Best of the Eighties

These days, critics are supposed to make pronouncements. One of my failings is that I never make enough of them.

I wish to declare the golden decade of French wine-making to be the 1980s. (By the way, the golden decade of American film-making was the 1970s, in case you missed that.) If I could only include 1990 as belonging to the eighties, in the same way as the year 2000 belongs to the 20th century, I'd be even more sure of myself. I'll just say that the 1990 vintage benefited from the residual greatness of the 1980s.

It was quite a decade. Monumental wines were produced in both Bordeaux and Burgundy, and the 1982 Bordeaux wines launched the modern era of wine. Yet the greatest wine of that decade came not from either of those regions but from the Rhône. That wine is La Mouline, a Côte Rôtie from Guigal. This is certainly no surprise to any collector, and it's not as though La Mouline is overlooked. The price of a bottle is staggering. Could I afford them, I believe I'd drink '83, '85, '88 and '89 La Mouline before any other red wines on earth. Recently, thanks to a friend, I was fortunate enough to taste the 1985 side-by-side against a 1986 Grange Hermitage from Australia. That's a fine vintage of a wine I've always considered my favorite.

They're both made from the same grape, Syrah, which is called Shiraz in Australia (Grange also contains a dollop of Cabernet Sauvignon). The La Mouline was easily the better of the two. It was inky, with a hint of the elegant, lead-pencil nose often associated with great Bordeaux. It was so rich it had a syrupy quality reminiscent of a 1959 Bordeaux, yet it also had a hint of the famous Rhône bacon scent.

We drank it at the Ryland Inn in Whitehouse, New Jersey, accompanied by Mishima beef in a black pepper sauce. I don't know much about this particular meat product, except that it originally came from a small island off the coast of Japan and is so rare it makes kobe seem like ground round. It was darned tasty, and a first for me. I've never eaten a course where both the food and the wine were so uncommon I'll probably never have either one again.