Fine & Rare Dinner Vol. 2 by Maksym Demchenko

Excellent beginning to the evening. Complex and charming bouquet of cheese, lemon, ginger, soda, chalk, zest, and meringue. On the palate, it's beautifully energetic, refreshing, mineral, vinous, and voluminous. It doesn't hold its ground for a long time, but it's delightful while it lasts.

My expectations are always high when Bérêche is in play, and luckily, this bottle was exceptional. Such a beautiful, intense, generous, and slightly perfumed bouquet of baked apples, zest, cider, yellow plums, fried nuts, spices, honey, and wet chalk. On the palate, it is pushing, filling, and stormy, evolving and lasting. Flavours of cider, spices, and fried nuts mixed with honey and chalk.

This one is pretty and well-made, yet somehow I find it hard to fully enjoy this wine. A bit austere bouquet of white flowers, tarragon, lemon oil, hints of bitter herbs, and an abundance (really, a lot) of brioche with almonds and chalk. Its medium to full-bodied and tight-knit palate is pointy, racy, and tense yet well-balanced, with a long and chalky finish. The exuberance of brioche makes the wine puffy, but other characteristics add layers of complexity while keeping it easy to understand. My bet is this wine needs much more time to achieve depth.

Over the last two years, it has become wider and deeper. Sophisticated, elegant, and perfumed bouquet full of apple seeds, iodine, yellow fruits, red apple skin, yellow currant, plum, dough, graphite, with some Jerez notes and lanolin. On the palate, it has a generous core of minerality, bright acidity, fruits in the background, and a lively mousse. All that results in an insanely concentrated, precise, evolving, enveloping, and vinous wine. It's interesting how it opens up with some cider and pickled flavours. I can't help but wonder how this wine will evolve with time.

Intense and generous bouquet of red fruits, damp cellar, fried hazelnut, honey, iodine, dough, with subtle peaty notes mixed with cocoa beans. It is racy, incredibly multilayered, deep, and concentrated. Yet it offers a clear, fresh, and very structured palate with a lingering and flavourful aftertaste. Beautifully oxidized style. It's easy to fall in love. And it still has lots of energy to evolve further.

2020 Edition, disgorged in the last quarter of 2019.

Alright, this is a beautiful wine at a charming age. Notes of honeycomb, marmalade, sake, tropical fruits, soaked bread, damp cellar, apple blossoms, orchard fruits, and citrus. On the palate, it's almost full-bodied, racy, structured, graceful, and concentrated. It offers a very potent and expressive core in the mid-palate, which ends with a beautiful and long-evolving aftertaste. The result? A sophisticated, multilayered, and insanely quaffable wine.

At last, the day has come when I tasted a bottle of Selosse that meets expectations. And it's a bottle of what some consider to be among the best rosé Champagnes, if not the best. Intense and beautiful bouquet of orange marmalade, spices, honeycomb, dried fruit, and white cherry. Full-bodied, racy, vinous, intense, and persistent. So oxidized that it's almost a fault, but this one maintains a good balance. A bit of caramel in the finish with a chalky touch. Really delicious.

My initial reaction was slight disappointment due to the lack of acidity and a rather simple bouquet. But after giving it more time, I realised it's a unique wine that brings a new experience. It offers an unexpectedly large amount of fruit both on the nose and palate. Around this core are notes of caramel, cottage cheese with honey, and candied fruits. Compared to some great Madeira bottles, this Ratafia indeed lacks acidity, but it's still delicious and has an endless aftertaste with flavours of bitter herbs, cough syrup, and cottage cheese. Delicious. I want to taste it again, and luckily, I have one more bottle stashed.