As a critic, I get to taste many hundreds of
wines each year and sometimes get invited to events, many of them involving
wine regions, wineries or importers presenting their latest releases. Sometimes
the wines are memorable and I write about them; sometimes not.
One of the more unusual
experiences of this kind came not long ago when I was invited to stop by
Morrell & Co., the well-known New York retailer and wine bar just across
the street from my office in Rockefeller
Center. The occasion was an updating of the store and bar and a chance to taste
a few wines. There was a rosé from Provence, a red Bordeaux and a California chardonnay. Good
wines, but hardly the stuff of which memories are made.
Fortunately, there were more wines to taste.
There, on the counter, sat three very large bottles that towered over the
others around them. Each was a Barolo, the famous wine from the region of the
same name in Piedmont in northern Italy. Not only that, they were from the
1970s -- a ‘79, a ‘76 and a ‘70 to be precise. They represented an unusual chance
to go back in time.
Wine is all about connections -- to those with whom we enjoy it and, for me, connections to wines themselves and their histories. The most interesting and vital of these old Barolos was the 1970, which was clearly a very good vintage for Barolo.
To put the year
it in context, Richard Nixon was president, the Beatles broke up and the
computer floppy disk was introduced, all of them relegated to history long ago.
In Barolo, on the other hand, Giacomo Borgogno would make a wine that would remain
vibrant for decades to come, the 1970 Barolo Riserva “Antichi Vigneti Propri.’
The nebbiolo
grape attains its greatest expression in Barolo and the wine is made for aging,
gradually losing the strongly tannic character of its youth and evolving, in
the best vintages, into a transcendent experience in which fruit and wood and
sense of place become one.
As I stood at the counter, David Johnson, Yung Leung and Jura
Almeida carefully poured small quantities of wine from the big bottle, which
held 3.78 liters and would cost more than $500 today, into a decanter for
aeration. Then they poured a half an inch or so into our glasses. The color was
light brick red; the aromas conveyed red fruit, roses and cedar.
This is the kind of wine that makes you want to talk about it with
anyone around you, and I found myself doing just that – describing how it was
still very much alive after all these years, with vibrant acidity, still-firm
tannins and beautiful fruit.
With each small glass I found myself focusing on something
different: in one glass an emphasis on the secondary tastes of leather, meat
and beef bouillon cube; in another hints of raspberry, blueberry and a long,
mineral-driven finish.
We all had the sense on this evening that we were tasting
something unique, something that could not be replicated. I found myself
transported back to another era, thinking of the images and the history of the
time, and in my glass, enjoying something old that was still very much alive.
