There were a few wines that haphazardly crossed my path in the 1980’s, names mostly forgotten and for sure including zinfandel out of experimentation, but it was 1985 Lynch Bages that got me hooked.
Damn Alfert, you noticed!
1997 Mondavi Reserve Cab…at a dinner in 2001.
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I have always loved wine, but the wine that made me want to learn more and build a cellar was:
2010 Domaine De La Grange des Peres.
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A bottle of 1961 Haut Brion in 1978. It was served by a housemate at a dinner celebrating the end of med school. It capped a series of Monday night dinners throughout the school year that he’d prepare where we all had to bring a bottle. Mostly decent but inexpensive stuff (Cotes du Rhone, Macon Lugny) on our student budgets but he splurged for this one.
Three of the five housemates got hooked on wine because of that bottle.
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I got into wine in the late ‘90s. By the early ‘00s I had discovered Oregon PN, Amerone, Burgundy, etc. and soon enough I had a general sense of the European wine landscape. Other things in life superseded and I didn’t collect much. I enjoyed the occasional good bottle, sometimes stored at home and sometimes purchased for drinking.
What got my attention again, and has turned me into growing my bottle collection, was a ‘21 Patricia Green Chardonnay. I hadn’t had an Oregon Chardonnay and there was something about that drink. It was of its place, saying something new. It gave me the libidinal energy to design my own wine collection.
1998 Vieux Telegraphe was the wine that put me over the edge
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The wine that got me started was Mateus rose
The wine that got me hooked was 1990 Drouhin Bonnes Mares
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Must have been mid 90ies when the chef/owner of our then most loved good food restaurant bitched at us for drinking champagne (Veuve) with their food and proposed he‘ll bring a good bottle of bordeaux at the same price point for us to try … brought some 89/90? LMHB and we were hooked.
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Like many, I was already excited about and exploring wine when I first encountered a few bottles that showed me what the highs could be. The ones I remember most clearly were 1990 L’Evangile and 1991 Guigal La Turque.
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2007 Lapierre Morgon
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I was involved with the wine program at my graduate school aptly nicknamed Thunderbird. I was able to drink some fun wines, but it wasn’t until I graduated that I got to taste my Eureka wine.
My wife and I had two weeks of vacation, and each chose a week. So that first week she chose hiking in Cornwall. Well, hiking is a bit of a misnomer. We started well, but then we were overtaken by an arthritic one legged nun, fell into nettles and endured rain and more rain that followed us around soaking us every couple of hours. We sheltered in one pub after another, then forgot about hiking and just planned a giant pub crawl.
The second week was life changing. We flew to Bordeaux and took a wine course at Chateau Loudenne with an MW. Not only did we taste and learn about Bordeaux, but we experienced incredible French food for the first time.
And there, I tasted Giscours 1979, the wine that propelled me into a career and has kept me passionate ever since. It was a vertical at the chateau, and was just so breathtakingly beautiful, it seemed to stop time. At the time , I realized the 1970/was as good, but somehow I related to the ‘79 in a way that I have seldom found in any other wine.
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In 1998 I was VP of sales for a small tech company in San Diego. We sold it to a company out of Atlanta that was rolling up healthcare information tech companies. We had our annual meeting in Vegas.The COO of the acquiring company took a bunch of us out to dinner at Smith and Wollensky. He ordered a few bottles of 94 Caymus to go with our steak dinner. And so it began
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In 1988, a friend of mine wanted some baseball card recommendations for his son, who was born in 1987. I helped him purchase some cards/sets and he asked me if I wanted a wine box or two to store my cards in return. With them were a bottle of the 1978 Montelena Estate Cab and Beringer PR Cab. We had the Montelena a short time after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake to acknowledge my luck in choosing not to go on the Bay Bridge that afternoon due to the anticipated World Series game traffic, and the wine was incredible. And here we are.
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The wine that got me hooked: 1996 Domaine Rene Leclerc Griotte Chambertin Grand Cru
I got it for a steal back in 2018. One of my very first Grand Cru experiences. It still haunts me…
Best I have had recently: 1978 Mouton Rothschild (375ml)
Outstanding! I was shocked at how youthful it was; especially out of small format. Do not sleep on the 78’s.
Funny, two great Cabs from a really unheralded vintage and a year for baseball cards that was absolute garbage with how over produced they were in 1987 (still like the Topps woody though and Donruss had McGwire, Maddux and Bo rookies)
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Around 1997 I started wandering into La Cantina wine shop in University Village (Seattle) from time to time, and that autumn began picking up half bottles of Bordeaux such as Cos d’Estournel, Rausan-Segla, both Pichons, and the like. But it was the 1990 Maucaillou that we opened first, paired with rack of lamb and decanted a half-hour before (because we heard that was a good thing to do), and it was grand.
A bottle of 1989 La Conseillante, opened in 1993. Had little wine experience at that point and none with anything at that level.
Les santenots du milieu, comtes Lafon 2009
Thinking about it further, it was probably Wolf Blass Black Label and Penfold’s Koonunga Hill while touring Australia and New Zealand in 1993 as a college graduation present. They got me interested in digging deeper into wine, which quickly led me to much higher end wines.
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