A 22-foot truck from Chicago showed up at the crack of dawn this morning with three overstacked pallets of wine, which the driver and I managed to get into my basement without, as far as I can tell, breaking anything or hurting ourselves, which was the first win of the day. And now, for the first time in more than 20 years, all our wine is in one place, and we've officially finished what turned out to be the nearly 6-year process of moving out of the Windy City. I managed to rack about a third of the cellar over the course of the day (slowed, ironically, by needing to be alert for the FedEx truck), and it was more overwhelming than I expected: I "know" what's in these boxes because I have an inventory, but seeing the labels was a different matter. It was like revisiting the last 25 years of (an admittedly narrow slice of) our life.
Which made it nearly impossible to decide what to drink with dinner. But then I pulled a bottle that was obviously the right answer: a Merry Edwards 2009 Russian River Valley Pinot Noir, Olivet Lane Vineyard. It wasn't the right answer because it was our "best" wine (whatever), or our favorite wine, or our most treasured wine, or anything like that. But way back when, I signed up for the Merry Edwards mailing list, having read a review somewhere, and bought a six-pack sampler of her RRV Pinots, including, I think, the 1998 and 1999 vintages; and it was around this time that we realized that we couldn't really store wine in our small pre-war Chicago apartment, whose one big closet had steam pipes in the walls; and so, newly out of grad school and flush with the lavish salary of an assistant professor, I ordered an 80-bottle Eurocave, which we nicknamed the "Yuppie Scum Machine" out of mild embarrassment at our bourgeois habits, and the cellar was born. (We're now using the YSM to keep whites at serving temp, because why not double down?) I think we bought this 2009 to mark the cellar's 10th anniversary.
Anyhow, the wine: This turned out to be a very nice bottle. As I recall, though it's been a while, the Olivet Lane bottling was always a little bigger and had more overt wood than the regular RRV; in this case, 15 years after the vintage, the wine is deep-crimson-to-garnet, still looks fresh, and shows black cherry, sarsaparilla, cocoa, earth, and herbs on the nose. It's elegant in the mouth, with enough remaining fruit to taste fresh too, and the wood has integrated pretty well, leaving a gentle suggestion of spice around the edges. With time, the earth and spice come far enough forward in the mix, and the fruit recedes enough, to persuade me that this isn't likely to improve, and might always have been a bit out of balance -- but this was, in any case, a nice moment at which to catch it, and a nice way to ease our way back into drinking things older than kindergartners.