When your wine turns 21...

Chateu Latfayette Renau Niagara Mist 1998 vintage.

This is less of a travel report and more of a memory of one that took place over 21 years ago.

In June 1998 my advisor sent me for a month to Ithaca, to spend some time at Cornell, potentially working on some of my thesis problems with Cornell CS faculty. Upon arrival, we learned that Ithaca and Cayuga Lake are a winemaking area. So, on the day before we left to drive Olga back to Maryland (I later took the bus to Ithaca to stay there for that month), we took a drive around the lake, and had our first experience of actual wine tasting.

The context of this is of course the fact that Olga was 5.5 month pregnant at the time. So... she was the designated driver and I was the designated taster.

From that trip we brought back four or five bottles of wine (one per winery, or something like that) - all wines were pretty cheap as I remember. Over time, we drank all of them but this one bottle: Chateau Lafayette Reanau Niagara Mist.  In fact, one of the other wines we got, Goosewatch Diamond was for a long time a favorite of mine, and we were able to procure a few additional bottles on a couple of occasions.

Now, back to  that Chateau Lafayette Reanau bottle.  It survived the two and a half remaining years in Maryland. It survived the move to Kentucky, and a change from an apartment to the house. It survived seven Kentucky years. It survived a trip to California (we packed most of the liquor and wine we had and put it in the container we were shipping - nothing got broken). It then proceeded to survive 12 years and two moves in San Luis Obispo.  As of last week, it was the single oldest bottle of wine in our household (I am somewhat afraid to use the word "collection" here).

Until last Sunday.  We had guests over, and finally - a reason to open it.  The cork, of course,  wound up being broken, and the first glass of wine had to be poured through a strainer.

The wine though...   To be completely honest, I had no recollection what it was supposed to taste like. Given that Olga was not tasting much, and I like sweeter wines, and given that we bought this bottle, it is hardly surprising that the wine was sweet.

But I am pretty sure that 21 years ago this wine did not have this deep dark amber color you can see on the photo above.  I am pretty certain it was not that smooth.   This bottle of $6 wine (we checked the web site - the new vintage is sold for $6.75 - crazy, right?)  tasted like a $50 375ml bottle of a local late harvest wine tastes.

Quite unexpected. But also quite pleasant.