A Well Traveled Bottle


• By Allen Dale "Ole" Olson   |   Tuesday, December 15, 2009 at 5:14 pm   |     |   Print   |   Permalink

In 1991 Dominique Thienpont gave me a couple of newly-bottled 1989 Lauriol  wines from his family cellar in St-Cibard, a hamlet in the Bordeaux Cotes de Francs. “Not a wine to keep long,” he said, “but it was a very good vintage, so who knows.”

Well, one of them kept, and it proved that wine can indeed travel. This is the story of that bottle. I carried it in my car for a day-and-a-half while I drove home to Heidelberg from St-Cibard. There it stayed in my cellar till the summer of 1993 when I transferred it to Wintzenheim where the Humbrechts kept it till the winter of 1995 when they shipped it to Philadelphia along with the rest of my collection. For a week or so, it rested in a warehouse in Philadelphia before being trucked to a Louisville suburb where I picked up the shipment in a Ryder truck and bounced it some 110 miles to my  cellar near Bloomington. (I must add that it was one of more than a thousand bottles in the shipment.)

The trip from Philadelphia to southern Indiana was done in freezing temperatures, but there was no evidence that any of the wines had frozen. Over the years, our incidents of spoilage were remarkably few. The Lauriol, I must say, was largely forgotten as we added to our collection and judiciously selected for consumption bottles from our European shipment. It lay in our Indiana cellar from December 1995 till November 2009 when I noticed that it was now twenty years old. I remembered Dominique’s caution not to keep it long.

When my daughter asked if I could please bring a special bottle when we came to visit her in Albuquerque for the holidays, I thought it a good test for the Lauriol. 1,300 miles of November weather, part of which across Oklahoma was unseasonably warm. No wine cellar in her home. Lauriol went into the garage for about a week — temperatures dipped into the low twenties and high teens at night.

But on THE night, we had Lauriol at room temperature — about 68 degrees Farenheit. The cork was firm and intact. No crumbling. The wine, mostly Merlot with about 15% Cabernet Franc was a bright crimson and astonishingly fresh. Silky on the palate, lingering on the finish. No loss of fruit, 12.5% alcohol in perfect harmony.

Wine can and does travel. After all, wines have to travel to get from the vineyard to your table. What changes are the setting, the mood, the ambiance, the menu. Or perhaps abuse occurs. But routine, sensible handling and a well made product work together to protect the wine. Or maybe Dominique thought 25 or 30 years might be too long,  not twenty.

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