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Weekly Wine & Spirits Columnist - Michael Vaughan

Reflections on Last Minute Christmas Gifts 

Copy for Saturday, December 11, 1999 - National Post Toronto Section

So here it is, the night before Christmas – well almost.  By now my “best buy” December Vintages items have been swept from the shelves.  There are, of course, a huge number of specially packaged gift items to choose from.  Many of these are pictured in one of three different glossy LCBO gift catalogues. In addition, the free 232 page advertorially-driven Food & Drink Magazine is loaded with goodies of every description.  In fact, the LCBO has done a great job in building up its inventory of special products, starting last September with the 24-page Millennium Collection guide.  Unfortunately, many of these products are not presented for evaluation making it somewhat dangerous to suggest that one plunge ahead and buy blindly.

 Of course some are no-brainers.  If you like Grand Marnier ($41.95), for instance, then the gift pack with two snifters for $2 more makes sense. I spent two hours kicking around Queens Quay flagship store checking out the merchandise and then went back to my tasting notes to see if I could find some best buys.

Here they are. For folks who love Cognac but are on a limited budget, let me recommend a fine, smooth, vanilla tinged De Valcourt10 Year Old French brandy which comes with two small engraved snifters for a modest $29.90.  For those of you who need a higher ticket item, the mellow, gently spicy Royer Grande Champagne Cognac at $69.85 (500 ml) complete with snifter and tube packaging shouldn’t be missed.  Produced by Les Magnolais Distillery, only 7,000 cases are available annually and Ontario only got a total of 420 bottles, so act fast.

In terms of new products to grace General List shelves is a sweet liquor called Poirot ($29.95) made from Cognac, cream and Belgium chocolate.  Of course I thought it was named after the famous, master detective Hercule Poirot.  Sorry to disappoint, but it honours a mysterious French socialite Yvette Poirot of the 1920’s.  The fact that it is quite tasty is not a mystery!

Moving on to sweet wines, the highly rated, sweet, ripe pear and butterscotch flavors of Henry of Pelham’s 1998 Special Select Late Harvest Vidal makes for a charming gift in its attractive wooden cylinder at $24.95 (375 ml).  An extraordinary buy from the General List at half the price is the rich, sweet, tropical flavoured, creamy Errazuriz Late Harvest Sauvignon Blanc at a modest $11.75 per half bottle and hails from Chile.  Don’t miss this one, especially for yourself!

A terrific Christmas gift that will please connoisseurs of fine Sherries (or ancient Madeira) is the Gonzalez Byass Apostoles ($19.95 per boxed half bottle).  This 25-year-old-plus Palo Cortado is a rare form of Oloroso that is very gently sweet with refreshing, slightly lemony, warmed toffee-walnut notes.   It’s dry enough to be an aperitif or works well as an after dinner sipper.

Of course you have to be careful with some items.  The Moselland Riesling Dry which comes in a blue cat shaped bottle at $9.95, for instance, is best left unopened.  Ditto for the pretty ‘Belle Époque” Champagne Brut 1990 which has consistently disappointed this palate, especially for $99.95.  You may also want to pass on an extraordinarily indifferent Bordeaux Rouge ‘La Reserve du Milleniare’ which comes a beautifully embossed metal canister for $17.90.  Save this one for your taste-challenged in-laws.

For those who want something that’s hard-to-find, the Classics Catalogue is the place to look.  Only a few of these items are presented for tasting in the LCBO lab. As these are one shot tastings, I don’t have an opportunity to taste a second bottle to make sure that the first impression was correct.  That’s important when it comes to wines.  Why?  Well at least 1 in 20 will have cork-related problems and sometimes it’s hard to tell whether the wine is simply poor or cork tainted.  This is why I taste two separate bottles of every wine I review at each Vintages release.  I may be the only critic to do this, but I believe it pays great dividends for the readers.

The LCBO’s new handsome Fall Classics Catalogue may well have many gems but unfortunately I haven’t tasted them.  One of my favourites is the 1997 Marimar Torres Pinot Noir from the Don Miguel Torres Sonoma Vineyard at $45.  It has very attractive, fine, somewhat spicy, cedary, backed black cherry fruit flavours with a long toasty finish.  For high rollers there’s a 500 ml bottle (untasted) of 1900 Castarède Armagnac which at $1,987 works out to only $117.57 an ounce!

Finally, for anyone in the spirits let me recommend the wonderful, profusely illustrated book The Martini An Illustrated History of an American Classic by Barnaby Conrad III ($34.95).  This delicious read traces the evolution of this drink’s renaissance as well as its bastardization by Jerome Zerbe, society editor of Town and Country, who introduced the “Vodkatini” in 1951.  You may want to try it with a martini made from what might be the world’s most expensive gin Daresbury Quintessential Dry Gin at the astounding price of $39.95.  Produced in England by Greenall, it is distilled five times so it should be as smooth as a baby’s bottom.  If you are shy about investing in a full bottle, a miniature is available at $3.95.