When deciding on a food match for this wine, we turned to one of our reliable favourites: Ottolenghi’s Baked Rice with Confit Tomatoes and Garlic (page 174 of his ‘Simple’ cookbook). The rice is baked with cinnamon quills for a fragrant lift and delivers a natural sweetness from the slow-cooked tomatoes and garlic. Soft and rounded in flavour, it’s an good match for a mature wine—nothing sharp or overpowering.
We were a little overzealous in removing the cork from this bottle and it broke in half during extraction. On decanting, an immediate aroma of strawberry jam was a promising sign, the wine still holding onto some of its primary fruit.
The palate delivered a mouthful of beautifully ripe fruit—rich and opulent, yet somehow restrained and elegant at the same time, quite the combination! It’s a full-bodied but refined wine with impressive length. It still looks relatively youthful; if you didn’t see the label, you might guess it was only half its age.
It’s drinking very well now but still has plenty of life ahead of it if you get a good bottle (cork) that has been properly cellared.
Drink now or over the next 20+ years.
2002 Noon Reserve Cabernet, a back vintage from our museum cellar.