I’ve always wanted to post on the Corner, but I’ve never really been moved by any of the topics. Until now.

John, you won three pretty excellent wines at that raffle. Well, two for sure, and the third, the Pessac-Leognan, is sort of a mystery to me. The two St. Emilions are going to be excellent. You can drink them now, or hold them for a few years if you like. My guess is that the other one, the Pessac, is going to be a little thin, but as I said, that one is a mystery to me.

A couple of things to bear in mind: 1) If you don’t know how they were stored–especially the temperature–then you really don’t know how long they’ll bear up. If they’ve been cellared perfectly, then they may last another 5 to 7 years or longer, but wines, like people, tend not to be stored under ideal conditions; and 2) give them a chance to mellow out a bit on their sides in a cool spot for a week or two before doing anything to them. Again, like people.

You really should feel free to drink them right now. These are 10 year-old wines, and they’ll all be interesting to taste.

By the way, the winemaker of the Clos de l’Oratoire has a website that’s pretty interesting and extremely French.

Discussions of wine and food pairings, like discussions of cannibalism or Canadian politics, can either be incredibly boring or incredibly unpleasant. Suffice it to say that good wines go best with the food you want to eat most, and there’s no “right” thing to eat.

However. There are some classic combinations, and with Bordeaux, the ancients have usually paired those wines with classic meat dishes, roasts, and minerally vegetables, like greens, anything with a bit of carbonized char usually works well. Cheese is problematic: I love it with red wine; a chef during my short stint at cooking school in Paris thought it was disgusting.

My suggestion is to drink the Pessac first, with something casual, open it and leave it open for a few minutes, then pour it and let it develop, as all wine does, in the glass. It could easily get a lot better as the air hits it.

The other two, I’d say, serve together, side-by-side. St. Emilion is a pretty prolific wine-growing and making area, and has always had a chip on its shoulder for being left out of the famous 1855 classification of Bordeaux wines–so they’ve been working extra hard for 151 years to stick it to the snobs. Tasting them together will be interesting. (You can put away two bottles during dinner, no problem, right? RIGHT??) Just make sure that the bottles are cool to the touch–you’re aiming for something between 55 and 60 degrees F. And feel free to decant them; it really will make them taste better. A steak, a glass of Bordeaux, a stack of Danish cartoons, a copy of the latest EU requirements and guidelines for bottling and labeling and making wine and wine-grape product, sit back and toast the end of Europe as we know it.