Capturing Memories in a Bottle
By Tom Wark
Well-aged wine isn’t special because it is well aged. It isn’t special because its flavors and aromas are defiantly subdued and evolved. Well-aged wine — a bottle with some experience — is special because it has the ability to make us contemplate the past, where we’ve been, and how we got to this moment when we are sniffing and drinking in another time.
Consider the 1991 Ravenswood Old Hill Vineyard Zinfandel. It was a wine my wife and I broke open this weekend and consumed alongside various cheeses and a bit of sauteed Linguica. Yes, its cherry cordial and muted blackberry flavors, along with the elegant structure and the bing cherry/dusty herb aromas, were very satisfying. But more importantly, it took us back.
As the vines that would yield the grapes for this wine were just starting to see bud break, the first Persian Gulf War was ending.
As the grapes for this wine were ripening in the Old Hill Vineyard, The Warsaw Pact was being dissolved and Boris Yeltsin was becoming the first freely elected Russian President.
And no doubt as the grapes were being harvested, Joel Peterson and those would were evaluating the potential for this wine had one ear trained on the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings going on in Washington.
Perhaps as the wine was being pressed in the Ravenswood cellars, the crew of workers were listening to that remarkable new song from Nirvana, “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” that was released that year. Or were they discussing the unfortunate events taking place in an adult theater that brought down the mighty Pee Wee Herman.
I was embarking on a career in wine public relations at the time. Green as I was, I knew it was my career.
This is the beauty of well-aged wine, of a song from a bygone era that pops up on the radio out of nowhere, of an old newspaper that you find tucked away in a box in your parents’ attic: They have the potential to take you back. Yet with wine, you consume the past; you ingest the past. This is why drinking older wine is important. It is a pleasure that confirms the past — and that’s part of the present.
Tom: You are right on. I purchased a few bottles of my sons’ birth years of 1988 and 1989 — no, not cases of First Growth Bordeaux, sadly, but a few rogue bottles of Loire, Rhone, German and the like — and I’ve enjoyed a few of them in recent weeks, including two ’88s on my son’s birthday: a Mondavi Reserve Cab that greatly exceeded expectations, and a Merkelbach Auslese that was drinking beautifully. And yes, I had a few deja vu moments much as you described. My 2 buddies and I, all 1958 birth years, found an Italian a few years ago — I think it was a Chianti Classico Riserva — that we opened with great anticipation. It was sewage water.
We found something else to sip on, and recovered from our grief rather quickly, as I recall.
Well done.
Mark