A private meal prepared by the Hotel Shilla’s great Chef Seo Song Ho gave me a chance to compare some outstanding Burgundies with traditional Korean cuisine. The food was once again extraordinary, with my favorite dish being the outrageously flavorful Korean beef tartar strips with the julienned pear and soy sauce. The steamed scallops in cabbage with black rice and lotus seed purée was another winner as was the char-grilled Korean beef ribs and ribeye with asparagus. The sweet potato noodle soup with eggplant sounds relatively bland, but it was a beautifully intense, flavorful, fascinating dish. Remarkably, all of these offerings worked extraordinarily well with the three great wines that were served. One thing I have noticed about high quality, traditional Korean cuisine is that it is neither peppery nor spicy, but it tends to be an elegant, Korean version of China’s great Cantonese cooking. However, there is a purity and simplicity in the Korean cooking that one does not see in Cantonese cuisine, which tends to be more of an assemblage. The Koreans seem to want all the individual components to reveal their personalities, and that was apparent in these wonderful presentations.

As for the wines, from a great vintage in Champagne, the 2002 Louis Roederer Cristal is spectacular. It is a young champagne with lots of brioche, honeysuckle, and nectarine notes presented in a full-bodied, rich style. Purists would probably say it is too young to drink, and it has at least 15-20 years of life remaining. One of the greatest white Burgundies I have tasted recently is Domaine Leflaive’s 1992 Chevalier Montrachet. An extraordinary expression of liquid minerality intermixed with white currants, citrus, honey, orange rind, and lemon butter, its unmistakable liquid rock character gives the wine full-bodied richness with great acidity buttressing some serious power and intensity. I have always believed the DRC 1990s were among the most outstanding red Burgundies I have tasted, forgetting what they also achieved in 1999 and 1959. Offering a sublime drinking experience, the 1990 DRC La Tâche is one of those magical wines that are so rarely encountered in Burgundy. The color is just beginning to lighten at the edge, and the wine possesses an ethereal perfume of forest floor, red and black currants, plums, earth, and spice. Fleshy, full-bodied, and expansive with a silky texture, it is an opulent, rich Burgundy with no aggressiveness or hard edges. This extraordinary wine appears to have hit full maturity at age twenty, where it should remain for another 10-15 years.