Thursday, 26 March 2015

The wines at Nana's party


In Food with the Famous, Jane Grigson gave the full menu of Nana's dinner party (to celebrate her acting debut) in which Emile Zola uses "every dishes chosen, its success, its serving [to make] some comment on the plot and characters, or gives a hint - not always a subtle one - of what is to come." Zola had already done this in L'Assommoir, in which Nana was first introduced in his Les Rougon-Macquart series. As can be seen in the picture above there are all kinds of rich and complicated dishes (many involving truffles), maybe as a hint to the fact that Nana has only a beautiful body, but basically no talent in acting.

Right at the bottom, the last line indicated that the wines to be served are Meursault, Chambertin and Leoville. Looking at the dishes, one sees that dishes with which white wines and reds are served are all jumbled up, giving sommeliers a headache if one were present. The other question was which Leoville did Nana (or indeed Zola) had in mind. The original grand estate was split off in 1836 to give Leoville-Barton and later in 1840 to give Leoville-Poyferre. All three were classified in 1855 as Duexieme Cru.

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