The quest for a better bottle of wine can bring one into some glamourous locales: modish wine bars, wood-paneled private cellars, tasting rooms perched over rolling vineyards. However, often the best wine I can find in Toronto is located in the basement of the North York Public Library, in a windowless room with institutional lighting and plastic furniture.
This dismal little room is one of Toronto’s best kept secrets, because it is home to the Winetaster’s Society. This is a friendly club of enthusiasts with tastings 12 times a year. They have been cellaring wine for 30 years, planning for future generations with a foresight and stewardship which would put most environmentalists to shame. The result is that their tastings provide an easy opportunity to drink wines that would be totally unavailable or prohibitively unaffordable elsewhere.
The Winetasters is not for everybody. The tastings are done blind and occur rapidly. Conversation at the table can be clipped, since most people concentrate on the wine with the intensity of a medium channeling a spirit at a seance. There is an aggravating focus on numerically rating the wines. Any drawbacks, however, pale next to the pleasures in the stemware.
Two weeks ago, the Winetasters offered a tasting of Chateau Beaucastel, one of the best estates in the Chateauneuf-du-Pape region of the Southern Rhone Valley in France. The Southern Rhone produces wines blended mainly from Grenache grapes which are juicy, fruity and bright, and from Syrah (Shiraz) which is deeper, darker and more complex. Chateauneuf-du-Pape is perhaps the best known Rhone subregion, and its wines are famous for their power and earthy pungency.
Beaucastel is a unique and idiosyncratic winery. Besides Grenache and Shiraz, Beaucastel uses lots of Mouvedre (the venison of the grape world) and Counoise, a rare grape that adds piquancy. Even more bizarre, after the grapes are crushed, Beaucastel cooks the juice in order to stimulate the wine-making process. This kind of heavy-handed intervention should produce plonk. Instead, it creates something sublime, especially when properly aged.
We tasted six Beaucastel vintages from 1983 to 1999. Each was etched with an overwhelming character of autumn. Flavours reminiscent of a forest floor predominated: earth, fallen leaves, sage, sometimes a little manure, and dried flowers. The acidity was vibrant and alive with the taste of unripe tomatoes and Cape gooseberries. Because the wines were so mature, the tannins were soft and melted on the tongue. The flavours were complex but also fully integrated with one another, leaving no rough edges (except a little rawness in the ’86). They were a portrait of fading elegance.
Happily, this tasting coincided with the LCBO’s release of Chateau Beaucastel’s“second wine”, the well-reviewed Coudoulet de Beaucastel ($29.95, Vintages #48884). I picked up two bottles for the Short Cellar, and I’ll uncork one around 2015. Some things are worth the wait.
Matthew Sullivan is a lawyer with the Department of Justice in Toronto. He writes a weekly blog entry here on lawandstyle.ca. The Short Cellar column appears in the print edition of Precedent. Matthew can be reached at matthew@lawandstyle.beta-site.ca.