Aquitaine and the Bordeaux Tradition, Boston's South End
Posted 03/24/2008 at 05:01 AM by Cathy
Aquitaine Bar à Vin Bistrot, in Boston’s trendy South End, manages to be both sleek and bistrot-traditional at the same time. Peek through the oversized windows facing the street and what you see are globe lights suspended from the ceiling, hand-written soupe du jour chalkboards on the wall, white tablecloths, and lots of mirrors in the style of Edouard Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergères.
This bar space, facing the very chic Tremont Street, is tiny compared to the huge ambition of its wine list. Their bottle list scores some winners, but their list of wine-by-the-glass? Not so much.
I chose a glass of 2005 Château Damase, Bordeaux Supérieur because I’d heard of Château Damase in the context of winemakers Brigitte and Gérard Milhade. The Milhades are known for taking over and restoring Bordeaux wine properties. Château Damase was a recent project and the smallest of the Milhades’ estates at 22 acres, all of which are planted to Merlot.
The wine in the glass in front of me was deeper and inkier than I’m used to with Merlots. It wasn’t very full on the nose, and the taste was somehow neutral, neither here nor there. Some wines don’t bloom until they’re drunk with food; I wondered whether that was the case with this Château Damase. I was skeptical – there didn’t seem to be much in this wine for me to come back to, not even after I gave it some time to settle in and make itself comfortable.
Kermit Lynch wrote that “A wine can only be judged as it relates to the environment in which it is served.” Judgment for this wine came swift and easy for me tonight: the wine, and the environment in which it was served, relied too heavily upon the reputation of their predecessors. Traditions – in this case, bistrots and Bordeaux wine – fare better as inspiration for contemporary creations, rather than their raison d’être.
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About the Author
Cathy Huyghe
Cathy Huyghe writes about drinking wine every day in the Boston area. She finds the quirky characters, the after-hours events, and the surprising stories that make up Boston's vibrant local wine scene. But no matter where she is, what she's doing, or who she's with, she mostly just wants to drink the stuff.
Her first restaurant gig was at Chez Panisse, when she knocked on the kitchen's back door and asked if she could work there. She's also worked for Jean-Pierre Vigato in Paris and Thomas Keller in Las Vegas. She went to graduate school at Harvard (twice), and her writing has run in Boston magazine, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, Edible Boston, and on Nevada Public Radio and Grist.org.
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