Wednesday, January 30 2008
Spill the Wine
I could feel the hot flame of fire roaring in my back as she disappeared. But soon, she returned. In her hand was a bottle of wine; in the other, a glass. She poured some of the wine from the bottle into the glass, and raised it to her lips, and just before she drank, she said, "Spill the wine, dig that girl".
War was a great band, and I've always loved lyrics that made absolutely no sense to me–it removes the burden of understanding a song so I can concentrate on humming the tune. But sometimes you have to pay attention, or pay the piper. In my case, the piper got his due.
I blogged over the weekend about my new fancypants wine cellar, and how it was replacing a rack in an inappropriate location. After I cleaned the storage room out, pulled out all of the wines from the old rack, I set a few aside to see how they were developing. I was especially interested in my 1995 Port. It was made with grapes from Alderdale Vineyards in Yakima, and I did a traditional foot treading and dosed it with industrial ethanol to stop fermentation at about 19 Brix, piled it into a barrel, left it for two years and bottled it. Over the last decade it's smoothed and become wonderful, with deep notes of chocolate and tobacco and plums and spice, but with the wine rack in a cramped area I haven't contorted myself to pull out a bottle for the last three years. So, last night I did.
The cork came apart like a handful of sand. And so did the next one, and the next, and the next, until I had one intact bottle out of 18 I pulled. All the bad-cork bottles smelled of ethyl acetate (nail-polish remover) and cardboard. Ruinous! I re-corked the last bottle and sewered the rest.
This is more tragic than even it may seem. I ascribe to the belief that after you shuffle of this mortal coil you have to answer for your deeds before you can move on. As such, you'll be met outside the gates of paradise by a couple of very sturdy guardians and a barrel. In that barrel is every drop of alcohol you ever wasted in your life, and in you go, head-first. Should it be deep enough for you to drown . . . no paradise for you!
But we fall so we can pick ourselves up and learn. I'll be going through the rest of my cellar this week, carefully checking every bottle for damage or low-fills (a sign of evaporation through the cork and potential oxidative damage). I'll also be making a little Fig-Port confit with the rest of that good bottle. It's very comforting in times of stress.
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