By: AJ McClellan
Wine is a miraculous thing. You can taste almost every flavor imaginable in a bottle of wine, good and bad, everything from the sweetness of fruits and vegetables to the funk of wet earth, barnyard, and saddle leather. More than simple flavors wine gives you a sense of the ground it was grown in, no other beverage will allow you to take a vacation while relaxing in your living room. When you enjoy the bouquet of a wine you can smell the steep slopes of Northern Rhone, or imagine the sunny hillsides of Napa Valley. More than merely allowing you to experience a region wine gives you a sense of timelessness, a small moment in time frozen in a bottle waiting for you to experience it and enjoy what it has to offer.
What were you doing in 1902? Maybe attending the premier of the opera “Hunchback of Notre Dame” in Monte Carlo, or cheering for your favorite team in the 1st Rosebowl game… while you may not have been able to attend these events when you crack a bottle with over 100 years of age on it you get a glimpse of that moment in time and get to experience the same things that those people experienced.
In 1902 Portugal declared bankruptcy, and on a small island off the cost in Pico dos Barcelos of Madeira Barbeito was bottling an absolutely brilliant bottle of wine. With a nose of dust and crushed cloves mixed with dried cherries, currants, and plums this wine was pure ecstasy in the glass. The palate was syrupy with a heavy texture and loads of complex nuances. There were hints of tilled soil, balsawood, cedar, tar, leather, lavender, allspice, dusty dried fruits, and a small hint of sugar but with little to no sweetness. It is a bottle like this that makes you take pause and really appreciate how fantastic wine is…