Your most memorable wine experience

[John_Morris]

1. A mentor of mine who was a German Baron and married to the daughter of a British Lord had emigrated from London to Toronto in the mid-1980’s, taking with him his nearly 100,000 bottle collection. For my 19th birthday he told me that he was going to sell, not give, but sell at his cost, a bottle of wine for me to have with my parents on my birthday. A birth year wine. It was a 1978 Domaine de la Romanée-Conti Romanée-Conti. It was, I seem to remember, about $130ish that he charged me (me, not my dad). Even in 1997 I knew this wine was worth thousands. My parents liked wine and knew it a bit but in a fairly narrow band. This was not in that band. My mother still doesn’t realize what we drunk and probably only had a small glass, my dad and I polished it off. . . . .

This is as God intended it.

[John_Morris]

… 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. . . .

And your view has changed?

[wspohn]

Four rather different wine experiences come to mind:

1. A bottle of Mateus Rose in the garden of the faculty club of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver [take note, Bill Spohn!] (in a year long enough ago that I have no interest in disclosing it publicly) with a young lady (whose name I will withhold because she’s long and apparently happily married). It was pretty innocent and ended with her driving me home in her Datsun 510 (oops, I may be dating myself). She was a master of smashing the shifter against my knee every time she geared up to 4th.

John - when was this?

I was at UBC from 1968, off and on until 1983, collecting various degrees and running the law school wine club toward the end of my tenure there.

[John_Morris]

I will PM you.

[Corey_Porche]

My two most memorable wines came together, and this would be the start of my wine collecting. Grand Floridian @ Disney World on July 4th 2015. 1978 DRC St Vivant and 1990 Chateau Lafite Rothschild

[Doug_Ackerman]

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

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

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

Carole: Years ago (I think it was 2001 possibly just before 9/11) we visited you and Steve for the second time in about a year. Feeling a bit guilty for imposing twice within a year, and beyond grateful for your hospitality, I brought with me a 90 Verset Cornas to share. Well, this wasn’t 67 Chave, but it was darn tasty…


fun thread! Most memorable…hmmm…not sure. Will report back

[Marcus_Goodfellow]

Randomly, my mom was married for a while to Jasper Morris’ brother-in-law. In 1996, my mother and I went to England, she was in the antiques business with a friend in Liverpool, and we stayed in London at Jasper’s flat for several days. He was operating a small shop called Morris and Verdin, and I was in the puppy phase of wine appreciation. I was reading everything I could find on wine, new world and old world, and tasting everything I could on a VERY limited budget. I had been expressing some sorrow at having 1968 as a birth year, and he agreed it wasn’t optimal.

The next night Jasper cooked dinner for us at his flat. In the time we were there he was a tremendous host, and one of the nicest people I have met. His wine knowledge was exceptional(says Captain Obvious), but he was very down to earth and patient with with the shallowness of my actual experience and the amount of energy I had for the subject.

At dinner he brought out a 1968 Lafon Montrachet. As he said, a wine that Rene Lafon had made him promise not to sell. It was not profound, yet perfectly capable of hinting at the ability to be profound, if that makes sense. And then he opened a bottle of 1957 Bonnes Mares, his birth year. To this day that is the most profound wine experience of my life. Little fruit, tremendously magical nose. At one point I remember being frustrated at having to stop smelling and exhale…

Unlike anything I had tried at that point, and only some older Rousseau has been in the same league. That bottles colors my thoughts and feelings on wines to this day, and I continue to be humbled at Jasper’s generosity with those wines.

[Carole_Meredith]

Carole: Years ago (I think it was 2001 possibly just before 9/11) we visited you and Steve for the second time in about a year. Feeling a bit guilty for imposing twice within a year, and beyond grateful for your hospitality, I brought with me a 90 Verset Cornas to share. Well, this wasn’t 67 Chave, but it was darn tasty…

Doug, Any Northern Rhone wine with a bit of age on it is always appreciated here

Carole

[Yao_C]

When I first got to San Francisco a few friends of mine organized an event where we would divide ourselves into teams and sprint 4-5 miles across the city, at night, from Bernal Heights to Pacific Heights, ending up at the sort of seedy Chinese restaurant that is slowly but surely vanishing from the city. Each team would carry a roughly 4L bag of Franzia (I believe my team had the cuvee Sunset Blush; NV needless to say), and every time we came across a public park we would have to chug from the bag. The objectives were to i) be first, or at least arrive within a respectable amount of time, and ii) drain the bag long before arriving at the restaurant (with of course no practical way to enforce this). You can imagine the sort of gleeful drunken giggling that resulted from having to look for stealthy places in the bushes and trees to gulp wine. It is the most fun I have ever had in public in San Francisco, sprained ankle notwithstanding

[R_Holliday]

two experiences.
The first, Drinking a '95 Shafer Hillside Select at a restaurant that was selling it at about retail in 2001 or so. I remember the alcohol literally burning my eyes from the glass. It was an epiphany for me that wine could be so much better than the everyday stuff I had been drinking. I started collecting wine literally the next day.

The second was memorial day weekend 2018. My wife and I were in Bermuda and hitting our favorite restaurants. Our first night in town I spy an '85 Lafite selling for $1300. I explain to my wife that we’ll never see it again at that price in a restaurant of this level so I ordered it without too much complaining from her. It was epic. I’ve always been a fan of older bordeaux but I’d say I’ve been disappointed more often than not when opening a “good” bottle. This, however, was a slice of heaven. Paired with chateaubriand it just couldn’t have been a better meal. Two nights later we had a '85 Latour that only magnified how amazing the Lafite was. The next morning, I woke up, had a heart attack and almost died there in Bermuda. (my wife insists it was having foie gras 3 nights out of 4 but it was a truly epic weekend of decadence)

[Ray.Tuppa_sch]

I’ll have to cheat and list three.

First trip to Paris, I order a bottle of '64 Dom Perignon the first night I am there. Was expecting it to be tired and for it to offer nominal enjoyment. Turned out to be my aged Champagne epiphany.

Dinner in Beijing on top of the Great Wall with a number of magnums of Margaux going back to 1959, all directly from their cellar.

Lunch with three good friends drinking a vertical of Krug Clos du Mesnil at a table set up in the Clos du Mesnil vineyard.