Fine wine at La Trompette

On Sunday evening The Editor and I went to dine with our wonderful friend Leon at the delightful restaurant La Trompette in Chiswick. We ate extremely well and, as La Trompettehas a free corkage policy on Sunday nights, all together we drank two phenomenal wines and one that was simply outclassed.

La Trompette is a fine dining destination. It is well lit, the tables are not too close together, there is no background music, the dress code is definitely smart-casual, and with the wonderful Sunday night corkage policy. La Trompette is a dream restaurant for me.

A dream restaurant as long as the food is up to scratch. Happily we were not disappointed and left full and terribly jolly – not least because we finished off our meal with a shot of VEP Yellow Chartreuse. Seeing such a wonder on a restaurant makes one know there is a Maître d’, and he wants his diners to live happily and well.

I started off with pig’s cheek, a slice of smoky sausage and some sauerkraut in a cream and mustard sauce. This was a mini-choucroute garnie of a quality and style simply unobtainable in Alsace for neither love nor money.

La Trompette’s pig’s cheek was meltingly tender with a delicious porky flavour to it. It was a decent size too. The sausage also had great piggy character but with the addition of smoke for complexity.

The choucroute had the correct texture and, as far as vegetables go, it could not be better. Being lavishly dressed with whole-grain mustard and cream sauce was the winning touch to this component. The choucroute’s ultimate quality made itself manifest when we returned to Elitistreview Court in Winchester and promptly started parping like Trumpet Majors. As confirmed by the quality periodical that is The Beano, farts are funny!

Leon and I were sensible, knowing full well that we had two bottles of red, we ordered the lamb for our main course. The Editor made a more baroque choice, roast chicken with tiny girolles and peas.

When it comes to obsessive attempts to match food and wine, I call them crap, and they get me very irritated, because it is immaterial. So, whilst The Editor’s choice was a bit of a surprise, good luck to him! He most definitely enjoyed his chicken with the two reds. La Trompette packed the chicken with a remarkable amount flavour whilst being yielding and tender.

La Trompette’s roast lamb fillet was perfectly pink and slipped down a treat. The piece of crispy belly was packed with flavour and provided an extra textural sensation. There were a few pan-fried gnocchi which were clearly fried in delicious, delicious animal fat. Then there were green things, I thought it was wise to leave them lest they give me cancer.

My dessert was a strawberry pavlova. The strawberries were wonderfully ripe and very tasty, the pavlova was errr… pavlova-like. Very well executed but not all that interesting.

But you are really here for the wines. Let’s go!

2017 The 1947 Vines Chenin

The 1947 Vines Chenin Blanc 2017, Kaapzicht

The ‘1947’ refers to the year the vineyard was planted. It is the second oldest Chenin Blanc vineyard in South Africa. The vines were therefore seventy years old when this wine was harvested and vinified. Those are old vines to still be producing a commercial volume.

Hang on, is it really a commercial volume? The back label says this is bottle number 52 of 900 made that year. 900 bottles for the entire world, no wonder this is rare as hens’ teeth. If you ever see any, you should snatch it up.

When I first saw this being poured I was terrified it had oxidised as it was quite deep in colour. A quick sniff? It’s fine.

And a thrill of excited chill runs through my body and everywhere that can get goosebumps erupts with them. Wow, this wine is going to be a fabulous bottle.

That first quick sniff confirmed this is a wine made from seriously old vines, it has a huge depth and intensity on the nose, very powerful.

It is also very fresh and clean, with grapefruit and pineapple fruit and a massive lanolin and wool character. Not wet, dirty or rotting wool, just the character of a freshly knitted jumper of the hairy variety.

The 1947 Vines Chenin is very clean indeed, with delicious fruit, a huge, textured mouthfeel and some soft creaminess. They’ve clearly fermented or matured part or all of this in old wood to get extra texture and umami character.

It is dazzlingly complex. You can almost taste the earth in of the vineyard this was grown in. It has phenomenal presence, but also great, great balance due to its fine acidity and lively fruit. This is a great wine!

Now, those of us from generation X and before would quite clearly view this as a dream of a Chenin Blanc wine. Excellent wines were being made from Chenin Blanc in the 80s and 90s (and before for those of us lucky enough to have access to them), but they were not like The 1947 Vines Chenin.

Whether it was unhygienic vineyards, wineries or cellars, or some character of the weather always being a bit too damp, or that the middle of the Loire was basically a huge swathe of mud, the ‘great’ dry Chenins I tried from Savennières to Vouvray were, to a bottle, absolutely filthy. They stank of mould, rotting wood, wet sheep, muddy dogs. They had big problems with the ‘being delicious’ aim in winemaking.

Most of us just accepted this as a character of Chenin-based wines, they were more about rot than about fruit. We grudgingly liked them, probably getting some respect for actually getting people to pay for wines that seemed, certainly by modern standards, made with poor technical skills.

