4 decades of Corton Charlemagne and still NOT enough!

My dear friend Arif and I adjourned to dinner after the Bonneau du Martray tasting of the Corton Charlemagne. We wanted to keep it simple -- after all we've had eight glasses of white wines on empty stomachs before that! And so we picked up two miniature bottles of sweeties (not stickies). With sweeties, we had an easy time with food -- virtually everything worked with them.

The Egon Muller Scharzhofberger Auslese 1999 exhibited a briary spicy apricot pit, slate, petroleum and minerally nose. This screamed "I'm a Mosel German Riesling!" and its typicity was unquestionable. The wine has a cleanliness and crispness to it that hid the bortrytis infection and there's a sleek elegance about it that was very exquisite. In the palate this too converges quickly into the midpalate and the finish would never quit. Nuts, stones and flowers were found in the inner mouth perfume as it evolved. Weightless, silky and round. In short, a great wine.

Leon Beyer Gewurtztraminer Selection de Grains Nobles 1983 was, above all things, an intriguing wine. Unabashedly Gewurtz even at over 20 years old, the nose gave off lychees, passion fruits, orange peels and caramels. In the palate this started out viscous and round, but not cloying, with an intriguing bitter quinine bite in the finish that somewhat gave the wine a grip at the back. However in the second hour of aeration, the integration of the elements of this wine was nothing short of remarkable. At that point the wine became much more cleansing, delicate and the bortrytis element almost disappeared, while the still-fresh fruits came to the foreground. The finish was bewildering -- interlacing the bitterness and sweetness of the grapes in a harmonious and seamless coexistence -- that it induced us to return to the wine over and over again. Beautiful and balanced. A delightful surprise.

Indeed a white (wine) filled night.