On May 29, 1985, we attended a dinner hosted by Les Amis du Vin at Grisanti’s East, “Big John” Grisanti’s restaurant in Germantown, the city that abuts Memphis to the east. Fifty years ago, Germantown was mainly horse farms, with one intersection where the old town was. Even in the 1970s, it seemed as if it took forever to drive from Midtown Memphis to Germantown, and what is now Germantown Road, a six-lane thoroughfare lined with fast-food emporiums, shopping centers and malls and office buildings, was a two-lane highway that ran north and south between cotton fields.

Anyway, it’s possible that in a box in the attic I have a menu from this dinner, but all I show in my wine label notebook is one label and description, and these are for Chateau La Tour Blanche 1976, Sauternes Premier Cru Classe, served in half-bottles with frogs’ legs sauteed in butter with a hazelnut sauce. The match was a stroke of genius on the part of chef Peter Katsotis (Big John’s son-in-law) and whoever provided the wine.

Here are my notes from that night: “A remarkable pairing — this wine with frogs’ legs cooked in butter & nut sauce — surprisingly, it worked. Medium gold color — Buttered toast nose, fruity, touch of raisin; beautifully balanced, not as sweet as I had expected, more mellow and round, lingering sweetness on the tongue and throat, subdued.”

In The New Great Vintage Wine Book (Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), a revised and expanded version of The Great Vintage Wine Book of 1982, Michael Broadbent records tasting what sound like remarkable bottles of La Tour Blanche
from 1869 (Broadbent gave this five stars in 1892; the wine was 113 years old!); 1899 (three stars in 1981); 1900 (three stars in 1989); 1904 (three stars in 1985); 1921 (“perfection” and five stars in 1987) and so on. With more recent vintages, however, that is, in the 1970s and ’80s, Broadbent’s notes are more circumspect and ambivalent. As Robert M. Parker Jr. writes in the third edition of Bordeaux (Simon & Schuster, 1998), “Since 1910 the Ministry of Agriculture has run La Tour Blanche and until the mid-1980s seemed content to produce wines that at best could be called mediocre.”

And there was I, at this dinner in 1985, wowed by a glass of La Tour Blanche ‘76 and a dish of frogs’ legs. Did I know what the hell I was doing? Who knows? I remember, however, 25 years later, how thrilling the experience was, how risky and satisfying the combination seemed and still does.

And just so you don’t get the idea that back in 1985 I was swanning around all the time trying great Bordeaux and Burgundy at tasting events and dinners, here’s a list of some of the wines we drank at home in April and May that year:

<>Shadow Creek Brut nv, Sonoma County.
<>Columbia Cabernet Sauvignon 1082, Yakima Vally.
<>Mirassou White Zinfandel 1984, Monterey County. (!!!!!)
<>Chateau de La Chaize Brouilly 1983.
<>Cribari Extra Dry California Champagne. (!!!!!)
<>Clos du Bois Merlot 1980, Napa Valley.
<>Petri American Burgundy nv (!!!!!)

Always the reckless experimenter, eh?

Inevitably, as more people read my fledgling newspaper wine column, I was asked to attend or conduct wine tastings. I accepted these invitations because, while I made no money from the effort, I was given the chance to taste great wines. Sometimes at these tastings the wines were prescribed, and sometimes I was invited to put together a group of wines for the event.

By the Winter and Spring of 1985, I was giving tastings for the local chapter of Les Amis du Vin, usually in the upstairs room at John Grisanti’s restaurant, and for Les Femmes du Vin, a group of young professional women interested in learning about wine. I also did a series of wine classes at the Oliver-Britt House, a bed-and-breakfast establishment in Oxford, Miss., the hour-long drive from Senatobia necessitated because Tate County, where we lived, was dry. Remember, though, I was still getting or buying most of my wine in Memphis. Inevitably, again, I often relied on the generosity of Shields Hood, wine manager at Athens Distributing, and “Big John” Grisanti for wines to feature at tastings.

