Not that an old, expensive bottle shouldn’t have you cooing at it like a cute baby. What irks me is that a wine like the affordable, accessible Mount Eden chard will, when put in a line-up with a much pricier option, go totally ignored. Drained, but ignored.

That’s not fair. Not to this wine. There’s too much sandalwood, poached pear, tropical fruit, apple, spice and everything else wonderful and right in the world in this bottle to let it not be the center of its own wank-fest. (There’s gotta be a better term for it than that.)

It’s a huge wine: weighty and complex, while still being dangerously easy to drink and pairing with food better than your average big chardonnay.

So, don’t do as I have. Don’t do as I have and keep this beautiful thing from the next get-together. But, don’t waste it on the wrong crowd, either.

Cheers,
TSW

P.S. If all you can find is the 2002 version of this wine, you’ll notice that it is designated as being from Macgregor Vineyard. Fear not. The 2002 is maybe even better than the ’03. Year after year, this wine rules!

* - Chimp Wine is a WoW designation signifying a no-brainer, must-buy wine (as in, "You'd have to be a chimp not to buy this wine.").

I am a bad person. Though just once, I have not served this wine to a guest and justified my actions by saying to myself, “This isn’t an expensive bottle. I should really open something more impressive.”

Of course, I knew better. I knew that this was (still is) one of the better chard’s in the house, and just didn’t want it to go underappreciated simply because it’s underpriced.

If you’ve been to a get-together at someone’s house and there are a few wine geeks there, no doubt more than a bottle or three have been opened up. And when that happened, there’s often one bottle that has them all get either quieter or louder than they were with the other bottles. This is the big deal bottle.

What bugs me about these wank-fests is that so often the bottle that gets everyone’s nutters buttered is the most expensive and/or oldest, and the lather starts frothing before anyone has tasted it.