Christmas is a magical time for a child, but as an adult, the affair takes a more sinister cast. Repressed familial dysfunctions are dusted off, gifts are given with insecurity and unwrapped with obligation and the cat begins its annual campaign to eat/knock over/mate with the Christmas tree. Such abundant festivity certainly tickles the gag reflex. Still, I giddily anticipate each December. There’s only one reason: the annual Holiday Party of the Winetasters Society of Toronto.
This is simply the best party in Toronto (no matter what the season), and it is open to anybody with $85 to spare. That may seem pricey, but it is a steal. Unless you are a millionaire, you will never get a chance to taste wines like this: top flight French wines with decades of age, extinct Scotches, and ancient dessert wines.
Normally, Winetasters events occur in a dour little room in North York, but this event is held at Casa Loma. The Elizabethan furniture and ersatz Gothic architecture make you feel like you’re feasting in King Arthur’s rumpus room. This year’s party, held on December 10, was a beautiful chaos of wine.
Upon arrival, I made a beeline for the 1966 Chateau Lafite Rothschild. Lafite is one of Bordeaux’s four “First Growths” and 1966 was a particularly good year. I always love tasting ridiculously old, ridiculously expensive wines, because they consistently defeat expectations. They don’t really taste like wine at all. It’s more like old book juice – if the old book you are juicing is a long-lost manuscript of Shakespeare’s personal diary, complete with erotic doodles of the Dark Lady. The wine was cloudy and brown, and the palate was dusty and insubstantial, with hints of dried flowers, church pew, and cherries. Unusual but also thrilling. My girlfriend summed it up best. After experiencing the Lafite’s endless and complex finish, she murmured simply, “It’s life-sustaining”.
Another highlight of the evening was the 1978 Chianti Classico Riserva “Il Poggio”. To be honest, I didn’t know Chianti could last thirty years – but in many ways, this seemed to have greater longevity than the Lafite. It was still fruity and vivacious. Age had integrated all the flavours and enriched the whole package with a gorgeous overtone of burnt fennel seed (a flavour I’ve never found in wine before). It was utterly delicious. Incidentally, you can find this wine’s granddaughter, the 2003 Il Poggio, at Vintages for $65.00 [Ed. note: No longer available] (Vintages #0702274). Expensive, yes, but in a quarter century, you’ll be thanking yourself.
Perhaps it strikes you as unfair of me to write about an event that has already passed, raving about wines that have now slipped beyond your grasp. I take your point. But now you understand how I spend the other 11 months of the year: waiting for Christmas like a child, dreams of sugar plums dancing in my head.
Matthew Sullivan is a civil litigator 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