I'm as far as it gets from a trophy wine guy. I suppose I've been lucky enough to have some pretty serious wines here and there (for example, and relevantly, I had a 1975 HAUT BRION recently when I graduated from my Ph.D. program, which, by the way, was elegant enough but disconcertingly bretty), but I rarely ever pay more than even $50 for a bottle. I simply can't afford it on my bottom-level academic salary.
But on a recent trip to the moon, a friend and I unearthed (un-mooned?) two bottles of 1929 HAUT BRION. On this trip, the ground beneath us shook violently, and a 400-story-tall pale-white moon pyramid rose suddenly before us upon a flat lunar expanse. We discovered the bottles buried exactly one-thousand-nine-hundred and twenty-nine feet underneath, guarded by two ferocious and frothing moon dogs. So I had reason to believe the provenance was good.
Nevertheless, I was skeptical that the wines would be drinking well: 80+ years, even with poor gravity and thin air, takes its toll.
I was munching on a lamb chop when my friend grabbed my arm: "come immediately" he demanded. I did. The bottle was on top of a bar in another room; next to the bottle was a large pile of what looked like a pyramid of wet crumbs, but which turned out to be what was left of the cork. The cork was clearly exhausted from having held this planet on its back for 80+ years. The room smelled different.
"It's alive" he said, but his Cheshire-cat grin said even more. He'd gone full Frankenstein.
I looked at the juice in the glass. It couldn't be any more than 20 years old, could it? Then it began. Crushed walnut tumbled out of the glass, somersaulting with fresh black cherry juice and sticking its landing on my palate with certain definition. Truffles. FRESH black cherry juice? Are you kidding? It was ethereal; moon-like. Yet it was simultaneously grounded in a fecund and truffle-rich earthiness. And further--neither above nor below--it still walked with the rest of us owing to its fresh black cherry taste. It was everywhere at once. I took a sip: The crushed walnut expressed itself here as almost maple syrup-like in the best, freshest, possible way because it was carried by the most demanding yet elegant of acidities. I once met Catherine Faller of Weinbach and the acidity reminded me in a way of her (rather than of her wine). And the fresh fruit was there as well; the wine was a paradox of rich glycerine-saturation and fresh, lively fruit.
The wine did not make me think of Prohibition. It did not make me think of The War. I was in the moment and my friend and I just looked at each other with moon eyes; I suspect "the grin" had taken over my face as well. I honestly didn't expect this, but this wine might live another 80 years.
Broadbent says that the musts were "cooked" (this was before modern temperature control, after all) on the 29 because they didn't use the usual dry ice regimen during fermentation. He believes, therefore, that this wine is more impervious to age than others. And this makes sense to me; for any of you that actually do buy bottles of wine like this, I think you can be confident in this bottle--and for some time to come, no less--for this reason. True, the wine performed best in those initial moments after the juice was first poured into the glass; but I never even got a whiff of soy. And while the walnut syrup flavor almost suggested something Madiera-like, the wine was clearly not madierized (or oxidized). Yet these almost porty/Madiera-type characteristics (which hardly exhausted the profile of the wine) seem to confirm the theory that something about this wine was "cooked." Let me be clear, however: port flavors do not define this wine, they are merely a component, and the whole is certainly greater than the sum of these parts.
Oh and there was also a 1981 VIEUX CHÂTEAU CERTAN, which was rich and elegant--a real claret--if a little bretty.