Description

James Halliday is often attributed to having said, “there are no great old wines, just great old bottles.” I’ve just read an article with Halliday attributing it to the English wine trade.

Whoever actually said it, what they mean is that after 30, 40, 50 years time and cork (especially that piece of bark), along with the cellaring conditions and movement, or lack thereof, all take their toll on a wine. Two bottles of the same wine bottled consecutively would taste almost identical on release. However, those two bottles at 30 years of age may taste completely different, even if they have stayed side by side for their entire life. Let alone what may happen if they were split up and treated entirely differently.

Far from being a case not to cellar wine

It is exactly why people cellar wine; because it is a living, breathing, evolving thing. It is not sentient; your cellar will not rise up against you… probably. What the wine will do is change. Change flavours, change structures, change textures. Not all wine will be better for that change. So long as 75% or more are well-chosen wines that do improve, it is a fun journey.

And drinking a wine at perfect maturity is a thrill. Especially if there are friendly faces sharing it with you. Because like the tree falling in the forest, if a wine is perfect drinking but there was no one to share it with, was it really all that good? Yes, but you will have a hangover the next day rather than a fond shared memory with the friendly faces.

The Dinner

On Thursday 25^th July you, me and six other friendly faces will make some fond wine memories. We will sit at ReWine Brunswick and share cheese, pizza and laughs as we drink what hopefully prove to be Good Old Bottles. The pedigree is there:

Henschke Hill of Grace 1971

Birks Wendouree Cabernet Sauvignon 1971 – Seabrook Bottling

Chambers Vintage Port 1983

We enjoyed a bottle of this already. It was amazingly good. So fresh it looked like it was a new bottling.

Not only are these wines potentially going to be amazing, if that HoG is a drink you’ll have got your money’s worth in one glass. A couple of weeks ago, we opened similar wines from this collection. All the wines were enjoyable. The only disappointment was the Alicante Bouchet and I’m not sure that wine was ever meant to last much beyond the year it was bottled.

The price of this dinner reflects that fact that some of them may be faulty or past it. And I’ll bring along a couple of emergency wines. Either way, you will either get your money’s worth. It is likely though that this will be the bargain wine event of 2019.

Let’s make fond wine memories with wine friends. Isn’t that why you do it?