It's curious how last year so many people, facing a life-threatening epidemic, business disaster, and social disruption, took to opening the very best bottles from their cellars. For some it may simply have been desperation: multiple lockdowns have a way of depleting your stocks. But many seemed to have made a conscious decision that if everything was going to fall apart, you didn't want to meet at the exits (the airport, or the River Styx) without having sampled the wines you were keeping “for best.”
Opening great bottles is an affirmation of life, a monument to optimism, an act of faith – and in doing so we change our mindset, we embrace life, hope, and the future. It wasn't obvious at the time, but from my own experience, I know that at some point I gravitated away from the everyday bottles and instead focused on those that added a sense of occasion to the ordinariness of lockdown life. I opened a bottle of Cristal instead of just another bottle of fizz. I went to that part of the cellar where the most collectable Burgundies were stashed, where my last bottles of perfectly aged clarets lingered in the shadows and from time to time invited them to dinner.
Looking at what is available to fill the gaps on my rack I find the 2009 Cristal Rosé irresistible. A few years ago, lunching at Champagne Louis Roederer, I was treated to a 1988 Cristal Rosé: pale apricot, hauntingly aromatic in a freshly baked butter biscuit kind of way, I dream of sampling it again, my senses already heightened in anticipation.
My last bottle of 1995 Domaine Latour Batard Montrachet succumbed to one of those special occasion moments during the last lockdown. Happily, there are a few 2015s available, as well as some 2006 Chevalier Montrachet “Les Demoiselles.” The only question will be how many bottles of each come home with me now.
Topping up the red burgundy stash comes with similar dilemmas. The 1997 Chambertin Heritiers Latour Grand Cru is beckoning beguilingly: it sells for a fraction of the price of the younger vintages. But I will have to keep some space (and some funds) for Jadot's Clos St Jacques Gevrey Premier Cru (a Grand Cru by any other name) and some 2015 Clos Vougeot – also from the Jadot Domaine.
There are two other wines whose purchase cannot be deferred: the Chateau de Beaucastel Chateauneuf-du-Pape Rousanne Vieilles Vignes from a vineyard which is now 110 years old and yields tiny quantities of a wine so fabulous and so intense you cannot bear to finish your glass, and the 2011 Chateau L'Evangile. It's the only other Pomerol on the same soil as Petrus, its unaffordable neighbour on the one side, and Chateau Cheval Blanc on the other.
