Your most memorable wine experience

Came across this old note I wrote back on ebob. Made me think of the best wine experiences I’ve had. What are yours? Doesn’t have to be the “best” bottle you’ve drunk, just something really memorable that involved wine.

7/26/06
TN: 1997 Cheval Blanc
I’m at a conference out here at Mt. Holyoke college this week. A very informal conference, we have talks in the mornings and evenings, then hang around drinking beer until later hours. I took a drive around to see the countryside this afternoon, and stopped in to Table & Vine to take a look around. On a lark, I picked up a half bottle of Cheval Blanc. No wine glasses in sight, so this was drunk straight from the bottle.

Color: no idea. Nose: ?? For a 97 Bordeuax, this is pretty damn good. Some decent depth, nice balance, though a little on the higher acid side, fairly mild tannins. Impressions of red fruits, plums, pomegranate, some vanilla oak presence. 89 points. Half bottle of wine: $65. Swigging Cheval Blanc from the bottle while talking science with a Nobel Prize winner: priceless.

A Tony Coturri Albarello. It complete opened a new world for me - didn’t knew wine could or should taste that way! Got me on a huge natural wine binge for years, that I’m now mostly recovered from. [cheers.gif]

1983 Rousseau Chambertin about 8 or 10 years ago; showed me the heights of which red burgundy is capable. Never really been equalled by any other wine, though some have come close.

1967 Domaine Jean-Louis Chave Hermitage
October 16, 1992

With Gerard and Jean-Louis Chave in Gerard’s home in Mauves
The wine was poured from an 18th century crystal decanter
Steve and I consumed this wine while listening to Gerard and Jean-Louis argue about Algerians. In French.

Steve and I have never ever had another wine experience even approaching this . . .


Carole

Can’t remember ‘best’, but sure miss the old Table & Vine in Northampton.

And yet, we’ve been to your place how many times? :wink:

Your visits are always memorable, Alan, but I don’t recall that you’ve ever brought us a 67 Chave . . .

How about a '67 Chevy?

[snort.gif]

Those are both great stories.

I don’t have anything remotely as interesting but the one experience I remember vividly was from some time that would have been late 1970s or early 80s. I had a friend whose father was a biochemist in another state. He introduced us to one of his colleagues, also a biochemist, and told us that he was a very nice man but extremely peculiar.

So this second guy invites us for dinner with his wife. They were a Japanese couple and for whatever reason, his wife apparently never went out so they always entertained at home. We greet each other and he goes downstairs and comes up with a bottle of wine, opens it, and starts talking about it. We finished it and he does it again with a different bottle. Turns out his peculiarity was that he was a wine collector.

“How eccentric!” we remarked to each other.

Over the next few years he would tell us about meeting a pilot at an airport because the pilot had picked up something from California or Italy or France or somewhere and was only in town for a few hours to deliver the wine. And in turn he was flying to Texas and needed to take a few bottles that our friend had picked up at some conference. This was all pre-internet so it was done by mail and phone. It was like some subculture where planning was key to obtaining those bottles.

I thought it was so weird and obsessive that you really had to be a little off if you were going to be involved in something so mystifying.

Unfortunately, Sam is no longer with us. I wish I had the opportunity to talk to him now. I doubt that he’d laugh. He’d probably suggest opening a nice white to start with.

Bottle of DRC Echezeaux with my dad, who’d never had one, at his member-member tournament at his club. Most of the best experiences I have had, have been with my dad and sharing with him.

I had a helluva time with some Boones Farm in college. A lot of it I can’t remember for some reason.

'08 Dom Perignon … opened it this May the night we lost our 10 year old pup ('08 was her birth year) after a battle with lung cancer … honestly remember very little/nothing about the wine, but it brought us together and fueled a couple hours of happy stories about her that helped get us through the night

“Most memorable” is impossible to narrow down; but these two come immediately to mind:

  1. An ‘86 Montrose in the very late ‘90s. Shared with an old high school buddy at home late at night - at the patio overlooking the garden; reminiscing about the trouble we’d get into way back when.

  2. A ‘78 Pichon Lalande under the stars, after an al fresco dinner at the grounds of Château Siran (where we were staying). It was a warm summer night in early June 2006. I was with my wife and a few friends, including our host (whose family used to own Pichon Lalande). We didn’t talk of anything of import - I actually remember absolutely nothing of our conversation topics; but I do remember the night itself very well.

Here’s one of more than one . . .
Rambling around Anjou. Dropping by unannounced and being invited to join an ongoing private tasting by the winemaker’s wife to help her communicate with an English speaking couple. Discovering that the guy had the same name as me. Hanging around and chatting a bit after they left and being joined by the winemaker with a bottle of Bonnezeaux for toasting his wife’s birthday. Serendipity!

A bottle of Silvio Nardi Brunello (vintage long since forgotten) shared with my dad and wife after our first child was born.

Being walked through a 5 vintage vertical of Lapierre Morgon by Matthieu at their winery in Beaujolais, inclusive of stories about each vintage. And it just so happened MS Brian McClintic was there for that tasting as well.

1991 Pichon Lalande. At its best, the epitome of pleasure and understated hedonism. :slight_smile:

One time years ago at Bern’s we drank some 19th and very early 20th century Bordeaux. It’s hard to describe. When I try to tell non-wine-geeks about it I tend to get strange looks, so it’s a memory that just sits mostly with me. The next year we did even better. Those were pretty good experiences. And a Rousseau dinner here around 2012 or so was off the chain memorable.

My wine epiphany.
!974 Chapel Hill NC, then a wine wasteland in an almost totally dry county.
Parental visit → out to a real restaurant and my dad, having no wine knowledge, let me choose.
1968 Duhart-Milon Rothschild. I had no idea wine could taste like that.
Only years later did I learn it was a horrible vintage, which no doubt accounted for it being in NC then.
What I did know at that time was that I loved it.