![]() The tannins are ripe and fine-grained, and provide a subtle backbone, well-hidden behind the plush fruit. On the palate a very welcoming texture, plush and svelte although still with an elegant poise. Despite its warm and ripe character (reflecting the vintage) there is still a fine, green peppercorn edge to it as well. The nose is very seductive, a theme which can be found running throughout this wine, with plenty of dark and toasty black cherry fruit along with elements of fresh coffee grounds. ![]() ![]() The wine has a very dark colour, with a glossy concentration right out to the rim, showing the deep, matt shades of a wine in very early maturity, but without any real move away from its red-black hue. And so this is not a candidate to join the display of fanciful curios after all rather, the St Julien of Pichon-Lalande is a very real entity, just as real as the shopkeeper’s most fantastic of antiquities, the seven-league boots of the story’s title, (as Antoine Buge discovers for himself on the very last page).Īnd so to this week’s wine, the identity of which is by now I hope obvious, the 2003 St Julien from Château Pichon Longueville Comtesse de Lalande (almost ubiquitously abbreviated to Château Pichon-Lalande). The two are separated by appellation law their geographically distinct origins must be maintained right through to the moment the wines go into the bottle. The fruit can not be included in the grand vin, a Pauillac, no more than village Meursault can be legally bottled as Montrachet. The vineyards of Pichon-Lalande do indeed stretch over the communal boundary into St Julien, 11 hectares of them in fact. Is there a vinous equivalent of these mischievous relics? Perhaps there is – what about a St Julien made from the fruit of vines within that appellation owned by one of the top estates in neighbouring Pauillac, Pichon-Lalande? A ridiculous suggestion you might think….but think again. That boundary should be well and truly broken by the sight of a leather football-cover labelled “once the property of Pope Joan“, but if that is insufficient evidence of the shopkeeper’s fraudulence, those still viewing the artefacts with open-minded credulity might awaken to the deception with the discovery of the Flying Carpet of the Thief of Baghdad within the store. A small, white-wood kitchen table marked up as the “outdoor writing-desk of Queen Hortense” begins to push the boundary of believability, however, as one imagines that Hortense, step-daughter of Napoleon I, wife of his brother and mother of French Emperor Napoleon III may have possessed a somewhat more grandiose bureau. All that is remarkable is that these objects should have come to this run-down, backwater shop. A hat once owned by French President Félix Faure, for example, or the pipe-stem of the Reine Pomaré, otherwise known as Lise Sergent, one-time cohort of Baudelaire who was on occasion known to dress as a man. Some of the articles within his window display do not, at first glance, seem that remarkable. Or at least that is what the shopkeeper would have his customers believe a closer inspection might of course suggest otherwise. All about the madman is his stock, as Aymé describes it “the modest litter of history”. Within there is a nameless shopkeeper and a stuffed heron, a quite lifeless companion who nevertheless seems to engage the merchant not only in intensely passionate debate but also the occasional game of chess. In Marcel Aymé’s tale of schoolboy adventure and socioeconomic divide Les Bottes de Sept Lieues, first published in 1943, the protagonist Antoine Buge and his band of accomplices discover, during their afternoon quest, a curio shop.
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