February Wine: Jean Foillard Morgon Cuvée Corcelette Beaujolais

Neil Ingram, Boneta | BCBusiness
Neil Ingram in front of Boneta’s second Gastown incarnation.

Spend Cupid’s favourite season with a frisky Beaujolais, an environmentally aware Chilean or a few hot cookies (if you can handle the heat in the kitchen)
.

Ask an Oenophile

The Expert: Neil Ingram, 
partner and sommelier at Boneta in Gastown

The Dish: Seared albacore tuna, chicken dumplings, golden beet puree and black-bean ragout, $27 

The Pairing: Jean Foillard Morgon Cuvée Corcelette, 2009, Beaujolais, France, $85 


Everybody should drink more Beaujolais. It’s romantic, it’s sexy, it’s lyrical, it’s ethereal. Really good Beaujolais smells like you just made out with your first love in a field of fresh strawberries – there’s a smell of wet earth, a little sweat, ripe strawberries. It’s amazing! If you’re looking for a wine for Valentine’s Day, it’s not a bad way to go.


This particular Beaujolais is from Côte du Py in the village of Morgon, which is well-known for its firm wines. There is a lot of iron in the soil there and as a result local vintners make some wines that you would not think were Beaujolais – gorgeous, big, full, voluptuous wines. 


This wine, especially the 2009 vintage, has this incredible Audrey Hepburn character. It’s lithe, but there is this enormous charm and depth behind it all. It pairs beautifully with lighter meals like our albacore tuna. 


The lush and silky smooth nature of this 
Beaujolais is the perfect complement to the meaty texture of tuna, while that kind of root vegetable essence that is both savoury and sweet pairs wonderfully with the golden beet puree in this dish.


Ideally, you want a wine to harmonize with your food and your food to harmonize with your wine, so you end up making – just slightly – the whole greater than the sum of its parts.

Cookies With Heart

Forget the fancy lingerie and the dozen long-stemmed roses. If you’re looking to show your affection this Valentine’s Day, try your hand at baking. Don’t worry, we’re not talking about anything too elaborate – a tray of cookies will more than suffice. Simply use a pastry cutter set, like Ikea’s 14-piece Drömmar box set, to add a little heartfelt whimsy. We like to have our cookie cutters contained and neat, so this set is perfect. It includes several sizes and shapes, 
all easy to clean, carefully enclosed in a light blue, lidded container. Even better, at $6.99 for the full set, it won’t break 
the bank.

The Chileans are Coming

. . . to the Vancouver Playhouse International Wine Festival. This year, Wines of Chile is the theme for Playhouse and they’ve got plenty of news to share. Already Chile is the world’s seventh-largest wine producer and its fifth-largest exporter, with 150 destination countries and 1.5 billion consumers a year, and a new generation of Chilean viticulturists and winemakers are looking to improve those rankings. The vision of the Chilean wine industry is to become the number one producer of sustainable and diverse premium wines by 2020. Learn more at the Playhouse festival, running from February 27 to March 4. 
Tickets $55 – $99, playhousewine
fest.com