Community Tasting Note

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Saturday, November 17, 2018 - Drunk onboard ship in midst of transatlantic crossing (Lisbon/Ft. Lauderdale), joined by the ship's head sommelier (who had stored my bottle and then opened it at table), accompanied by another wine-loving couple and paired with venison and sirloin and grilled tuna.

The bottle had been bought as a future ($15 a bottle for two cases) and was the final bottle from the first case (and the first opened from that case for at least five years).

There was about an inch of ullage. The cork was half-saturated and broke in two in its extraction. The sommelier had to withdraw his ah so and go to his trusty waiter's corkscrew, whose worm is, like all on that instrument, quite short. But with some reddening of his face (from effort and anxiety), he managed to get all but two small specks of cork out. The wine was then decanted without the available screen and poured into the decanter with its brilliant, dark color a seemingly defiant answer to any doubts that had arisen in regard to the weak cork (typical, in my experience of corks in old, red Bordeaux; corks in Italian wines and American reds and Bordeaux whites and some Australian whites of this (35+) age or older tend, in general, to fare better.

The wine in the glass was dark at its core with very little fading at its edge. It was very much the color of a young red of most any varietal (that doesn't show purple).

The aroma was enveloping if not intense and, as all agreed, classic (though I noticed some sous bois more typical of Burgundies; a good thing, from my point of view).

It was in the mouth that the wine was a bit disappointing. The tannins seemed to have faded so far beyond the fruit (and to have taken some of the fruit with them) that the wine lacked, as someone there said, a "punch." For me, it was a richness that was missing as well as a satisfying finish.

Well, all it needed was more air, more time.

Over the course of an hour and a half, with no other red wine at table (so each sip was precious), this old wine opened up and gained strength and wowed in particular our guest who had complained the most about it. He went from its greatest detractor to its most insistent supporter.

I--with another entire, unopened case of this in my cellar back home--was the wine's biggest skeptic. I had wanted (and had wanted to share) greatness. But in the end I felt what was great was (the idea of) our drinking a 1982 Pichon Lalande on a ship in the middle of the Atlantic. The wine itself was a fading beauty, probably better than anything we might have found on the ship's wine list (important and costly wines, but so much younger than this one and, for me, not ready and too expensive to boot) but moving toward its final (though years away) dance.

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