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'FRIENDS OF THE GEORGIAN' TASTING
GRAHAM HARDING - 13TH NOVEMBER 2006
NEW YORK, USA
Thanks to an invite originally extended by Club member Juliet Gammon on behalf of a friend who is on the committee of the American Friends of the Georgian Society, Graham Harding went to America to host a tasting.
The tasting was of wines (and / or producers) that Americans at the turn of the 18th / 19th century might have known. Graham had an audience of around 80 American ‘Georgians’ in the penthouse of the British Consulate in New York.
There were 6 wines in the tasting – starting with Bollinger NV champagne, which was founded at the end of the period in 1828. In those days, many connoisseurs preferred the still wines of the Champagne area since the sparkling wine was all too often faintly pink, gritty and rather sweet.
The tasting then moved to ‘Hock’, that favourite of 19th century drinkers. In those days riesling wines were drier (more like the trocken style of today’s wines) and valued by the aristocrats who could afford premium prices (10 bottles of ‘very old hock;’ sold in 1808 by Christie’s fetched a per bottle price that was not matched for nearly 75 years).
Then two reds – Pontet-Canet, a claret known and recommended by Thomas Jefferson, and Chateauneuf-du-Pape from Beaucastel. A Fifth Growth, Pontet-Canet is flying high these days but the wine the American supplier had sourced was a touch young and very much not to the taste of the Americans in the room (despite 90+ Parker points).
After the reds, a Tawny Port and a Madeira. The latter, a favourite of Southern Americans in the late 18thcentury but very little known in the US today, was the star of the tasting and went exceedingly well with the Thomas Hoe Stilton that the Embassy had bought in for the tasting.
Graham was in New York to launch the American edition of his Wine Miscellany and also managed a couple of radio interviews focusing on the history of wine and on champagne. The interviewer badly wanted to hear stories of baths in champagne and ladies being toasted by champagne drunk from their shoes and Graham duly obliged!
GH: 19/11/06
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