You might have ‘le goût anglais’, the English taste for old wine, but don’t ignore younger vintages.
I have an imaginary room beneath my house that’s full of rotting fermented grape juice. That this room is, in reality, a darkened corner of a huge bonded storage facility 100 miles west of London is neither here nor there because, as many space-restricted city dwellers know, owning a wine cellar is a state of mind.
This state of mind is mostly brimming with happiness, cosseted by the knowledge that regular deposits have been paid into the Bank of Future Vinous Joys. But at other times, it’s clouded by mild bewilderment. Because, until the corks are pulled from all those bottles of Meursault, St Joseph and Brunello di Montalcino slumbering in the faraway gloom, there’s absolutely no way of knowing if what’s inside them is wonderfully mature or has long since departed. That’s the risk you take when you have what our Gallic chums amusedly call “le goût anglais”, the English taste for old wine.
The term le goût anglais was originally coined to describe England’s historical preference for rich, long-matured styles of champagne, but our fascination with age extends across the vinous spectrum. American winemaking innovator André Tchelistcheff crudely compared appreciating old wine to relations with a very old lover (“It can be enjoyable. But it requires a bit of imagination”), yet nothing extra is needed to appreciate a time-defying classic such as 1961 Château Latour, a claret so full of vim that it’ll surely still be pulling up trees in another 61 years’ time.
However, a little imagination is required for 1887 Pol Roger, the most senior champagne I’ve drunk, rescued from a collapsed cellar at the Grand Marque’s Epernay headquarters. While the first bottle was, sadly, dead on arrival, a second’s oily texture and faint umami flavours were enriched by knowledge of the 125 years of history that had unfolded around it as it lay undisturbed in northern France.
A TTC Lomelino Verdelho from 1862 long held the record as the oldest wine I’d tasted. This near-indestructible Madeira, a wine produced by alternate cooling and heating, making it among the longest lived of any style, was created from grapes harvested at the time of the American civil war.
But even its 160-year lifespan seems fleeting when compared with the 1728 Vino Pancho Romano I discovered at Bodegas González Byass in Jerez de Frontera recently...
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