The good life

By now, it should be pretty standard practice for credit card companies to offer the power of "analytics" along with their online portals. You've seen them - the tools that show you how much of your expenditure per month go to travel, food and other categories of expenses. I cringe each time I use them, since such a large portion of my spending goes towards food and beverage - way too much, in fact. And what kind of category is food and beverage, anyway? It's too broad. Now, if my credit card company could break that down further, that would be really useful. Chinese, French, Italian, Japanese. Wine, hard liquor, beer. Well, maybe it wouldn't be useful, but at the very least if I broke it down into smaller pieces I wouldn't be confronted by such a large histogram each time.

In any case, I spent more money on wine this month, thanks to the World Gourmet Summit hitting town. The good folks over at Sassicaia kindly agreed to do a vertical tasting and there was no way I was going to miss out on that. Here are my tasting notes, in the order of tasting.


2006 Barrua - A sister wine to Sassicaia and one of two "primer" wines. Tannins unfortunately overpowered the fruit (perhaps it was still young), so all I got was prunes.

2008 Guidalberto - The other "primer" wine. Though younger than the Barrua this was less tannic and more similar to Sassicaia in that it had the kind of forest glade nose that you expect from Sassicaia.

2006 Sassicaia - An absolute blockbuster. Someone at the tasting ventured that this had "muscular tannins", which I thought was an apt description. One of those wines with a perfect blend of tannins, acid and fruit. This will keep for ages.

2005 Sassicaia - By contrast, a lot more muted. Hit all the notes that you would expect a Sassicaia to hit, but unlike some of the better vintages, does not linger on your tongue or in your memory.

2004 Sassicaia - My favourite of all the wines I tasted that night. I had had this before with RK in DC, but only now do I appreciate it as my favourite of the recent Sassicaia vintages. Elegant, elegant wine. Again, the forest glade feel, hints of espresso. Great structure. By far the vintage with the creamiest mouthfeel, which I loved. It's like eating a piece of bread with too much butter spread on it. Good, French butter. Absolutely divine.

2003 Sassicaia - I should mention that the organiser of the tasting had advised us to taste the vintages in pairs: 06/05, 04/03, and 02/01, and I later saw why. Each of the pairs contained a so-called stellar vintage ('06, '04 and '01), and you could better appreciate their excellence by comparing them to what I hesitate to call a lesser wine. The '03 Sassicaia is a great wine in its own right, but it was far from the star of the night.

2002 Sassicaia - A bad year for Tuscan wines, but as the organiser explained to us: what holds for Tuscany doesn't necessarily hold for Bolgheri. This was not as full as the other vintages, but definitely a very tasty wine indeed.

2001 Sassicaia - Drinking very well now. The tannins have started to fall away, leaving the fruit flavour more exposed, and you can really taste the sophistication. There is just so much going on here - currants, cherries, nuts, chocolate. Delicious.

If all accounts are to be believed, the 2007 Sassicaia promises to be another stellar offering. At the tasting I could see people slyly tapping at their Blackberries, and at first I just thought this was rude. Later when I overheard a conversation I realised that many of these people were frantically on their phones and Blackberries with their wine brokers or distributors, urging them to "Don't think! Just buy!" (verbatim quote). I suppose, then, they could be forgiven.