What was your first wine epiphany?

1994 Wynns Michael, almost exactly 10 years ago.

Went looking for it after a John & Dottie article on Australian Shiraz.

They rated the 1993 a "Delicious!", and I found the 1994 at the Carolina Wine Company.

By the way, I drank my last bottle a year or two ago at an offline, and

A) I wish I had a case of the stuff, and

B) If I had a case of the stuff, I'd hold it for at least another 20 or 30 years.

What a fantastic wine.

Like others, mine was a stepwise epiphany, but my first one was in '78, when I discovered how good wine could be when drinking a '74 Concannon Sauvignon Blanc. A more complete epiphany timeline follows:

1978 - A '74 Concannon Sauvignon Blanc convinces me that wine can be juicy and delicious
1981 - A '79 Dehlinger Zinfandel open my eyes to what complexity of flavor is all about
1982 - A horizontal tasting of '78 Cabs from Mondavi, Caymus and Clos du Val shows me how profound Cabernet can be
1983 - The '78 Ch. de la Gardine CdP opens my eyes to French wine
1986 - The '78 Chateau Montelena raises the bar yet again
1987 - The pairing of a '79 Zinfandel with lamb vindaloo demonstrates the potential for food/wine synergy
1988 - The '85 R. Dauvissat Chablis 'Les Preuses' rearranges my thinking about Chardonnay
1992 - A '90 Ridge Geyserville teaches me how profound "Zin" can be
1999 - '88 Chave Hermitage -- wow
2001 - '61 Lynch Bages makes fans of aged Bordeaux of us
2001 - New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc reminds me of the appeal of white wines
2001 - Visits to JP Brun and Marcel Lapierre rearrange our thinking about Beaujolais
2005 - '88 Dujac Clos de la Roche makes Burgundy believers of both Jean and myself

I'm still waiting for my next epiphany -- they never grow old!

Mark Lipton

My first real eye-opener was a Chambertin Cuvée Héritiers Latour 1947 tasted in the early 60s.

At about the same period, I served my apprenticeship on a number of great Bordeaux, Latour 28, Mouton 34, Pichon-Lalande 49 and numerous delicious 53s, including Cos, Lynch-Bages, Pichon, Beychevelle, Cantemerle, Léoville, etc. There were also some delicious Rheingau and Mosel, particularly from 53. But none of these have had quite the impact on my memory as the Chambertin.

From the 80s two really superb wines stand out; la Tâche 62 and Latour 45 (the latter purchased in the early 60s for £ 2.25 - then $ 6.30)

From the last 10 years, I particularly remember the following -

Palmer 61
Ausone 59
Dönnhoff 98 eiswein
Chevalier-Montrachet 85 Leflaive
Bonnes-Mares 69 Clair-Daü
Vouvray Huet 1947 (Le Mont, I think)
Corton Bouchard P&F 29
A series of Barolet pre-war burgundies
Imperial 66 and Viña Real 59, 64 & 70

I have had the mythical Latour 61 twice which left me full of admiration but unmoved, unlike the 45.

The first wine that made me open my eyes a little and started making me think seriously about wine was in 1999, and it was a Sella & Mosca Cannonaou di Sardegnia at a restaurant during a business lunch.

After that Chateau des Charmes Reisling Late Harvest was a favorite...and buying half-bottles of Prieuré de Cenac as drinking a whole bottle between the 2 of us was crazy talk!

The rest is history...

[David M. Bueker]

And the discussion was about jazz. I think it's easier to get to like jazz with an artist like Dave Brubeck than say Coltrane (who I now truly enjoy).

Still, if Coltrane was Burgundy, you could do worse than the Coltrane Ballads album, Spiritual or as Dale said, My Favorite Things.

In fact, you can hear "You Don't Know What Wine Love Is", as far as I know, legally and in its entirety.

I like the idea of Coltrane as Burgundy. Brubeck is really more Beaujolais.

Ah, but such a beguiling Beaujolais. I heard Brubeck's group play on the lawn by Sheldon Art Gallery while attending the University of Nebraska. Ideal day to just groove on some easy jazz.

JC - I am fortunate in that Liz went to the same church as Dave Brubeck did, up in Connecticut and I have since met him here in DC, at National Cathedral, no less.
Jon

[David M. Bueker]

I would never have gotten into jazz if not for The Dave Brubeck Quartet Live at Carnegie Hall.

