LCBO Food and Drink Holiday 2016

Tender steak, brown butter and world-class Cabernet

Stags’ Leap Winery The Leap Estate Grown Cabernet Sauvignon 2012 VINTAGES 142844, $89.95

Concha y Toro Don Melchor Cabernet Sauvignon 2012 VINTAGES 403980, $74.95 I remember a most luxurious lunch in the Concha y Toro family mansion in Santiago. As the climax of the meal, our gracious hosts served us superb Chilean fillet steak and matched it with their flagship Cabernet Sauvignon, Don Melchor. It’s a pairing I’m delighted to recreate here. This is one of the world’s great Cabernets, made from grapes grown in the cool Puente Alto vineyard in Chile’s Maipo Valley. It’s well knit and a perfect balance of fruit, acidity, tannins and oak—but on a massive scale. The intensity of flavours (red cherries, cassis, brambles, damsons, lavender, espresso…) is astonishing. Fifteen months in French oak barrels (71 percent of them new) and then a year of bottle age has integrated the spicy vanilla oakiness, but it creeps out at the end. There have been many great vintages fromNapa Valley’s Stags’ Leap vineyard since it was first planted in 1892. 2012 was pretty near perfect for the Cabernet Sauvignon that grows there now. The Leap is a blend from the year’s “most expressive barrels,” themselves sourced only from select blocks in the estate vineyard, so yes, you could call it “the best of the best.” Twenty months in French oak, half of it new, tempers but does not tame the vibrant blackberry, blackcurrant, plum aromas or their nuanced cedar, pepper and mocha notes. It’s a big wine but not at all clumsy, intense and concentrated but beautifully balanced. I’d suggest cooking your steak on the medium-rare side so that there are still meaty juices to run into the brown butter Béarnaise sauce… This wine can handle it perfectly.

128  FOOD & DRI NK HOLIDAY 2016