It’s not wine per se, but while hiking in Italy on a rocky trail ascending a steep ridge flanked by vineyards and orchards, we came by a farmer selling his limoncello.
Not wine, but…
Back in 1985 a college friend and I took People’s Express to Belgium and spent time driving around France. While passing through Normandy we stopped at a shop which carried Calvados. I had read an article on the stuff and picked a half bottle of 1976? Gontier Calvados. Opened it about 15 years later and it was wonderful.
An upcoming vacation to the area reminded me of it and I tried wine-searcher. Seems it’s very popular in New Zealand and Japan and has limited availability in Paris.
I wasn’t buying it, rather selling it. The first shop I worked at in 1990 had a small library of wine identified by neck tags. One was a 1982 Ch. Mouton Rothschild that was priced at $300. A couple guys came in and said they wanted it. I opened the case and slid the bottle out horizontally and started to turn it vertically. “Oh, keep it horizontal!” they said. “We’re going to drink it.” They then produced a mason jar and we kept the bottle ‘mostly’ horizontal while removing the capsule and cork before decanting for them. They left us the last inch or so in the bottle. Nothing was temp control in there…
Nails!!
Wine bought was several cases of Rosso di Montalcino from the officers club at Aviano Airbase. Wine not bought was a bottle of 1990 Krug in the shop at a regional airport in Thailand. Good price, I thought about it, but didn’t. No climate control. I also bought a reused plastic water bottle filled with homemade slivovitz from a mountain monastery in Romania. Not the worst thing I’ve ever had by any means.
In January 1980, my sophomore year in college, a friend of mine and I went to the local Howard Johnson’s restaurant in North Adams, Massachusetts – and ordered a bottle of 1967 Chateau Lafite Rothschild off their wine list for $20. Who knew Howard Johnson’s even had a wine list, let alone Lafite!
Amalfi coast??
Path of the Gods?
I once paid $4 for an airplane bottle of NV Funchal wine company Baul Madeira from a flea market. Hard to say the exact age, but it certainly looked like it came from the 60’s. The few sips we could muster proved to be immensely pleasurable.
Back in college I was working for a small wine store that bought private cellars from people. In the cellar we’re 6 magnums of 1970 DRC GE. The owner sold me one for $250 and I shipped it out to California for a wine gathering…it’s still probably the best experience I’ve had with that wine. I was lucky enough to get to taste it two other times. Too bad there aren’t any more old finds like that these days
I would guess one of the hilltop route crossings in Cinque Terre…
A good friend and neighbor had a wine cellar problem. While he was away, the AC went on and stayed on, it drove down the temp in his cellar to sub freezing for days. Lots of bottles with pushed out corks. The insurance company took it as a total loss and let him keep the wine. We moved all the bottles with pushed out corks to his basement and over the next year, drank them all. He’d call up and say “hey, I’m grilling burgers. Want to grab one of those bottles of 1990 DRC GE? Think it will go with the burger??” Almost all were great!
In Rome, in the late '90s. Walked into a good restaurant, asked to see the wine list. Everything crushingly marked up. For some reason I went to the Aussie section. 1986 Grange ‘Hermitage’ on the list for about $40. We had 2 bottles.
That reminds me…
the major Sydney importer/seller of Burgundy had a container full of great 1999 Burgs freeze on its way to Australia due to a stuck thermostat, the insurance company wrote it all off as a total loss, I helped unload the container and the wine stacked in the middle of the container had only got very very cold.
The wine importer had a frozen container sale with Bourgogne (Arnoux, Groffier etc) at $6 per bottle, premier cru was $12 a bottle and grand cru was from memory around 20-25.
I still have a couple of cases from that shipment ageing in the cellar, and I probably drank 10 cases of it over five years
Bingo. Hole in the hedge midway between Monterosso al Mare and Vernazza.
In the early 2000s, there was a bottle on the close-out table at the famous/infamous Crossroads store on 14th here in Manhattan. The label was missing and it was marked at $5.99. The neck label survived, though, and it said 1990. And it looked very familiar. Then I realized why: It matched an empty '83 Gentaz-Dervieux Cote Rotie I had in my kitchen.
Needless to say, I snatched the bottle. I waited another five years or so to open it. When I did, it was a bit worse for wear (Crossroads was famous for being warm in the summer months), but it was still very much Cote Rotie and gave a lot of pleasure.
It’s likely to be the last bottle of Gentaz I’ll ever drink. And certainly the only one at that price I’ll ever drink.
I’ve bought wine from strangers on the internet.
Though not strictly wine: a week ago I bought half a dozen miniatures of Chartreuse and Otard XO from the early 1950s for 50 pence each at the local indoor market, at what was basically a flea market stall. Someone had clearly bought a box of miniatures and were selling them off one at a time. It is a long while since I got that excited about a find…
In 2001, while on a driving trip through France with my then girlfriend/now wife, somewhere close to Narbonne in vineyard country, we followed some handwritten “wine-for-sale” signs. We were led through about 2km of a dirt road through the vineyards and arrived at a barn. It didn’t appear that anyone was around, so we knocked on the barn door and waited. Eventually, a short, portly woman wearing knee-high galoshes with a cigarette hanging down from her mouth opened the door and greeted us gruffly. We purchased a couple of 5-liter jugs from her and had one filled with Cab Franc, the other with Merlot, from a couple of huge stainless steel tanks using a gasoline-pump style hose. If memory serves, I think we paid the equivalent of $8-9 USD for all 10 liters.
Winner 