How seriously do you take white wine? Would you often, or ever, consider enjoying it with a main course? Or does white lack the gravitas to star in the dinnertime show?
For many people, I fear the answer to the last question is yes. We live in an age of red supremacy. Red not only outsells white, it gets the lion's share of respect and exaltation.
Even in my line of work, it's rare to come across a dinner orchestrated around white wines. I regret that because white wine, generally speaking, is keener at telegraphing the vine's intent. White typically sees little or no barrel aging. Oak, which can impart rich texture and complementary flavours of vanilla and toast, is like makeup. It can mask natural shortcomings. That's why some people like to say unoaked white wines such as riesling or sauvignon blanc are naked.
I did get an invitation to a white-wine dinner recently. While my account may scandalize some because of the prices involved (I'm talking $22,000 for a dessert wine), it palpably underscored for me that when it comes to the fruit of the vine, white can be just as exhilarating and vital as red – worthy of prime time if not exactly prime rib.
Let me stress that the libations were donated to raise money for a worthy charity, specifically the Walrus Foundation, a non-profit organization supporting Canadian writers (walrusmagazine.com).
The hosts of the eighth-annual “Stonefields” dinner ($5,000 a seat) were Michael Barnstijn and Louise MacCallum, a couple who donated all of the 24 wines, as well as the food, taxi fares for 18 guests and the use of their southwestern Ontario home, which sits on a field studded with numerous stones (hence the Stonefields nickname). They met while working as software engineers for Research In Motion, the University of Waterloo spinoff behind the BlackBerry. The couple left in 1998, when Mr. Barnstijn held the post of vice-president, software, and retired to a life of child-rearing and charity.
And to wine collecting. Mr. Barnstijn has an awe-inspiring cellar that betrays a genuine passion for quirky, handmade wines, not just bling reds from the Médoc, Pomerol and Napa. But he's got some bling in the basement, too, such as a Château d'Yquem 1784, harvested five years before the French Revolution.
I might have travelled 100 kilometres west to the dinner just for the apéritif wine, Vilmart Grand Cellier Rubis 2002, a hard-to-find small-production bubbly at the vanguard of an independent-bottling movement in Champagne.
But the bubbles that blew me away came from a bottle of Louis Roederer Cristal Brut Rosé 1999. Made in small quantities and worth more than $700, this pink version of the trophy Cristal of so many hip-hop lyrics arguably undermines my defence of white supremacy. It's not, technically, white, after all.
But rosé wines are essentially produced and served like whites, so they spiritually belong in the pale camp. This one danced nimbly with a delicate Japanese hors d'oeuvre prepared by one of two guest chefs, Toronto-based kaiseki-cuisine master Masaki Hashimoto. In contrast, most reds would have trampled all over the jewel-box arrangement of sesame tofu, mashed chestnuts, Japanese Inaho vegetables and persimmon tossed with miso.
Next up was a bottle of 1865 Yquem. That's not a typo. I am referring to the final year of the U.S. Civil War, two years before Confederation. This was a wine older than Canada.
An ecclesiastical silence fell upon the room as the Sauternes was poured, a silence almost amplified by the cavernous dining room's 20-foot-high ceilings. Yquem is the world's most famous sweet wine, a favourite of Thomas Jefferson. The 750-millilitre bottle on the table, worth about $22,000 at auction, had predictably turned a rusty copper hue with decades of oxygen ingress through the cork. (White wines get darker with age; reds get lighter.)
