My newspaper colleague Michael Donahue, who is well-versed in country things, years ago used to make corn wine. He learned the recipe from an elderly woman who lived down the road from him out in the country in north Mississippi. I don’t mean corn whiskey, but real corn wine. We have had a jar of Michael’s corn wine from 1993 sitting in the refrigerator for a little more than 13 years; actually several refrigerators, because the little Mason jar moves with us from house to house. We used another jar, again years ago and I think this was the 1992 vintage, for a deglaze with fried pork chops; it was wonderful.

Anyway, every once in a while, I say or LL says, “We ought to open that jar of Michael’s corn wine,” and then one or the other of us says, “Oh, let’s let it age some more.”

Last night, we opened it.

We were eating dinner, trying three wines with one of our favorite dishes, the cod, potato, leek and chorizo stew. Except that the fish was orange roughy, which worked fine. We were tasting the Domaine Bruno Clavelier Bourgogne Aligote 2004, the Domaine Barmes Buecher Rosenberg de Wettolsheim Pinot Blanc 2000, from Alsace, and Nicolas Joly’s Clos de la Coulee de Serrant Savennieres 2000. Yep, just another night at the ol’ trough. All three wines were excellent, and I’ll be writing about them soon, either on my website or on this blog.

In any case, we tend to sit at dinner like this for an hour and a half or so, eating and trying the wines, going back to the wines, filling out the details and dimensions. Eventually, LL said, “You know, there’s some kind of really interesting spice going on with the aligote. Something almost primitive.” She thought for a moment and said, fatefully, “Go get Michael’s corn wine.”

Off to the fridge, pluck the little jar from the shelf. Had to knock at the lid a few times with a spoon to get it to turn.

The color, of course, is extraordinary, a brilliant brassy gold. The bouquet is “foxy” and earthy in the way that scuppernog or muscadine wine is, potent and alcoholic like moonshine or grappa, and then it takes on a scent of citrus-drenched fruitcake. LL and I look at each other, eyebrows raised. I believe I say something like, “Lord have mercy.”

In the mouth Michael Donahue’s Corn Wine 1993 is absolutely smooth and mellow, a segue of orange rind into apricot into spiced and brandied peaches. And completely dry; there’s nothing sweet about this wine, in fact the finish is dauntingly austere. And under the fruit, there remains something earthy, primitive, an elusive, handmade aspect I can only describe as “country.”

What would it have been like at age 15? Age 20? We’ll never know.

The Wine Spectator for December 15 reported that at Christie’s inaugural wine auction in Los Angeles on September 28, an anonymous telephone bidder paid $290,000 for a case of Chateau Mouton-Rothschild 1945 and capped that by paying $345,000 for a case of six magnums of the same wine. Talk about cornering the market. Ha-ha, that’s not the point of course, the point is that this gentleman paid $635,000 for two cases of wine. That’s an average of $26,458 for a standard 750-milliliter bottle.

Will he pop the cork on a few with the Christmas standing rib roast and Yorkshire pudding?
Ha-ha, well, that’s not the point either, is it, because one does pay one’s money and one does take one’s choice, doesn’t one, and if Mr. Anonymous Telephone Bidder wants to pour his Mouton ’45 at the next office party, he has every right to do so, though some of us would spurn to cast pearls before swine. I vividly remember attending a party, in a small town in the Mississippi Delta, about 10 years ago, at which a young doctor was pouring magnums of Chateau Margaux 1981 as house wine, and people were lining up for it, glasses raised, saying things like “Damn good shit, whaddya say this was again?” And my reaction was to bloody the keyboard on his grand piano and kick off a couple of ivories, but that’s another story.
Anyway, what is Mr. Anonymous Telephone Bidder getting for his $635,000? Twelve bottles and six magnums of the wine that Robert M. Parker Jr. , in the fourth edition of Bordeaux: A Consumer’s Guide to the World’s Finest Wines (Simon & Schuster, 2003), calls “truly one of the immortal wines of the century” and asks the (seeming rhetorical) question: “Will it last another 50 years?”

Michael Broadbent, in Vintage Wine: Fifty Years of Tasting Three Centuries of Wines (Harcourt, 2002). describes Mouton ’45 as “immediately recognisable, complex, endlessly fascinating, unforgettable … inimitable, incomparable … Seemingly tireless — indeed another half century anticipated.”

No need to go on; Mouton ’45 is obviously one of the best and most long-lived wines made not merely in Bordeaux or France but in the world. Its reputation is not hurt by the fact that Bordeaux suffered from mediocre vintages throughout the 1930s and into the war-torn 1940s, but that the year of the end of World War II was the triumphant 1945. That was also the first vintage for which Baron Philippe de Rothschild commissioned an artist-designed label for the wine, a tradition that continues today.

Rarity is also a factor. Mouton made about 12,645 cases of the 1945 and 2,091 magnums. After 60 years, how much could be left? Broadbent and Parker themselves must had consumed a goodly portion.