Looking through my album of labels and notes from 25 years ago, I can piece together some of these events. For example, on Jan. 8, 1985, I attended a meeting of Les Amis du Vin that featured 12 cabernet-based wines tasted blind. The ones I recorded in my album were Zaca Mesa Cabernet Sauvignon 1981, California; Konocti Cabernet Sauvignon 1980, Lake County; Chevalier Lascombes 1981, Medoc; and Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars Cabernet Sauvignon 1981, Napa Valley (“clearly the best … fabulous spicy black currant nose — lots of depth and complexity”).

One night, at my class at the Oliver-Britt House, we tried, among other wines, Chateau Lynch-Moussas 1981, Pauillac, and Carneros Creek Winery Fay/Turnbull Vineyards Cabernet Sauvignon 1980, Napa Valley, the latter a beautifully-made, expressive cabernet.

For the women of Les Femmes du Vin, on April 21, I assembled a sterling group of red wines from Bordeaux: Vieux Chateau Certan 1982, Pomerol; Chateau Branaire Ducru 1981, Saint-Julien; Chateau d’Issan 1979, Margaux; Chateau Grand-Puy-Lacoste 1978, Paulliac; Chateau Gruaud-Larose 1976, Saint-Julien (my favorite); and Chateau Leoville-Barton 1975, Saint-Julien (second favorite). I seem to remember that Shields Hood and “Big John” Grisanti both contributed wines to this important and educational tasting. The experience, the education were my compensation, though getting to spend some time with intelligent, well-spoken, attractive and pretty damned hard-drinking women only added to the allure.

On some occasion that Spring — I didn’t record which one — I did a little seminar on white Burgundy, tasting and talking about this quartet: Chassagne-Montrachet 1983, Leonard de Saint-Aubin; Puligny-Montrachet 1983, A. Noirot-Carriere; Chablis Premier Cru Fourchaume 1983, Chateau de Maligny; and Domaine de la Maladiere Chablis Grand Cru Les Clos 1983, William Fevre. The two village wines didn’t stand much of a chance against the superb Premier Cru and Grand Cru Chablis.

Best, however, was the group of five wines that I presented to my small class at the Oliver-Britt House the last night of the series. I wanted to conclude with a sort of blow-out, and that’s what we did, courtesy, as always, of my benefactors. Here was the line-up: Chateau Branaire-Ducru 1981, Saint-Julien; Chateau Nenin 1981, Pomerol; Chateau Petit-Figeac 1981, St.Emilion Grand Cru; Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars Stag’s Leap Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon 1981, Napa Valley; and, the triumph, the best wine I tasted in the first four months of 1985, Chateau Margaux 1981, from the Bordeaux commune Margaux.

The variable though frequently excellent year, 1981, was seriously overwhelmed by the magnificent 1982; ‘81 was more classic, the wines a little tighter and leaner. Margaux was coming off two bad decades, making a dramatic turn-around, under the recent ownership of the Mentzelopoulos family, in 1978. The wine of Chateau Margaux is dominated by cabernet sauvignon, sometimes as much as 85 percent, followed by decreasing portions of merlot, petit verdot and cabernet franc. Robert M. Parker Jr. described Margaux 1981 as “outstanding,” though without the “power and weight” of the 1982, ‘83 or ‘86. In The New Great Vintage Wine Book (Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), Michael Broadbent writes that “recent” tastings of Margaux ‘81, that is in the late 1980s, gave the impression of a wine “still deep, youthful; good crisp fruit, opening up well; dry, fullish, lean, raw but flavoury.” (Flavoury?) Out of five stars, Broadbent gave Margaux ‘81 a score of **(*), a more temperate response than Parker’s rating of 91.

My notes from that night, in the Spring of 1985: “Wow! Incredibly good, even this young — deep purple; fragrant berryish/cassis nose; deep, but elegant, wonderful tone and balance, yet tannic, fruit already emerging. Favorite of the evening and maybe the course.” No “maybe” about it! This was a great wine.

The point, as I think I have said in previous entries of The Chronicle, is not to say, “Ha-ha, here are the wines I was tasting 25 years ago that you didn’t,” but to reveal the course of my education — especially in Bordeaux — and how rapidly it accelerated after I started writing a newspaper column and had met people whose aid and influence were invaluable. I was lucky enough to be the right person in the right place at the right time.

