Long Lunch Long Ago
Merci Mâcon | No Year, No Grapes
Kids, gather around your screens: Old Man Jolley is going to tell a tale of wine trade public relations from long ago. Travel with him to a time before smartphones when social media was merely a glint in Silicon Valley’s eye called Web 2.0. The past is another country, and people were different then. They had lunch.
When one was invited to lunch, one finished the work of the day before noon. While this would not preclude telling one’s spouse that one was ‘working’ through lunch, would be to take a few notes on the wines served (hopefully on tech sheets supplied with the name and details of each), and making pleasant conversation. Photos were merely an option, and if they were taken, it was with a camera in purposive and somewhat performative way.
I am thinking of one lunch in particular. It would have been around 20 years ago. I would have been established enough, with a year or two under my belt in my second career as a food writer to have been invited. It was small, attended by maybe a half dozen journalists and our two hosts, a marketing or public relations person representing the winery and the chef and owner of the restaurant, who was acting as ‘brand ambassador’ for the wines we would taste over several courses.
I remember the rough number of guests and the table set-up because we were alone in the dining room of one Toronto’s top restaurants at the time. They either didn’t have a regular lunch service, or we there on a Monday, when it would have been normally closed. It was flattering to have the place to ourselves, in the company of a renown chef, who in our little world counted as a celebrity.
I started Canada’s first dedicated food and wine website, Gremolata, in 2004. For a couple of years I was the only online ‘foodie’ destination and, despite being in my 30s with a kid and two more on the way, the new hot thing. Incredibly, I was taken seriously enough to rub shoulders with the restaurant critics from the newspapers and magazines that I regularly read, admired and respected. (More incredibly they were almost to a woman and man kind and generous with me.)
I can’t remember who exactly was a the table with me as a fellow guest. In the days before anyone with a smartphone could become an influencer, the pool of available was relatively small. And that was just on the food and restaurant beat. The wine pool was even smaller, though decidedly more weird, as it included amateur newsletter writers, sometimes delivered by fax.
My point is that the company would have been as much of an attraction as the food and the wines. I could expect a pleasant afternoon of stimulating conversation with an interesting group of women and men of letters. The bonus was the chef, duly celebrated for his mastery of the cuisine of his home region in France, also had a reputation as something of an enfant terrible. This is not a character trait one might look for in a business partner, but it’s an excellent one for a dining companion. War stories were elicited and told.
The wines were from a prestigious Champagne house. Not one of the really big ones, but big enough to have the budget to pay for enverything. It was one of the old-school established ones that’s held its reputation since the middle of the 19th century. If you looked over all my wine writing over the last two decades, you could probably guess which one, since the lunch turned me into an instant and lasting fan. Don’t tell me PR doesn’t work.
I don’t remember what exactly we tasted (drank, really). Likely we started with the non-vintage brut, then maybe got into a blanc-de-blanc, which could have been followed by a blanc-de-noir. I am sure we had at least one rosé, and I have vague memory of a salmon involved dish that went with it. We would have crescendoed with one or two vintage Champagnes, maybe the same one in a vertical of different years, served youngest to oldest.
It was a long lunch, with a course to match each glass, and vice versa. I would’ve had a double espresso when it was offered at the end, and might have taken a few mignardises with me, if I retained enough wherewithal to remember to bring a peace offering home. I hope it wasn’t my day to pick the kid up at daycare.
A Champagne lunch with a great chef, in his restaurant he’s closed for your benefit, paid for by someone else is about as close to a fantasy come true as can be, at least gastronomically. If my recollection of the details are hazy, the core memory is indelible. Maybe that’s because it was early in my career.
I have had many delicious and fun wine lunches and dinners since with famous winemakers and chefs, all over the world. I am confident there will be more. But they are fewer and far between, and generally organized by people of my vintage, who remember how it was done.
This makes sense: there are far more channels to reach. The long Champagne lunch doesn’t work if your target is 100 social media influencers. And how long does it take to snap a picture, compose a two line tasting note or make 20 second TikTok video?
The beauty of the lunch was that it was unmediated. Like tasting wine itself, you can’t experience a long lunch on a screen. You can make pornography from presenting wines and foods, but it’s not the same as experiencing the real thing.
The Champagne house understood the value of showing their product in the field. This is how, they demonstrated in real life, Champagne works at the high table. They gave us the experience so we could describe it then and retain it even now.
I just hope they don’t ind that I am bit late to file.
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NEW WRITING AT THE HUB
This month at The Hub I look forward to wines I’d like to investigate further in 2026. Read my column here.
WINE RECOMMENDATIONS
Prosper Maufoux Mâcon-Villages 2023
Price: $20.95
Channel: LCBO Vintages
Producer: Maison Prosper Maufoux
Country: France
Region: Burgundy
Appellation: Mâcon-Villages
Grapes: Chardonnay
Alcohol by Volume: 13%
Sugar Content: 5 grams per litre
This is a lot of wine for $21, and great example of how Burgundy’s rising tides have brought up many boats. Prosper Maufoux makes, by my estimate, around 100 different wines in Burgundy. For all of their Côte d’Or crus, they have clearly not spared their efforts in this humble white from the south of the region. Nor have they put the price up. No one has given them the memo that Mâcon-Villages now start at $25 at the co-operative level. This is the deal of the week. Maybe it’s meant to break Dry January?
Look for a big Burgundy Chardonnay. There’s no wood involved, but lots of creamy malolactic effect, counterbalanced by lemony acidity that melts into tropical fruits. If you close your eyes, you could be in Pouilly-Fuissé. The wine is a bit of a meal in and of itself, though it could happily meet a roast chicken, or a salmon mousse before dinner. Or a BLT at lunch. Or just olives and almonds.
https://www.lcbo.com/en/prosper-maufoux-m-con-villages-2019-18709
Garage Wine Co. Old-Vine Field Blend
Price: $24.95
Channel: LCBO Vintages
Producer: Garage Wine Company
Country: Chile
Region: Maule Valley (sort of)
Appellation: Maule DO
Grapes: Who knows? (see below)
Alcohol by Volume: 13%
Sugar Content: 2 grams per litre
There’s no vintage nor cépages for this wine. We only know that it comes from grapes that were harvested between 2012 and 2022. What exactly those grapes were is also ambiguous, though we have an idea of the general blend, which includes “…barrels of Cabernet del Maipo y (dry-farmed) Maule & Itata fruit including Cariñena, Garnacha, Monastrell, Cinsault [and] Pais.” It’s made like a Sherry, in the solera system, where new wine is added to old every year. The idea is to use barrels, or lots of wine, that don’t quite fit into Garage’s standard blends in any given year.
It’s tempting to call the Old-Vines Field Blend, which is also called ‘Cosecha Especial’, a Frankenstein wine, but it’s hardly a beast. Though it is certainly alive. It’s vibrant, fresh and full of food friendly acidity. It’s got red fruit energy, except it also has black fruit resonance. It’s crowd pleaser that will appeal broadly across the wino spectrum to conservative traditionalists to new wave naturalists. It should be paired with fun and shared. It will give you something to talk about.
