WTN: The Burg that came back from the dead

[Jenise]

1997 Jacques Girardin
Santenay Clos Rousseau Premier Cru

I bought two bottles of this about five years ago, and the first bottle sampled early on was thin of fruit and acrid with with pervasive smokey, toasted barrel flavors. It was undrinkable. The second bottle therefore never even went to the cellar but ended up in a downstairs closet, forgotten until I hired someone to gut that closet a few weeks ago. I set the recovered, unwanted bottle on the kitchen counter pending an exercise that was certain to be: open, dump.

Didn't get around to it until last night when, coincidentally, I was making crepes stuffed with morel mushrooms and asparagus in a rich, beefy cream sauce and thinking how a great old burg would be pretty phenomenal with the dish. Which reminded me to open that bottle--after all the recycler comes Monday. So of course you know that the bottle turned out to be good or I wouldn't be writing this note. That is, though far from perfect, and definitely not for people who eschew necrotic wines to be sure, the color was a light, reddish brown, the tannins were resolved, it still had plenty of acidity, there was sweet canned cherry fruit on the nose, and the mushroom and tea flavors on the palate provided a singularly good match for the crepes.

I love it when this happens.

Thanks, Jenise. There's no section in the wine store for these types of wines, is there?--they just happen. And that's part of what makes being a wine lover...fun!

Incidentally, I've also had the situation where I drink a newly recommended wine, find/announce that it doesn't suit me, then drink another bottle several weeks later only to realize that the first bottle must have been flawed but I didn't realize it (no obvious cork taint, etc.). In the meantime you find yourself wondering what all the fuss is about!

[Jenise]

Steve, you're so much fun when you speak up, you should post more often! You know what, over the years I've read a lot of notes like mine and more often than not the protagonist is a red burgundy. No wine seems to play dead better, and I've real experts on the grape describe in detail the extent to which they were fooled--sometimes years after sending cases of presumed-dead wine off to auction. Ouch, eh?

I've had the experience you're talking about too, probably the result of travel shock. But travel shock has a dangerous flip side: it can make a fat new world wine seem quite delineated and restrained. Six months later, it's a whole different baby!