Wine Tasting in Shinagawa - Enoteca Wine Shop

On Wednesday, I finished work a little bit early and hurried over from Akasaka over to Shinagawa. In the Wing Takanawa complex, there is a small branch of a wine shop called Enoteca across from the Anna Miller's coffee shop (as you cross from Shinagawa station you pass McDonald's and take the escalator to the second floor). The shop was featuring a wine tasting of six different wines from the Rothschild stable of wines. Although the Rothschilds have fabulous vineyards in Bordeaux, they have also purchased and developed vineyards in Chile and have tied up with California winemaker Robert Mondavi to make the $300/bottle Opus One, supposedly one of the finest wines in the world.

The wine tasting started with a Chilean white and then a powerful Chilean red, very spicy (probably heavy on the Cabernet Sauvignon), and then a more balanced wine from Languedoc (the area somewhat southeast of Bordeaux). In the latter part of the session there were three wines, all fantastic, one from the Pauillac region (Armailhac 1992), one the legendary Mouton Rothschild (every year they have a different person paint the labels; some collectors buy the wine not only for the extraordinary wine but also frame the labels after finishing the bottle), and one mildly sweet Sauternes dessert wine. All three were fabulous, the Pauillac rich and aromatic, the Mouton silky with aromas of chocolate, and the Sauternes not cloying sweet like typical wines of that region.

Apparently this Mouton Rothschild 2005 (just released, as it takes two years for the wine to be matured and then bottled) was the first to be tasted publicly in the world. Quite an honor to have been able to do so.

Most of the people there were amateur wine drinkers, but one French guy showed up and I talked to him about the wines in French. He also pointed out which ones he would buy as well as others available in the shop, but unfortunately many of them were way out of my budget!

I'd love to go to another wine tasting, and will sign up for the next one that's scheduled.

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LINKS
Enoteca English site and Japanese site

Baron Phillippe de Rothschild site