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LONDON, England (The Financial Times), September 13, 2008:
A libation to the last Lafite
By Harry Eyres
I spent the end-of-summer weekend quietly, with my parents at home in
the Chilterns. The weather was uncertain, and my father not particularly well (he is 82). But we enjoyed walking and talking, and at two successive meals our mood was lifted by a pair of wines about half his age; that is over 40 years old, which is a pretty good age for a wine.
The wines were both 1966
Bordeaux: Château Pape-Clément from the Graves, the oldest documented vineyard in Bordeaux, planted in 1330, and Château Lafite-Rothschild, perhaps the most famous of all Bordeaux wines, though not nowadays the most expensive. On the subject of expense, or the cost or value of these wines, we were following a hedonic principle established a while ago by my father: when drinking certain wines the rule is to think not about how much they might be worth, but how much they cost when originally purchased (in this case no more than £5 each).
Opening such mature bottles is always a delicate business. You have to be prepared for disappointment; a sudden fading; or a fine wine turned to elderly vinegar. In this case the omens were good; the bottles had lain undisturbed for decades in a cellar with proven keeping qualities and the levels were up to the bottom of the neck.
The Pape-Clément was a revelation. It was vigorous, rich and full of fruit; with something of the suave, silky texture of its neighbour Château Haut-Brion. Next day’s Lafite seemed at first a relative disappointment; much lighter in colour and body and less vigorous, though beautifully scented. Then something odd happened; instead of fading, the 42-year-old wine suddenly perked up. As we drained the last drops, it was still gaining strength; who knows, it might have moved into yet another gear if we had allowed it.
To me, wines that might be considered on the far side of optimal maturity have a peculiar grace denied to youthful vigour. They bring up the intimate, physical relationship between wines and human beings. Aestheticians have long debated whether wines can be considered works of art; you could hardly say wines had philosophical depth, though they can focus our faculties and elicit aesthetic responses in a similar way to paintings or poems; but they have one quality which is denied to other artworks: they age very like us.
Wine perishes. All things perish eventually, no doubt; when I look at the “Rokeby Venus” or Titian’s “Diana and Actaeon” I am aware of the fragility and vulnerability of this canvas, those encrusted pigments, but I am not experiencing what Heidegger called their “being-towards-death”. But when you buy a bottle of wine, even the finest, you know you are purchasing something with a limited lifespan. When you drink a bottle of wine you are participating in, indeed hastening, its being-towards-death, in a way that cannot help reminding you of your own. Every opening of a bottle can be seen as a libation, or a sacrifice. The colour of red wine is the colour of blood; the wine in the sacrament of the Eucharist becomes blood, the blood of the ultimate sacrifice.
“Diana and Actaeon” National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh
Being-towards-death, for Heidegger, is not an accidental quality of human beings, and presumably the same goes for wines: it is our – their – essence. This sounds sombre, but it needn’t be. The great thing about the way wines (and some human beings) age is that they mellow; they lose tannic armour and hard edges, become more rounded and more complete. Instead of a decline, they can offer an ascension: a rising from the earthy ground into the ether. Becoming more spiritual, they might summon spirits: as Yeats said in “All Souls’ Night”, “it is a ghost’s right ... /To drink from the wine-breath, /While our gross palates drink from the whole wine.”
All this seems far from the contemporary language of wine-writing – and particularly far from the language used by the influential American wine writer Robert Parker. Parker doesn’t tend to like very old wines; he marked down Pape-Clément 1961 (which I tasted last year and thought superb) for lack of vigour and strength. He doesn’t always particularly like older vintages of Lafite, the most ethereal and intangible of all the great Bordeaux. In his great tome Bordeaux he awards the 1966 Lafite 84 points (which is the equivalent of a bare pass at GCSE), calling it “weedy ... washed-out ... with little body or length”.
The 1966 Lafite couldn’t help making me feel nostalgic. This was not just because it was the last bottle of that wine in the cellar, one of a sequence of “last bottles” we have been drinking over the past couple of years. It felt like the end of an era – an era when a great wine could be splendidly, insouciantly, unself-conscious.
The only information on the label was the name of the château, the vintage and the appellation (Pauillac). Nothing else, no tasting note, nothing about alcoholic strength, grape varieties or oak ageing; no health warning. “I am no more or less than a bottle of wine, even if I am Lafite,” the bottle seemed to say: “drink me in the spirit in which I was made.”
© Copyright The Financial Times Ltd 2008.
