfast food so I need the song to match that feel. Sunrise by Norah Jones obviously fits perfectly with the breakfast theme, as well as the name of the wine: L’Etoile meaning ‘the star’. While I wouldn’t personally advocate drinking wine with breakfast or at sunrise, the song, much like L’Etoile, is bright and sunny but richly textured and multi-layered.
