Gilbert and Sullivan said it best, if ironically: “There is beauty in extreme old age”* – both mine and wine’s. Well, maybe my beauty is arguable, but the beauty of old wine is certain. I offer in evidence the bottle of 1979 Caparone Cabernet that Diane and I drank at home one evening recently, alongside a French-style dinner of salade de géziers confit followed by squabs crapaudine.
This wine – 1979 Cabernet Sauvignon Santa Maria Valley, Tepusquet Vineyard – was a marvel. The winemaker, David Caparone, sent me the bottle some years ago, and I put it aside for an occasion or a dinner appropriate for it. This one seemed right.
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When I first pulled the cork, the faintness and delicacy of the aroma worried me a little, even though it was very pleasing. Might it not have lasted as long as 43 years? The worry disappeared as soon as I poured the wine. Its aroma opened, and even more striking, its color was grand! Still a crystalline garnet, with scarcely any visible orange edge, despite being, as its label says, “unfined and unfiltered.” It looked like a wine half its age.
I won’t give you a mouthful-by-mouthful account of our dinner: It’s enough to say that that Cabernet gracefully accompanied every dish. (See Diane’s account of the squab dish here). On the palate, it showed mature California Cabernet fruit – no youthful boisterousness, of course, and nothing “in your face,” but also none of the pruniness of mature Bordeaux Cabernet.
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The best description I can say is that it was vinous in the richest and most profound senses – medium-bodied but mouth-filling, composed and serene, seemingly open and self-evident, yet rewarding the slightest attention with constantly shifting nuances. Near the end of the bottle, it grew sweeter, as if its fruit were intensifying – a very lovely ending for a memorable bottle. Need I say that this is great winemaking? Thank you, Dave.
Now, I admit that I may not be aging as splendidly as that wine did, but I had the inestimable advantage of being able to drink it. No small pleasure of age is that I can now consume, at leisure and thoughtfully, the wines I accumulated when they were young and affordable, and I was still toting that barge and lifting that bale.
Way back then, when I was bit by bit picking up the knowledge and experience to start making sense of wine and my life, my palate ran to young wines, fresh, lively, up-front. Those are fine, and I can still enjoy them, but only gradually did I learn how much more there was to wine, not to mention to life.
Now I savor wine more slowly, more contemplatively, with far greater sense of its nuances than my younger self perceived. That’s true too of my life, now that I understand what my younger self was working toward. Without any real awareness of it, I was buying time, and it’s the best investment I ever made. That’s what age gives you: the ability to appreciate one’s own hard-earned savvy and a wine’s slow-matured savor. We old geezers know things our younger selves never imagined, and we enjoy things that still lie outside the scope of young wine drinkers (and I mean both young drinkers of wine and drinkers of young wine).
That’s the beauty of extreme old age – both mine and the wine’s. It’s a preternatural youth who knows at 18 everything s/he might know at 80 – but there are an awful lot of young people (of every generation, to be sure) who know at 18 all they’re ever going to know: “wine spritzer” people, not capable of long keeping or contemplation. I wish all my readers very long keeping and deep contemplation, and the wines to go with them.
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