With photographs added by
Seniors World Chronicle
I spent the end-of-summer weekend quietly, with my parents at home in the Chilterns. The weather was uncertain, and my father not particularly well (he is 82). But we enjoyed walking and talking, and at two successive meals our mood was lifted by a pair of wines about half his age; that is over 40 years old, which is a pretty good age for a wine.
The wines were both 1966 Bordeaux: Château Pape-Clément from the Graves, the oldest documented vineyard in Bordeaux, planted in 1330, and Château Lafite-Rothschild, perhaps the most famous of all Bordeaux wines, though not nowadays the most expensive. On the subject of expense, or the cost or value of these wines, we were following a hedonic principle established a while ago by my father: when drinking certain wines the rule is to think not about how much they might be worth, but how much they cost when originally purchased (in this case no more than £5 each).
Opening such mature bottles is always a delicate business. You have to be prepared for disappointment; a sudden fading; or a fine wine turned to elderly vinegar. In this case the omens were good; the bottles had lain undisturbed for decades in a cellar with proven keeping qualities and the levels were up to the bottom of the neck.
The Pape-Clément was a revelation. It was vigorous, rich and full of fruit; with something of the suave, silky texture of its neighbour Château Haut-Brion. Next day’s Lafite seemed at first a relative disappointment; much lighter in colour and body and less vigorous, though beautifully scented. Then something odd happened; instead of fading, the 42-year-old wine suddenly perked up. As we drained the last drops, it was still gaining strength; who knows, it might have moved into yet another gear if we had allowed it.
To me, wines that might be considered on the far side of optimal maturity have a peculiar grace denied to youthful vigour. They bring up the intimate, physical relationship between wines and human beings. Aestheticians have long debated whether wines can be considered works of art; you could hardly say wines had philosophical depth, though they can focus our faculties and elicit aesthetic responses in a similar way to paintings or poems; but they have one quality which is denied to other artworks: they age very like us.
Wine perishes. All things perish eventually, no doubt; when I look at the “Rokeby Venus” or Titian’s “Diana and Actaeon” I am aware of the fragility and vulnerability of this canvas, those encrusted pigments, but I am not experiencing what Heidegger called their “being-towards-death”. But when you buy a bottle of wine, even the finest, you know you are purchasing something with a limited lifespan. When you drink a bottle of wine you are participating in, indeed hastening, its being-towards-death, in a way that cannot help reminding you of your own. Every opening of a bottle can be seen as a libation, or a sacrifice. The colour of red wine is the colour of blood; the wine in the sacrament of the Eucharist becomes blood, the blood of the ultimate sacrifice.
“Diana and Actaeon” National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh
Being-towards-death, for Heidegger, is not an accidental quality of human beings, and presumably the same goes for wines: it is our – their – essence. This sounds sombre, but it needn’t be. The great thing about the way wines (and some human beings) age is that they mellow; they lose tannic armour and hard edges, become more rounded and more complete. Instead of a decline, they can offer an ascension: a rising from the earthy ground into the ether. Becoming more spiritual, they might summon spirits: as Yeats said in “All Souls’ Night”, “it is a ghost’s right ... /To drink from the wine-breath, /While our gross palates drink from the whole wine.”
All this seems far from the contemporary language of wine-writing – and particularly far from the language used by the influential American wine writer Robert Parker. Parker doesn’t tend to like very old wines; he marked down Pape-Clément 1961 (which I tasted last year and thought superb) for lack of vigour and strength. He doesn’t always particularly like older vintages of Lafite, the most ethereal and intangible of all the great Bordeaux. In his great tome Bordeaux he awards the 1966 Lafite 84 points (which is the equivalent of a bare pass at GCSE), calling it “weedy ... washed-out ... with little body or length”.
The 1966 Lafite couldn’t help making me feel nostalgic. This was not just because it was the last bottle of that wine in the cellar, one of a sequence of “last bottles” we have been drinking over the past couple of years. It felt like the end of an era – an era when a great wine could be splendidly, insouciantly, unself-conscious.
The only information on the label was the name of the château, the vintage and the appellation (Pauillac). Nothing else, no tasting note, nothing about alcoholic strength, grape varieties or oak ageing; no health warning. “I am no more or less than a bottle of wine, even if I am Lafite,” the bottle seemed to say: “drink me in the spirit in which I was made.”
© Copyright The Financial Times Ltd 2008.
With photographs added by Seniors World Chronicle
