Special Club Champagne

I opened a bottle of Gaston Chiquet 1999 Special Club Champagne Friday night. These wines go through two rounds of blind tasting, by the winemakers themselves, before they can be released in their squat little bottles, with their old fashioned labels, looking like something you might be served on a White Star or Cunard line.

Upon first sip my vision blurred and I stared out a window that wasn't there. The wine was vertigo inducing, such was it's depth. It was like falling into wine more than drinking it. It was broad, a thousand rivulets woven into one wide cataract. The wine was profound, yet other than it's extreme quality, age and extended yeast contact, the wine was for the most part quite classic. This was to change dramatically.

We pulled the wine off the ice. It is my habit with Champagnes of this quality to serve them cold, but drink them slowly over hours, letting the wine warm, breathe, open up, even go flat. It is an exercise in discipline to simply nibble at something so delicious, as it is a leap of faith to let your $70 Champagne go warm . Yet, I have done this many times, and while I don't always know where I'm going, I know I'm going somewhere.

So we put down the Champagne. My head was swimming from one sip. I needed a bracer. So out came the Gaja Sperss Grappa, made from Nebbiolo pomace from the Sperss vineyard and Angelo's $400 wine. It was perfect with a plate of charcuterie and cheese. Properly tuned up, we sat to dinner and cracked a bottle of 1983 Cheateau Cantemerle.

The Bordeaux was a little past prime, thin of texture, lacking the fruit and volume, muscle and penetration of flavor one would expect from Bordeaux. I, of course loved it. What it lacked on the plate, it had retained on the nose. From the first smell, I was taken. Dried rose petals, horse hide blanket, the smell of wet gravel, and the very smell of your lover after sex.

The rest is somewhat of a blur. I distinctly remember having two glasses in my hands, one filled with 1999 Special Club Champagne, the other with 1983 Bordeaux. I remember trying to break my mind and confuse my senses, smell the Bordeaux, and drink the Champagne, back and forth until everything was gone, including the Grappa. In the morning I had an E-mail from Dr Hank Mann, apparently in response to this missive that I had sent him the night before.

" I found some stupid good Champagne. Gaston Chiquet Special Club 1999, disgorged 2007 (!!!!) that's 8 years on the lees. It's like a Spatlese by Willie Shafer, all Orange blossom and tropical fruit, shored up by a briney little breeze of caper berries, with brioche curtains, and a Chardonnay coffee table. "