1994 Dominique Laurent Chambertin-Clos de Beze Grand Cru

We were watching an episode of Jacques Pepin making a chicken ballotine recently and that inspired my husband. He watched many episodes of how to ballotine a chicken as well as the original Jacque Pepin episode to learn how to ballotine a chicken. Ballontining a chicken is to remove all of the bones from the chicken leaving just a little bit of the leg so that the chicken when stuffed can be tied into a roll. When Jacque Pepin did it, ballontining the chicken took only 5 minutes!
In most of the videos, the advice was to get your butcher to do it the first time. We know of a great butcher near us so we went there and assured that they knew how to ballotine a chicken, we ordered one. However, and this confused us, the butcher kept referring to the process as galantine. Since we are of that age where our hearing is not quite as good as it was, we just went with it. When we got the galantine chicken home, the butcher had totally removed the chicken skin from the chicken and the meat was totally in disarray. I stepped away from the kitchen and my husband put the chicken back together again, stuffed it and baked it and it was delicious.
This past weekend, my husband decided that enough time had elapsed since the first galantine chicken fiasco that he was going to try his hand at ballontining a chicken. He did it! To celebrate, he opened up this 1994 Dominique Laurent Chambertin-Clos de Beze Grand Cru to pair with the stuffed chicken. The aroma is one that I associate with Burgundy. The wine was still youthful tasting, crystal purple in the glass and was well balanced with black cherries and an acid backbone giving it a long finish.
Here is what the chicken ballontine looked like stuffed with wilted spinach, gruyere cheese and croutons:

For dessert, we made a French Silk pie.

It was the first time that we made this pie and it was smooth, silky and delicious!