By way of introducing myself to this forum, I thought I'd tell the story of a special bottle of wine. To celebrate my 60th birthday, my wife and I went to France last January - 5 days in Paris, a week in Burgundy (in the small but gastronomically significant town of Saulieu) and then back to Paris for another couple of days. While wandering around Paris one morning, we stumbled upon a street market: a few clothes and hardware kinds of things, and lots of wonderful looking food - seafood, vegetables, sea salt, sausages, all kinds of exotic things that you'd never find in the US - and wine. But these were not the wares of an official wine dealer per se, it was clearly flea market wine. 2€ wine, 5€ wine, 10€ wine, 15€ wine etc. I figured it would be fun to buy a bottle of something and have a picnic in Burgundy and drink whatever we'd bought. I didn't know much about what I was looking at, and so I did what I'm sure a lot of people do, picked by price and the look of the label. I had the help of another friendly shopper who seemed to have bought from this vendor before, and between us we chose a 1995 Margaux from Chateau Valliere. He said '95 was a good year and we checked the level of the wine in the neck to make sure there had been no significant evaporation. I handed the dealer 10€, thanked my consultant, and the deal was done. Well, of course we never did end up drinking it and I brought it back to the states in my suitcase, and stashed it in my cellar as a special occasion wine to be consumed later. A whole year went by without the right circumstances to open it, and so on my 61st birthday I decided that special occasion had arrived. The night before I baked a rhubarb pie, and that afternoon I braised a lamb shoulder in red wine and home-made beef stock. We went to a movie (Atonement) and then came back to the house to finalize the meal and drink the mystery wine. There is such a lot of pleasure in anticipating a bottle of wine, is there not? Especially true if you've had it for a while and thought about it, imagining its pleasures, contemplating its promise. Often looking at a handsome bottle just makes me smile. I looked at the label one more time - a lovely black and white line drawing of a vigneron on a horse drawn cart carrying a barrel of grapes, outlined with a fine gold decorative grape and wine leaf motif. Jean-Pierre Touya proprietaire; Soussans 33460 Margaux. 12.5% by volume. I had of course, searched the web in vain for any information about this Chateau or wine maker. I cut the foil seal and removed the top portion, and adimired the 1995 stamp on the top of the slightly red stained cork. Wow. 18 years old. I put the corkscrew into the cork and turned it and began to pull. The cork broke in half, leaving the bottom in the neck of the bottle. No problem. Carefully I re-inserted the screw into the remaining cork and pulled it out with a satisfying pop. The time had come. I knew full well this wine could be great, fair, completely gone, or somewhere in between. Any one of those scenarios would have been fine with me. In a way this bottle had already given me enough. So how was it? I'd give it an 85 or so. It never did shake a kind of musty old cellar smell that may well have been cork taint (though I did kind of like that suggestion of age and cellar storage) but under that was a solid well make old world wine, nice subtle hint of dark berries, good structure, nice balance, mellowed tannins, a nice deep color just beginning to turn to a brickish shade. Certainly engaging enough to keep me interested throughout its consumption, with a wonderful imagined narrative of history to go with it. A bottle I will always remember fondly. Sometimes it's a lot more than just the taste.
Bob
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