Laucha

I think I prefer four great bottles to twenty. So why do I keep going to Paulées? I’ve been thinking about this after the most recent Paulée. For those unfamiliar, a Paulée is a Burgundy-inspired dinner where everyone brings gems from their cellars to share (and, let’s admit it, show off a little). The wines were ridiculous: great Champagne, mature Burgundy, Côte-Rôtie, La Turque, 1900 Madeira, 1868 Armagnac, and eventually a mystery white that turned out to be Coche-Dury. How do you say no to an event like that? And yet, if I’m being truthful about how I most enjoy wine, it’s almost the opposite. Some of my favorite dinners are the small ones where 6–8 people open perhaps four or five serious bottles. You have time to follow each wine, revisit it over dinner, watch it change, and actually remember it the next morning. At a Paulée, abundance is part of the magic—but also the problem. Another great bottle appears before you’ve really understood the last one. And eventually there’s a more basic problem: palate fatigue. After enough wines, I simply can’t appreciate the next great bottle the way I would have three hours earlier. Something that somebody cellared for decades—and that might be the wine of the year at another dinner—becomes a few increasingly tired sips before the next cork is pulled. At some point, it almost feels disrespectful to the wine. And yet I find Paulées almost impossible to resist. Where else do you get the opportunity to taste so many extraordinary and sometimes incredibly rare wines in one evening? The generosity, camaraderie and sheer spectacle are intoxicating in their own way. So I remain conflicted. Would you rather have four truly great bottles over four hours—or twenty great bottles at a Paulée?