Then you try a South African Chenin. It is clean, fruity, delicious! There is something not quite right here, Chenin is not supposed to taste like this. Let us only try them occasionally to see if they end up getting it ‘right’.

Finally you come to trying a 2017 The 1947 Vines Chenin and your worldview changes. Here is a vineyard as old as any in the Loire, making wines the reek of old vines, place of origin, that are properly complex, long, detailed, intense, balanced and, good god, delicious! This one has even matured and it is more delicious than young examples I have tried!

The 1947 Vines Chenin is how one dreamed fine Savennières or Vouvray could taste if it was not so bloody filthy all the time. It has all the positive attributes of those wines, but it is clean, fruity and fun. Let us not beat about the bush here, The 1947 Vines Chenin is a damned fine, freaking serious wine that can hold its head up in any company and stand tall.

Hilariously fine wine, made in a manner that is sympathetic to the very old vines in the vineyard, which matures gracefully, provides intellectual and visceral pleasure and where appreciating its charms does not take years of getting used to the taste of filthy wines in order to ‘like’ them. This wine is a marvel, utterly brilliant. The only thing not to like about it is that they only make 900 bottles a year and, if you are sensible, you want to buy 1.1/3% of the total production every year!


An aside, there are plenty of South African old vines Chenins that provide almost the obscene levels of delight The 1947 Vines provides, the Rall Noa Chenin I review here is one example. Usually these seriously old vine Chenins are cheaper than The 1947 Vines Chenin and cheaper than the few Loire producers who are cleaning up their act (vis Jacky Blot et fils). Take my advice, snap these beauties up drink them and age them. One day soon the wider world market is going to look sharply in the direction of South African old vine Chenin and demand to know why the hell they weren’t told. I am telling you now.


Rabelais 2017, Thelema

Rabelais Cabernet Sauvignon 2017, Thelema Mountain Vineyards

90% Cabernet Sauvignon, 10% Petit Verdot

After the incredible rollercoaster of Chenin brilliance, I need something pretty god-damned exciting to keep my thrill levels up. Thelema Rabelais 2017 is not that, alas.

Do not get me wrong. It is a very flexible food wine, it is capable of ageing and improving for a long time and maybe, one day, it can be a more exciting, more pleasure-giving wine. At the moment it just seems a bit strait-laced and po-faced.

It is not pretending to be a Claret; it has Saffer cherry fruit and a grind of pepper to it. There are aromas of Parma Violets. You can really smell and taste the Petit Verdot in it; this adds to its currently high tannin burden. It is also very fresh, which is a great thing in a wine like this. It is certainly not flabby or fat, heavily-alcoholic or soupily tannic.

It is good, and at some point in the future its time will come, but at the moment it lacks the turbo-charged excitement the occasion deserves.

Shall we see what is next?

Tonight's wines

Montebello 2013, Ridge

The wines of Ridge are one of the USA’s significant aesthetic gifts to humanity, and top of their pile sits the Montebello Bordeaux blend. Does it deserve to be top of their pile? Does it have more personality than Geyserville? Can it really, as yet another Californian Bordeaux blend, really be so exciting.

The answer is a thunderous, “YES!”

Indeed, where the overwhelming majority of Californian Cabernets and Bordeaux blends are simply Californian Cabernets and Bordeaux blends, Ridge transcends that whole slop tray of wines. It is not just a Bordeaux blend.

There is no point in my analysis of the wine discussing the various grape varieties in its blend, its wood treatment, or anything so prosaic. Ridge Montebello 2013 is a unique entity. It commands a place in the pantheon of wines that is far beyond the reach of even The 1947 Vines Chenin.

This wine is a forthright statement, a command, a leader. It is, in a true Nietzschean sense, an uberwein.

In the dining room where The Editor, Leon and I witnessed the drama, the ecstasy, the profundity of this wine expressing itself on our palates I noticed someone drinking Mouton-Rothschild. Montebello spoke. “Have these diners not realised, that the god of Claret is dead?” And it laughed down our throats.

We know this to be true. It conquered Claret as far back as 1971 in Steven Spurrier’s Judgement of Paris. This 2013 Montebello tramples the gods of contemporary Claret under its wooden six-pack.

Now, you may be thinking that you do not really like these Claret-esque outposts in the New World. Let me assure you that if you were in La Trompette on Sunday evening you would have found this wine fabulous, in its most literal sense.

This is to say, you would find this wine to be like something from a fable. Like Zarathustra coming down from his mountain, you would have heard the voice and known something new was happening. A new character, a new trait, a new possibility in wine was emerging. It was fabulous.

And I drank a third of a bottle of it last night.

Leon, The Editor and Davy


Thank you to Leon for inviting us to London, the transcendental bottle of Montebello 2013 and the unrestricted pleasure of your company!

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