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On a Thursday evening in May 2011, I spent more money on a single bottle of wine than I had in my life — or have since, for that matter. (Or will again… in case my partner’s reading this.)
I was at the Winnipeg Wine Festival’s gala dinner, and there was a silent auction table laden with all sorts of tasty, rare and expensive treats. Between courses I wandered over to the table to check out the offerings when I saw a unicorn wine — a bottle of wine from my birth year.
Regular readers of Uncorked probably saw that Nov. 13 was my 50th birthday, meaning the unicorn wine was also of the 1975 vintage — and it was one of Bordeaux’s best reds, the Château Mouton Rothschild.
I took this photo of the unicorn wine when I first wrote about it in Uncorked in 2011. The label design and label artist changes every year; for 1975 it was Andy Warhol, which just makes it that much cooler. (Ben Sigurdson / Free Press)
With a little “liquid courage” in me and some prodding from my tablemates, I wrote down a relatively modest bid of a few hundred bucks — way out of my price range, but I was sure I’d be outbid. I was right, but the liquid courage wasn’t letting up, and I raised my bid.
With a couple minutes left in the silent auction and the high rollers swarming the table, I figured the bottle was going elsewhere. But when the auction closed, my name (and $450 bid) was tops.
I figured I’d open the wine when I turned 40 — I wasn’t even 36 at the time, so there was plenty of time to plan a big uncorking. But 40 came and went, and the bottle remained tucked away in a dark corner of my basement. As the years went by I became worried the wine was either now a) very expensive vinegar or b) a dried-out tannin bomb, with no fruit flavours remaining, especially because, as Bordeaux vintages go, 1975 wasn’t a particularly good one.
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Well, this past weekend we had a few folks over for a modest 50th birthday party. And as the night went on, I knew what I had to do — I had to open the unicorn wine.
A pal from the wine biz had come armed with a special two-pronged corkscrew which is helpful for pulling delicate corks for old wines. I deferred to said pal to take the reins on extracting the cork while we both nattered on about the wine, its provenance, etc. to a mainly non-wine-geek crowd. The cork emerged in one piece, although it was visibly quite saturated.
The 50-year-old cork, visibly saturated. And yes, those are Hawkins Cheezies in the background.
We poured the stuff around and I nervously stuck my nose in my glass. And, to my utter shock, the wine was outstanding — leagues better than I had anticipated.
The ‘75 Mouton had somehow retained bright strawberry and plum notes mingling with more balsamic, savoury and black-tea components. The tannins were grippy but had softened nicely. It was in the absolute perfect drinking window. I was stunned.
Maybe it’s because I was already so full of birthday cheer (a.k.a. “liquid courage”), or maybe it was the experience of sharing the brilliant old bottle with some good pals (including Eva!), but I can’t imagine I’ll taste another wine that special in my lifetime.
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