So history, heritage, rarity and supreme quality make Mouton ’45 perhaps the most sought-after wine for the world’s collectors.

But, you know, for $26,458 you could buy, well, what? One hundred, even 200 bottles of very fine wine indeed, getting your cellar off to a splendid start. A pretty damned stunning diamond bracelet. Half-interest in a Hummer. On the other hand, in many parts of the United States, $635,000 barely buys a decent house. On the other hand, again, $635,000 would probably feed and house and buy medical supplies and build a school and pay the teachers for the population of a village in Darfur for several generations, if there are any villages left in Darfur.

Again, what’s the point of all this?

I want a glass of that wine!

Sorry.

Occasionally in the daily, weekly, monthly, yearly rounds of tasting wine and making notes, one longs for something different, a wine that possesses a sort of odd authenticity and character that goes beyond the usual run of sauvignon blanc, chardonnay and riesling, merlot, pinot noir, cabernet sauvignon and syrah. Not that there’s a damned thing wrong with those grapes and the sometimes wonderful wines made from them. I fully realize, and so does every other wine-writer in the world, that we occupy a privileged position: People send us fabulous wines! They invite us to tastings of fabulous wines! They want to know our opinions about their fabulous wines!

They also send us — naively? cluelessly? — crummy wines, but that’s another story.

Anyway, the week before Thanksgiving, I was in a retail store looking at the vast array of white wines from California and there on a shelf were three or four bottles of sauvignon blanc from Kalin Cellars in Marin County. Now if you’ve been around the block a few times in the Golden State, you know that the mad-caps at Kalin hold their wine before release an extraordinary length of time. In fact, this label said Kalin Cellars Sauvignon Blanc 1995, Potter Valley. That’s right, an 11-year-old sauvignon blanc. The wine manager at the store said, “No joke,” though later I checked on the winery’s website (http://www.kalincellars.com) and found that the current release for Kalin’s Potter Valley Sauvignon Blanc is 1996.

So, I bought the wine (about $22); I mean curiosity alone would have impelled me.

After Thanksgiving, in the first blush of abstemiousness that comes after the annual feast, I used the ravaged carcass of the turkey, resembling a cathedral after bombardment, to make broth, simmering it for eight or 10 hours with carrots, celery, parsley and an onion. I strained the mass through a colander and three times through the chinois — yes, we are a household that owns a conical, three-layers-of-fine-mesh “Chinese hat” strainer — to achieve a broth with as much clarity as possible. A motivation in making the broth, in addition to wanting something clean and pure, was that my wife was recovering from a bad cold; there’s nothing like a hot flavorful broth to soothe the throat and provide nourishment
She suggesting opening the Kalin Sauvignon Blanc 1996, and I promise that it was a revelation. This was a fully mature wine, possibly leaning over the edge a bit. The color was mild golden-yellow, and the bouquet, which was not oxidized, offered a weaving of lemon curd and orange rind with undertones of caramel and butterscotch and a touch of sherry; an unpleasant earthy quality quickly blew off. In the mouth, the wine balanced liveliness with a moderately lush texture, delivering flavors of lemon curd, roasted pears and ginger, bolstered by a hint of dried herbs and a gentle limestone element. Taking a bit of getting used to, the wine turned out to be not just intriguing but delicious, and it was striking how appropriate it was with the turkey broth.

While I would be highly suspicious of 10-year-old sauvignon blanc wines and chardonnays and pinot noirs from the majority of wineries in California, it’s clear that the proprietors of Kalin Cellars operate by a different philosophy than immediate gratification. It’s worth the risk to try their wonderfully eccentric wines.

We don’t expect a Cotes-du-Rhone that originally cost about $10 to last for six years, so I was surprised when the owner of a retail shop in Memphis urged me to buy a bottle of the Jean-Luc Colombo “Les Abeilles” Cotes-du-Rhones 2000. “This was the last that the importer shipped,” he said, “and I bought the last three cases the wholesaler had. It’s drinking beautifully.”
No joke. Well-worth $13, this wine is certainly at the limit of its maturity, yet the rich, warm, meaty bouquet, wafting scents of spicy red and black fruit, briary-brambly qualities and a touch of mushroom-like earthiness was irresistible. That spiciness blossoms in the mouth, as does the fleshy-gamy nature of the slightly over-ripe and macerated currant and plum flavors, lending a hint of decadence. Lively acid cuts a swath on the palate; the wine retains plenty of grip in the form of tannins that have lost their shagginess, though there’s an edge of austerity on the finish.

Jean-Luc Colombo’s “Les Abeilles” — “the bees” — 2000 is definitely Worth a Search but needs to be consumed within six months or so. The importer is Palm Bay Imports. The 2004 vintage is available now at about $8 to $11.
What would you do with this wine? To me it cries out for a rabbit fricassee or quail with polenta or dove on toast, the sort of fare that hunters serve at breakfast.