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20 Jul 2024 | Randy Kemner

OLD WINE

Sometime in the past year, I acquired a small cellar from the estate of a man who had died six years earlier.  His son, who didn’t drink wine, had inherited his father’s wine and wine fridge which was now on the fritz.  This isn’t a good thing if any treasures inside are to be auctioned off.

After examining his wines, which contained some international pedigrees as well as some 30 year old California Riesling and Chenin Blanc, I told him I could not sell these wines, but my personal curiosity as to how these old wines would age, though academic, prompted me to make him an offer for the lot, which he gladly accepted.

Recently, Dale and I had some neighbors over for a happy hour nosh of rose and charcuterie. I went to my cellar, and just for fun retrieved a Spanish wine from the collection. It was marked “Rioja” in big red letters with a vintage date of 1961, so I had zero expectations that this 60 year old wine would be good to drink.  Besides, it had lost so much color, I could see light through the bottle.

Or so I thought.

What I failed to notice was this bottle was not a red wine, but a white Rioja, clearly marked in English along with the words “Spanish Chablis”.  The plastic netting had obscured all but the Rioja name, so I had no idea I was looking at a 60 year old white wine from Spain’s greatest table wine region.

The cork crumbled, as expected, so I poured the amber wine through a metal strainer into a carafe, where we then poured it into our glasses.

The aroma had sherried, and the first sip was similar to the flavor of Oloroso Jerez.  Yet there was still fruit in the wine—kind of like a Jura white wine that had been aged with the flor, with little overt acidity, but still enough to give the wine a gentle structure.

Surprising me and one of the other three tasters, we drank a second glass admiringly.  It is always a profound experience when you drink a wine from previous generations, especially one from a legendary wine vintage, the same year that JFK was inaugurated, before anyone had ever heard of the Beatles, let alone personal computers.  The texture was silky, the aroma intriguing, and the fruit present enough to give two of us pleasure at the table.

Old wine is not to everyone’s taste, as the other two at our table testified.  Any semblance of lively fruitiness, or any youthful floral character was probably gone by the Reagan administration. 

But for me, drinking a wine made and sold by people who are likely six feet under, and cellared by a man who certainly was, became more than just a liquid refreshment and an aged-wine experiment.  It was a humbling reminder that wine can remind us, every once in a while, of our shared histories and humanity.  Consuming that soft amber liquid nourished me with a profound sense of gratitude for people I had never met in another time and place.

Comments
Virginia Madsen was much more articulate than me on the subject, yet we were both on the same page! Thanks for commenting.
RANDALL KEMNER - 24 Jul 2024 - 21:49
Randy, reading this piece made me recall the scene from Sideways when actress Virginia Madsen's character, Maya, describes her take on wine and how it relates to her feelings regarding pleasure, time and the human element.

"I do like to think about the life of wine, how it's a living thing. I like to think about what was going on the years the grapes were growing, how the sun was shining that summer or if it rained... what the weather was like. I think about all those people who tended and picked the grapes, and if it's an old wine, how many of them must be dead by now. I love how wine continues to evolve, how every time I open a bottle a bottle it's going to taste different than if I had opened it any other day. Because a bottle of wine is actually alive - it's constantly evolving and gaining complexity. That is, until it peaks - like your '61 - and its steady, inventible decline. And because it tastes so f*****g good.
Denver Kissinger - 24 Jul 2024 - 17:56
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