On 2013-03-31 06:26, Mark Lipton wrote:
> Some friends who run the local Thai restaurants recruited me to help
> them choose wines for their BTG program. This consisted of tasting 4
> different Chardonnays with 16 different Thai dishes and choosing the one
> that went best with them. Given that Chardonnay would be one of the last
> wines I'd serve with Thai food, this was a pretty thankless task (there
> were also two Aussie Shirazes that we evaluated as well, with even more
> dire results) with the eventual "winner" being a 2011 Coppola
> "Director's Cut" Chardonnay that drew many of the dishes to a draw and
> actually went surprisingly well with Tom Kha Gai. (The 2011 Drouhin St.
> Veran, by contrast, went miserably with the food, despite being all of
> our favorite on its own).
>
> Having taken one for the team, I then opened a couple of wines that I'd
> lugged along for just this reason:
>
> 2009 Frantz Saumon Montlouis 'Mineral +' was absolutely beguiling, lithe
> and mineral (duh!) and bearing no imprint of the year with racy acidity
> and no sense of ripeness. It went fabulously with the food and
> disappeared instantly.

Back then, in the (admittedly few) places that had it, the Chateau de
Loei (chenin, of course) was the best pick, and not only because it was
not suffering from the insane import duty.
Outside of Thailand, it remained a favourite, but the QPR was no longer
the same.
Anyhow, chenin rules.



--
Éric Lafontaine