Founded in 1854 in Santa Clara Valley, Mirassou was once a venerable name in California. Having been farmers and bulk wine producers for four generations, the family in 1966 turned to bottling wines from their own vineyards and entering the competitive lists of the state’s growing wine industry. These efforts were not always successful, yet particularly in the white wine area, with gewurztraminer; “White Burgundy,” made from pinot blanc; and the “Harvest Reserve” chardonnay, the Mirassou family could be proud of its achievement. I tried many of these wines in the 1980s, including this Mirassou Harvest Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon 1979 from Monterey County. As you can see from the label, the winery made 3,000 cases of the wine.

We drank this bottle on Dec. 9 and 10, 1984. I paid $10 for it. My notes read thus:

“Interesting and complex. Deep ruby color; tannic, fruity nose, hints of herbs and flowers; quite a mouthful, almost thick — very complex, almost puzzling, many layers of fruit and spicy, sappy nuance with, at the bottom, a provocative level of what CDK [my son, 17 at the time] called ‘cherry gasoline.’ Long finish. Perhaps not to everyone’s taste.”

“Cherry gasoline,” indeed, way to go, my boy, and surely not to the taste of anyone with a nose and palate for real cabernet sauvignon. A noble failure at five years after harvest? Or just a weird anomaly or indication of how erratic the winemaking could be at Mirassou?

In any case, Gallo bought the brand and the inventory in 2003, and the cheap Mirassou wines are now made in Modesto.

For my birthday on Dec. 7, 1984, we met some friends for dinner at La Tourelle, a French restaurant just off the Overton Square district of shops and bars and restaurants in Memphis. At the time, remember, we still lived in Senatobia, Miss., a small town (in a dry county) south of Memphis, where we taught at the junior college. Most of our entertainment dollars, believe me, were spent in Memphis.

La Tourelle closed in July 2007, just after its 30th anniversary. Located in a wooden Queen Anne house (with a round tower), the restaurant was owned by Glenn and Martha Hays. He was the track coach at the University of Memphis for 36 years and was a devotee of France and French cooking. La Tourelle was an incubator for chefs in Memphis, many of whom passed through that kitchen to open their own restaurants in the city. It was one of the restaurants I wrote about the most in my 20 years of reviewing restaurants for the newspaper here. The Hays still own the thriving bistro-style Cafe 1912, a few blocks south of La Tourelle, which is now Restaurant Iris, presided over by award-winning chef Kelly English.

Anyway, that night, 25 years ago yesterday, we gathered in La Tourelle’s smaller dining room, an intimate space with a fireplace, to celebrate my birthday. It was the first time I had eaten rabbit, an animal we don’t see enough of on restaurant menus, probably because (a) it’s difficult to cook without drying out, and (b) dining on Thumper just messes with people’s heads.

Though I had been writing a newspaper wine column only for five months, the phenomenon had already begun; when a waiter offered a wine list, it was passed to me, usually with the words, “You’re the expert, you choose the wine.” At this point my expertise was more likely a combination of nervous geekdom and bravado, but on this occasion, I ordered a bottle of the Georges Duboeuf Juliénas 1983, the first time, I’m pretty sure, that I had tried a cru Beaujolais. Juliénas is a middle-of-the-road cru Beaujolais, not as delicate as Fleurie, not as spicy as Brouilly, not as robust as Morgon, yet with an appealing fresh, dark, slightly spicy interiority of its own. Actually, it’s my favorite of the 10 crus of Beaujolais, at least in this mood of retrospection, and it was, as my notes attest, terrific with the rabbit fricassee.

The price of this wine on La Tourelle’s list was $11.50, “not a bad price for a restaurant wine,” I wrote in my label album. Ah, those were the days.

