In the long ago past, I too was taken with Australian wines and swallowed whole the entire wine intelligentsia-so-far-as-I-knew-it's belief that 1998 was the most amazing vintage ever. Dan Phillips and his Grateful Palate import business were in full swing, and entirely coincidentally, I happened to be travelling around Australia in the fall of 2000 when the '98's were being released. So the five cases of cellar door souvenirs I brought home were all that vintage, many of which have not survived because they were overripe and lacked long-haul structure.
This bottle of Lloyd's Reserve from perhaps the most beautiful winery we visited in what was certainly the most beautiful wine growing region, the Maclaren Vale, is one of the few survivors remaining. I think the winery was actually called something like Annabelle's, but the Lloyd's Reserve was a proprietary name for this one signature bottling. It was never a big name here but widely respected there, and too we had this collector's treasure-hunt kind of value-added madness thing going on because the wine wasn't officially released and yet I talked them into selling me a few bottles, which after some discussion among the principals, they reluctantly did.
Those bottles have turned out to be that which I have learned I don't like: quite porty in weight, with lots of charcoal and an off-putting sour milk character that helps me pick out Maclaren Vale wines in blind tastings. 15 years out this wine is in it's last stages, saturated and smokey and plodding with dried black fruit, a trio of effects that make it unsuitable for anything but big flavors with tons of contrast, as was in fact the Ethiopian dish I served it with last night. Anything less would have been overwhelmed, and rare red meat would have accentuated it's near-decrepitude. Still, we drank every drop, the wine cranking loose all manner of detailed memories about that trip long since forgotten and presumed unrecoverable--the smell of a huge planting of an orange flower we'd never seen before, our first taste of of a cinnamon-cumin-sesame dry spice blend into which to dip bread dipped first in olive oil, and running from laughing magpies who were dive-bombing our heads as we made a run for the door at D'Arenberg.
Which is one of the things I love most about wine and which you can't attach a score to. That beyond the technical merits, or lack of, it's experiential. And that a sip or three shared at the right moment with the right person can do more than an airplane ticket at taking you back to another moment in time and remind you why you're here.