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ORIGINAL: fingers

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ORIGINAL: wine247365

Cran, we'll have to ask your boyfriend!

I can vouch that Cran is a fan

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ORIGINAL: bacchus

i am putting dick tracy on the case which should put an end to this escapade into forbidden territory.

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ORIGINAL: Jenise

I've loved all these stories, so I'm going to share mine. Here goes.

My story begins in California. My earliest wine memory was Annie Green Springs in the back seat of a jacked up Chevrolet while cruising Whittier Boulevard. I was about 17.

Eventually I met my first husband, who was nine years senior, and made my first wine tasting trip to Napa Valley before I was 21. Freemark Abbey, Heitz and Sterling were my favorites. Time passed. In the E & C side of the oil business, we eventually moved to Saudi Arabia where we made our own wine out of German grape juice in 5 gallon jerry cans--each batch was 30 days from start to finish. We could only make one batch at a time due to lack of closet space so we weren't able to get very far ahead, but if you visited our little tin can trailer-house sitting on pipes three feet off the desert floor in a construction camp outside of Dhahran in October and we served you vintage April, you knew you were special. As soon as we got back to the U.S. I filed for divorce.

In my single years afterward in Newport Beach, I primarily drank white wine socially. I advanced from French Columbard to Chardonnay--in 1.5 liter bottles, natch. Hardly a geek, but among the crowd I ran with I was thought of as a snob because I would spend the extra bucks for Mondavi Woodbridge vs. cheaper brands. My observation was that I was the only one who could tell the difference.

Then I met Bob. He funded our life and I had nothing to spend my salary on, so I lavished him with my cooking and wine from the local (Irvine, CA) Albertson's. That store had the silly habit of drastically reducing prices on 'old' vintages to make room for the new stuff regardless of producer. And the slow sellers--Bordeaux, Burgundy and other imports--were the usual culls. I pounced on them, and my standards went way up real fast. A few months later on our honeymoon in Paris, a Client gave us a wedding gift of dinner, bill paid, at Yves St. Laurent's restaurant. I recall foie gras and duck breast with a sauce made of fresh red currants and other berries. For our wine, the sommelier chose a minerally Fontaine Gagnard Chassagne Montrachet (blanc). EPIPHANY. I lived in California, and I thought I knew Chardonnay. But I'd never experienced anything like the kaleidoscope of flavors in that white burgundy. I'd been drinking plain glass, and now I knew diamonds. I came home on fire to find out the rest of what I didn't know. (The label from that bottle, framed, hangs in my cellar today.)

A few years later we moved to Alaska where we were going to have both a lot of disposable income and time on our hands on those long winter evenings. On a flight to Anchorage we met a guy who asked if we were into wine, and he recommended wine tastings in the back room of a local liquor store. As soon as we unpacked I signed up. The leader of those tastings, a well-connected dentist-importer who was welcomed annually for tastings at DRC just for instance, adopted me as his #1 mentee. Things progressed. When we moved away five years later I was president of the Denali Wine Society which held monthly tastings for 100-120 people in the ballroom of the local Sheraton. All our friends were wine people, and I had started building a cellar.

In Alaska, of all places, wine became my life and it's been my life ever since.

I'm still a Europhile. But I now live in Washington state and have an industry to help support, and for reasons we all know the gap between here and there isn't what it used to be. I buy a lot of local wine though my cellar remains about 50% old world. Currently we have 1400+ bottles, deliberately reduced from a peak of around 2000. I have cycled through many favorites over the years. My usual line: depends on what I'm eating. But my current obsession is Lopez de Heredia blancs which might have a lot to do with scarcity. One thing for sure, I'll never find enough to tire of them.

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ORIGINAL: DoubleD1969

For those who have written about their journeys, have you found your Holy Grail? For me it was the 100-pt wines (in retrospect) I mentioned. I didn’t have a specific wine I sought in the beginning of the journey, but I wanted to know what a perfect wine would be like.

Also, which wines in your cellar are you most looking forward to trying?

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ORIGINAL: DoubleD1969

For those who have written about their journeys, have you found your Holy Grail?

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ORIGINAL: DoubleD1969

Great list Cran! Was the Felsina drunk in Italy?