Remembrance of Wines Past

The NFL playoffs have nothing on “The Iliad.” Over the holidays I read the latest translation (by Robert Fagle) of Homer’s epic, in search of a little perspective on all the millennial madness. Unexpectedly, one of its most enjoyable aspects is the way the ancient poet took every opportunity to sing the praises of wine.

The noble grape was as popular 3,000 years ago as it is now. Of course, the ancient gods and heroes had a little different slant on their libations than we do on ours. For example, it was rather amusing to be sipping a modern Zinfandel (the gorgeous Gundlach-Bundschu “Morse Vineyard” ’97) while reading descriptions such as this one, of a wine served by Hecamede to the hero Nestor and his guests:

Hecamede, reports Homer, “mixed them a strong drink with Pramnian wine, over it shredded goat cheese with a bronze grater and scattered barley into it, glistening pure white, then invited them to drink when she had mulled it all.”

Tastes have changed. I, for one, seldom use a bronze grater anymore. But the memory of an outstanding wine experience can still hold up over time. Indeed, memory can serve as a kind of virtual Ganymede (Zeus’ wine-cup bearer). In reminiscing over some of my own wine memories from the late 20th century, two in particular take on somewhat mythological proportions.

Appropriately, both were classical French wines: a grand marque Champagne and the patriarch of Syrah.

It’s almost impossible to name a single most memorable Champagne, because those divine bubbles have been associated with so many memorable moments. We toasted the year 2000 with the 1988 Pol Roger “Cuvee Sir Winston Churchill,” and its almond-cream scent and miraculous balance brought to mind a remarkable bottle of Pol Roger 1921 that I drank in 1988 with Christian Pol Roger in his study above the firm’s cellars in Epernay.

We caught the great wine just at the end of an impressive 60-year-plus life span. Brought up just moments earlier from the chalky depths (theirs are the deepest caves in Champagne), it was absolute, if fleeting, perfection.

Pol Roger had called downstairs (about half a mile downstairs) to have the wine disgorged and brought up immediately. A few minutes later it arrived in the hands of a burly cellar worker wearing a heavy coat and a leather apron, who brought the frigid air of the caves in with him. He was visibly pleased when Pol Roger invited him to join in the first taste before returning to Champagne’s underworld.

There was a palpable air of anticipation in the room. Churchill himself seemed to be leaning out of a nearby photograph taken in the ‘20s; he would have drunk this cuvee on special occasions, such as toasting the victory of his famous racehorse, whom he had named Pol-Roger.

It was not a young wine, certainly no longer fresh. But it was alive, with a measured effervescence and a taut, if somewhat ethereal, focus. Even beneath the descending weight of its age, evident in the tawny gold hue and rich toasted nut aromas and flavors, it was brilliant, razor-sharp, balanced on a pinpoint. The glass exuded dignity, wisdom and a kind of autumnal sadness. We were transported; discussion could wait.

Within minutes, inevitably, the great old wine gave up its ghost and we were left with an oxidized, faintly yeasty brownish liquid that was no longer Champagne. But during those few moments I had a vivid sense of observing time itself in its inexorable movement--of coming face to face with mortality.

To experience the last fragile moments of a wine like that is profound. The obligatory white Burgundies can’t compete.

I met my most memorable red wine to date on a magazine assignment in France during the late ‘80s. One evening we arrived at Le Pic, a three-star restaurant in Orange, not far from Tain-Hermitage, the Mt. Olympus of Syrah. We were in high spirits after several days of eating and drinking our way up the Rhone Valley from Marseilles on a generous expense account and, with the heady abandon of people who aren’t spending their own money, we decided to drink one of the restaurant’s--and, as it turned out, the world’s--last bottles of the 1961 Jaboulet Hermitage “La Chapelle.”

The sommelier took his job as guardian of a great wine cellar quite seriously. He was openly suspicious. Without immediately assenting to our choice, he engaged us in a little badinage on the subject of wine, during which several pointed questions homed in like bronze javelins from the mist. We found our spirits considerably subdued as we realized we might actually be found unworthy of so great a wine. We began correcting one another’s French.

Then the mist of suspicion cleared. The sommelier gave us a kind of grimace that might have been a smile and went off to fetch the legendary Hermitage.

In due time our bottle appeared with a decanter and a candle on a small table beside us. While we oohed and aahed over our amuse-bouches between quaffs of a superb Georges Vernay Condrieu, the sommelier gravely opened and decanted the ’61 La Chapelle over the candle.

I happened to be watching when he poured a little of the wine in his silver tastevin and tipped it through his lips--and was afterward certain that I’d seen a brilliant gleam burst from his half-closed eyes. Our high spirits restored, we chatted and laughed as he poured the wine, hardly paying attention. Then we realized he was standing to one side, as grim-faced as Hector, cradling the decanter and watching us.

The liquid in our big round glasses was dark, blood-red, gleaming in its depths. Still chatting, we raised our glasses to inhale the wine’s fragrance. And the table fell silent; absolutely silent.

The silence lasted a long time.

When conversation began again, we were talking about our innermost dreams and desires. We were speaking poetry (in French, of course). Each of us told a different story, but they all uncovered long-forgotten moments, love affairs, old cars, triumphs and regrets.

After some 25 years in bottle, the perfume was dazzling. The wine was superbly concentrated and powerful, yet light as air and elusive as memory. Its vibrant fruit, spices and silky texture were like tapestries concealing some compelling mystery. Swallowing hardly made a dent in the ongoing wave of impressions that lasted several minutes after each sip.

That extraordinary moment exemplifies, for me, the power of a sublime wine to break the continuum of ordinary life and elevate us to a kind of Olympian exaltation.

Not that dinner at Le Pic is ever ordinary, but it easily could have been--forgive me--just another three-star dinner in France. Instead, like characters in an epic when some god or goddess decides to step in and alter reality, we momentarily entered a world of wonder, mystery and light as we savored the shimmering radiance of a summer three decades past that had been captured in a bottle.

Now, there was a wine experience worth recounting far into the future--although it might not have been quite up to Homeric standards. Alas, we neglected to drag the sommelier around the walls behind our chariot.