Chateau Beau-Site 1961. It was our first real wine and I bought the store out.

Jon Peterson,
You and Liz might enjoy the video "The Stone Carvers" (1984) about the Italians who carved the gargoyles, etc. on the National Cathedral. It also shows them talking about their Italian roots, drinking wine with their picnic-style meals, etc. I purchased one video for myself and gave another to a friend whose father had been a stone mason in New York City.

Thanks, JC. I'll check out "The Stone Carvers" over a glass of vino.
JP

remember vividly the first glass of Rioja (don't know the year or specific vineyard, but it would likely have been something around '88 or so) I had almost exactly 13 years ago. I had grown up with junk cabernets or merlots costing roughly as much as an equal volume of soda which were a heart healthy way to wash down a steak or tenderloin sandwich while fishing--hardly anything to make you want to drink it on its own let alone have some kind of liking for it. But while on a school trip to Spain, I was in a group that stopped in Sevilla for a flamenco performance. They were taking drink orders I asked for something the locals liked...and starting with one taste, that one glass of wine stuck in my head for years until I could do something with this curious, powerful, soul piercing miracle that comes from rain, soil, charred wood, and thousands of years of the work of human hands, taste buds, and vision. To this day Riojas and most other temperanillos and grenaches have been my enduring favorites and formed the basis for all of my exploration into what a wine can be and what I can find in it.

[David M. Bueker]

Chateau Beau-Site 1961. It was our first real wine and I bought the store out.

Sure...sure...I've never seen (or drank) any evidence of that purchase.

Great thread:

I've probably related my account before, but if we're talking epiphany, it was at the Domaine Les Gouberts in Gigondas in the summer of '99. Because of my growing interest in wine, I'd arranged our long-overdue holiday in France to head through the Loire and the Southern Rhone. I'd done my homework. I'd had fun up in the Loire. We'd visited several wineries both there and in other Rhone villages. We'd picnicked by the Loire, and stayed overnight at Les Vieilles Granges, several miles from Tain L'hermitage, where we were so late arriving and I was so completely taken aback by the wine list of Northern RHone classics (on which I had NOT done my homework) that I panicked and ordered a Tains L'Hermitage Crozes-Hermitage. And that was certainly not an epiphany!

But then came that morning at Les Gouberts. Mme Cartier treated us tourists like royalty; I can't imagine Parker getting a more friendly reception. She lined up the Domaine's entire production, leading through Village wines to the Gigondas and even a complementary taste of the Cuvee Florence. She then ended the tasting with the winery's Viognier - not something one might normally expect in the order of tastings, but she knew what she was doing alright. Words still fail me. It wasn't just an epiphany. It was absolutely ethereal. It was magic. (And it wasn't even an expensive bottle of wine.) I fell in love. I came home from that trip, signed up to this group, bought tons of 98 Gigondas that was still mercifully cheap in New York, realized I could not afford my infatuation with Condrieu but occasionally splurged nonetheless, and got invited to offlines that introduced me to aged Chateauneuf du Pape, Cote ROtie, Hermitage and other wines that make me wish I could revisit Les Vieilles Granges and its wondrous wine list. But above all that, I can still envision that Viognier and the impact it had on my taste buds (and bank balance).

I've given up trying to turn people onto wine. If they're interested, they'll say so and show some interest. If they're not, they'll gulp down whatever I pour them regardless.


Tony

Chateau Beau-Site 1961. It was our first real wine and I bought the store out.

Sure...sure...I've never seen (or drank) any evidence of that purchase.

You're a lucky man, David. Although wine was a staple at dinners at our house, it was usually Charles Krug Zinfandel -- admittedly better then than in recent years -- bought in jug form and stored in decanter for days or weeks or Almaden French Colombard for my mother. It wasn't until I was in college that I realized that red wines could have fresh flavors if from a recently opened bottle. Actually, thinking back on it, my first true wine epiphany was probably while traveling in Germany in '68 and getting to taste some decent white wines with my parents. In retrospect, they were probably nothing special but a definite change from what I'd seen and tasted at home.

Mark Lipton

For me, it was an early 80's Chateau Montelena. I was wine tasting with my girlfriend at the time and a number of friends and we 'stumbled across' the winery as we were touring Napa. I can still smell the nose of that wine today . . . and it was simply the aromatics of it that turned me on to red wine for good . . .