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History, bottled
I love hearing stories about older wines - tales of decades-old wine (or older) surviving signifant dark times in human history and other significant world events. There have been a few juicy tidbits surfacing as of late...
- A bidding war broke out over a rare bottle of Nazi wine. The 1943 bottle of Führerwein (a red table wine) brought in four thousand pounds, about five times the amount it was expected to sell for. More about this here.
- On a somewhat related note, some wines that were hidden from the Nazis recently sold for £50,000. The bottles, some dating back to the 1920s (and including some big names from Bordeaux), had been hidden in a secret chamber during the Nazi occupation of these islands located in the English Channel. Details of the sale and the bottles can be found here.
- Speaking of collectibles, a dozen of the world's most savvy palates (yours truly not included... sniff sniff) gathered in London to taste the world's oldest bottle of French Champagne - a bottle of 1825 Perrier-Jouet. More from the BBC here, including some truly flowery descriptions of what the wine tastes like.
So - what's the oldest bottle of wine you've ever tasted? Mine was the Bassermann-Jordan 1945 Deidesheimer Hohenmorgen Riesling Auslese (a real mouthful, literally), which I tasted at the winery last spring.
The wine was way over the hill - it looked like iced tea in the glass and had very little left in the way of typical Riesling characteristics (honey, lemon, mineral, etc.).
Crack open something nice this weekend - springtime is here!
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Best of what's left from the fest
05/17/2013 2:48 PM 0While my initial plan was to write about many more of the wines brought in special for the Winnipeg Wine ......
About Ben MacPhee-Sigurdson
When he wasn't bashing on a drum kit in local punk rock bands, Ben spent the mid '90s hucking cases of wine around to pay for two English degrees. Now he's the Winnipeg Free Press wine columnist and blogger.
The extent of Ben's wine experience in the mid-90s was memories of accidentally leaving a bottle of White Zinfandel in the freezer overnight, and the ensuing mess he was left with. Between 1996 and 2005 Ben absorbed all he could about wine while working at wine shops to pay for school. Meanwhile, he was churning out papers for his BA and MA in English (from the Universities of Winnipeg and Manitoba, respectively).
Ben became the Winnipeg Free Press' weekly wine columnist in 2005, and two years later joined Wine Access magazine as a contributor, a member of their national tasting panel and a judge at the Canadian Wine Awards and International Value Wine Awards until the magazine closed up shop in 2013.
In 2013 Ben joined the Winnipeg Free Press as a copy/web editor.
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