I’ve mentioned this before, but I like wine. I like wine a lot. Tonight, I opened a 2002 Domaine de la Combe “Au Renards,” which is a red wine from the Burgundy region of France that is made from the pinot noir grape. When I poured the wine, the color was nearly pink in hue and looked like watered down Kool Aid. On tasting, it was all sweet fruit and resembled nothing so much as soda pop. Very disappointing. So I opened up the 2003 Domain de la Combe “Au Renards,” which the more observant of you will notice is the same wine but a year younger. There was a huge difference between the wines, with the 2003 having a deeper, garnet color and a much more complex set of flavors that only got better as we finished the bottle a couple of hours later.
So far, this isn’t that unusual a story. It is true that 2003 is considered to be a better year than 2002 in Burgundy. In addition, there was the possibility that the 2002 was just past its prime. Finally, it could also be that that bottle was “corked” (i.e., spoiled). One of the sad truths is that many wines that are cellared—some say as many 5–10%—get corked. For what its worth, it hasn’t happened to me that much, but in fact that is what I thought had happened with the first bottle.
So here is where it gets strange. About 3 hours after pouring the wine from the first bottle, I came back to the scene of the crime and found that the color had completely changed. It now resembled the the deep garnet/ruby color that I had expected (and had seen in the 2003). More shocking was the fact that the wine was not only drinkable, but was close to outstanding. While it isn’t at all unusual for a wine to improve with more time in the glass as it gets exposed to air, this was the first time I had ever have a wine pull a Lazarus.
You gotta love a beverage that breathes life back into itself.
First bottle? I read this blog entry in disbelief, especially after the story about tight NIH research funding. If one “connects the dots”, taxpayer funding of ostensibly valuable research can result in supporting personal lifestyles where hundreds of dollars worth of wine are consumed at a single meal! What’s most amazing is how oblivious the author is to the irony of this economic system. The positive news is that change is coming, despite this oenophile’s insistence that he’s always right:
http://tinyurl.com/2qz3cr
Left by Hugh G. Rection on March 16th, 2008
Interesting post, Hugh, with a fascinating callout to “Shifthappens.” My only hope is that if you have, by some Darwinian cosmic joke, been able to breed, that your children’s mathematics instructor does a better job than yours did. That said, “Hundreds of dollars worth of wine are consumed at a single meal!” is only off by an order of magnitude, which I suspect in your world, Mr. Rection, is close enough.
Left by Glenn on March 16th, 2008
Will you be my Client #10?
Left by "Kristen" on March 16th, 2008