Friends With The Right Restaurant
TASTING NOTES:
Gård Winemaker’s Select Chardonnay - “Flambéed pineapple, wet stones, custard apple, honeycomb, butterscotch, and white flowers. Swirling brings ripe stone fruits, citrus rind, roasted marshmallows, nutmeg, and oak spice. The mouthfeel is broad, with remarkable structure and a phenomenal acid presentation. Ripe stone fruits dominate the mid-palate, but there are lots of citrus and spice components that remain towards the end of the wine. Extremely complex and layered and with a balanced oak profile, this beautiful Chardonnay finishes long, with the perfect amount of sweetness and lingering acidity. Enjoy now or in the next 20 years. Decanting is recommended.” (AbV 14.6%)
Gård Grand Klasse Chardonnay - “96 pts - Jeremy Young, Int’l Wine Report” (AbV 13.8%)
VARIETALS: 100% Chardonnay
BARRELS: New French oak.
PAIRS WITH: N/A
THAT REMINDS ME OF: Flambéed pineapple.
Flambé just means “flamed” in French, and it’s one of those cooking moves that gets dismissed as pure tableside theater when it’s actually doing real work — the fire burns off the raw edge of whatever spirit you just poured on, and caramelizes the sugars in whatever’s underneath. Rum on pineapple, brandy on cherries, whatever’s handy and won’t ruin the tablecloth.
The dessert flambé story I actually think about is Bananas Foster, not pineapple, but it’s too good to skip. Invented in 1951 at Brennan’s in New Orleans, supposedly by chef Paul Blangé, and named after Richard Foster — a regular at the restaurant who happened to be the chairman of the New Orleans Crime Commission. So somewhere out there is a guy whose entire claim to culinary immortality is that he was friends with the right restaurant owner at the right moment, and now his name is permanently attached to a banana on fire. No idea if pineapple has an equivalent origin myth with an equally random civic official involved. If it does, I want to hear it.
