'78 Horizontal

Last night I attended another MNSC gathering at the VIP floor of Yung Kee Restaurant. We were a little pressed for time compared to our normal schedule, since the host needed to board a plane bound for Paris.

We started with the 1988 Pol Roger, which had a very sharp, acidic finish. I did not care much for this wine.

We had some really nice fatty char siu (肥龍叉燒) to go along with the Champagne. There was enough juicy fat to make it yummy.

The Chinese menu was excellent, which consisted of:

燻雲霧肉 - yummy and fatty pork with crunchy skin.

清酒鮑魚 - soft and tender abalone, flavored just nice and not too salty.

禮云河蝦 - creamy and full of flavor, with sauce made from the eggs of local crabs called 蟛蜞.

椒鹽參扣 - crunchy and chewy, these are acually the same type of sea cucumber that I had at Rafa's in Roses, Spain. These are small and white in color, and very different from the typical sea cucumbers used in Asian cuisine.

金牌燒鵝 - what else can you say about roast goose from this restaurant?

香茜陳皮燉鴨湯 - this was a surprise. We were served a bowl of soup with just the Chinese parsley, but the full flavor of the roast duck has already been infused in the soup.

原隻花膠菜膽 - not bad but the host wasn't pleased with the quality here.

枝竹香芹浸海斑 - the garoupa was deep fried and then braised, and quite yummy with the tofu skin.

瑤柱蛋白炒飯- nice and light, this was originally meant to be 楊州炒飯but changed to remove pork from the menu.


禮云子粉果 - here we have the crab eggs again, wrapped with shrimp inside the dumpling skin. Yummy.

In terms of wine, we were served a horizontal of 1978's in 2 flights. They were:

1978 Robert Groffier Bonnes Mares - classic Burgundy nose, a little thin on the body which indicated that there was considerable age in this wine. Rim was a little orange.

1978 Conn Creek Cabernet Sauvignon Lot 1 - tasted like a classic Bordeaux in blind tasting, with typical smoky nose. None of us except the nose had heard of Conn Creek, since the winery is no longer in existence. But a little research showed that Conn Creek actually produced wine from the famed Eisele Vineyard for the 1974 vintage.

I was pretty drunk by the time the second flight came around, and really couldn't taste much of anything...So no tasting notes for the following wines.


1978 Camille Giroud Pommard 1er Cru Les Rugiens
1978 Vieux Telegraphe Le Crau
1978 Paul Jaboulet Crozes-Hermitage Domaine de Thalabert

As a number of us guessed that the wines were from Burgundy when they were in fact from Rhône, it demonstrated to us once again that old wines from the two regions tend to converge in character.