Tasting 58 Year Old Wine (Or "Sipping a Grandfather")

I spent yesterday evening out in Hillsboro at a family member's home built in a plum orchard that overlooks the Willamette Valley. Yes, indeed, it was exquisite. This same family member has a dear friend who is a wine collector. I have known this for a while and have often drank fine wines in his company, however, not since I 'took the plunge', so to speak, into the world of wine. Therefore, I eagerly rushed over to the table where he was unloading his wines (he has over 2,300 in his cellar). This particular night, however, he had brought around 20. Oh la la!

He had whites, he had rosés, he had reds, he had champagne, he had obscure varietals, he had Willamette Valley classics, including: Beaux Frères from 2005, several vintages of Ken Wright, a few J.K. Carrières and a few from Elk Cove. I am sure I am missing a few, but, with 20 wines at hand, even I cannot try, nor remember them all. 

It was great to hear this man, Ralph, share his thoughts on authentic wines. His approach was very moderate and he explained that he thinks that while many other more conventional wines are becoming a bit homogenized (while nonetheless quite good), authentic wine offers an alternative. While there is less guarantee, less standardization and more risk, there is also the opportunity for the occasional wine that is utterly fantastic. These 'wonder wines' make the drinking experience more interesting, however, they come at the cost of some very, very poor authentic wines. They are certainly not all good, but, there is variety, for better or for worse. Naturally, I tend to think, for far better.

While we spoke, he shared a bit about what was in his collection. He mentioned that he had acquired  about a decade ago a bottle from 1955. 'What luck', I thought to myself, 'how wildly interesting it would be to taste wine from 1955! Gah!' My grandfather, sitting nearby chuckled and shared that he and my grandmother were married that same year. Ralph retorted that that was the year he was born. 1955 was a good year for love, child birth and le Jura, apparently. 

Ralph left to take his daughter home and when he returned, he had a bottle under his arm. It was, indeed, the bottle from 1955. He said that he'd been looking for an occasion to drink it and this seemed as good as any other. He decanted the wine, which was a deep reddish brown color and the rest of us at the table held our breath in mouth-watering anticipation. I looked at the bottle, which was a different shape than any bottle I'd seen before; in some way, it was more angular. The labels were quite new, certainly not from '55. Ralph explained that it had been in the vintner's cellar the whole time, they just put a new label on it when they exported it to the US. Here's an image:

Finally, it was time to taste. I must say that neither the odor nor the flavor made me fall out of my chair. It was very tannic and acidic and I'm sure that with more time in the decanter, the fruits would have been more apparent. Ralph shared, however, that with a wine that old, it would be extremely challenging for it to have retained in initial fruitiness. What did make me swoon, par contre, was the idea that I was drinking something that was 58 years old. Isn't that amazing? That wine is older than my parents, in fact, it's almost three times older than me. I find that unbelievable. For someone who is such a fanatic francophile, I was mystified by the idea that here I am in 2013, drinking something made by a frenchman over 50 years ago. This man may no longer even be alive, yet here I am, 6,000 miles away from what was once his treasured vines, drinking the fruits of his labor. (Mind the wine pun that's surely been made a thousand times before this.)

Summing up, I found the whole idea, and the experience, exceptionally neat. Nothing more or less. I know the little tween next to me wanted to 'gross us out' when he said that it was like 'sipping a grandfather', but, au contraire, I don't find it gross at all. The word I would use instead was, again, enchanting.