HENRY OF PELHAM CUVÉE CATHARINE CARTE BLANCHE ESTATE BLANC DE BLANCS 2018

To invoke an Asteroid City concept, the time is always right to taste Cuvée Catherine. This because it’s simply never a sparkling wine we need to see in “the wrong way,” as Kafka once wrote, “to be able to see things the right way.” Many bubbles fall into the category of that conundrum but in Ontario the Speck brothers’ Carte Blanche always gets the art right. It excuses us the need to learn that artifice is the antithesis of affect, if simply because it is a fizz that presents a consistently clear vision of sparkling winemaking as an art form that casts a light, illuminates and enriches. Case in point and again with 2018, perhaps the most decadent of them all, perfectly aligning base wine fruit with secondary fermentation and felicitous acidity towards an elasticity that snaps back on the palate with each sip. If you need to ask did it turn out, the answer will always be, Cuvée Catherine always turns out. One day the H of P boys have got to pour this for the filmmaker because theirs is benchmark cinematic bubble. Drink date: 2025-2032. Tasted November 2025. (Michael Godel,winealign.com,Dec. 9, 2024)