One of the traditions maintained by “Big John” Grisanti was that the first time a guest visited his wine cellar at home, he or she could pick a bottle of wine to take with them. The task could be overwhelming, so on the occasion of my first visit, struck dumb by the choices, I allowed Grisanti to choose for me, at which prompting he handed me a bottle of Chateau Haut Brion 1975, a First Growth red wine from the Bordeaux region of Graves. I, in turn, gave the bottle to my (former) father-in-law as a housewarming present; he and my mother-in-law had just moved into a new house in East Memphis. (Now a widower, he still lives there, in his mid-90s every bit the gentleman he was raised to be.) He opened the wine for us to enjoy at the Thanksgiving dinner in November 1984.

Records of vines being cultivated at the estate of Haut Brion go back to 1423. The Pontac family built the chateau depicted on the label in 1550. In his diary entry for April 10, 1663, Samuel Pepys mentions a visit to the Royal Oak Tavern in London where “I drank a sort of French wine called Ho-Bryan which hath a good and most particular taste which I never before encountered…..” The estate went through several changes of ownership in the 18th and 19th centuries, and after a period of decline was purchased by the Dillon family in 1935.

Haut Brion was listed as a First Growth in the 1855 Classification of the wines of the Medoc. Whatever variations of quality and fortune it endured through the 20th Century, the estate has performed at the highest level of quality and consistency since 1975. The vineyards at Haut Brion are planted with 45 percent cabernet sauvignon, 37 percent merlot and 18 percent cabernet franc; the proportion of grapes in each wine differs according to vintage conditions. The “second” wine of Haut Brion is Bahans Haut Brion. The estate also produces one of the region’s greatest white wines. Production of Chateau Haut Brion is about 11,000 cases annually; Bahans Haut Brion is about 7,300 cases and the blanc is 650 cases.

In Michael Broadbent’s Vintage Wine (Harcourt, 2002), the British auctioneer and writer gives 1975 a four star rating (out of five stars), though he calls the year “irregular” and “certainly interesting, not to say challenging.” His notes on Haut Brion 1975 are ambivalent, though he rather grudgingly comes around to liking the wine by 1995. Robert M. Parker Jr. calls the year “tricky,” with “the overall quality level … distressingly uneven and the number of failures … too numerous to ignore.” Yikes! Haut Brion 1975, however, Parker rates as “a great wine and one of the top dozen or so wines of the vintage.”

My impression of Haut Brion ‘75, on Thanksgiving 1984? Here are my original notes: “A great wine. Surprising color, deep brown, like mahogany. Cedar nose, lead pencil, fruity, quite tannic, emerging fruit, exotic, dry but with an underlying core of succulent sweetness. Years to go.”

At the time, in Memphis, the Haut Brion ‘75 sold for $100 to $110.

Well, today we don’t have a Bordeaux First Growth to grace the Thanksgiving board. Instead, there are three bottles of my standard Thanksgiving wine, the Ridge Three Valleys, Sonoma County, this from 2007. For this vintage, the blend is zinfandel (75%), petite sirah (8%), syrah (7%), grenache (6%) and carignane (3%). I also have a bottle of Trefethen Riesling 2007, Napa Valley, because I do like a riesling with the Thanksgiving feast. Some bottles of pinot noir — Morgan, Terlato, Sokol Blosser — await in case our guests’ tastes incline that way. All American wines, yes, because this is, after all, a great American celebration.

On the menu: Clementine-Salted Turkey with Redeye Gravy (a Matt and Ted Lee recipe); Sweet Potato Stuffing with Bacon and Thyme; Wild Mushroom-Collard Green Bundles; green beans, roasted carrots and bacon-topped cornbread. There’s a pumpkin pie for dessert, and a pear crisp with candied ginger. If anyone wants a dessert wine, I have a couple of vintages of Dolce and Beringer Nightingale on hand.

All of that should get the job done.

I hope that all of my readers partake of excellent food and excellent wine today, blessed with family and friends, and remember, while you’re at it, all of those who have neither food nor wine, family nor friends, and let us help them at all times of the year.

Number 25 in this chronicle, one-quarter the way through. At this rate, it will take six more years. I’ll try to move along more speedily.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Now, this, friends, is a wine label. For about a decade, the Chateau Lagrange 1926, from Bordeaux’s Left Bank commune of St.-Julien, was the oldest wine I tasted. I encountered in it October 1984 (I didn’t record the day) at a special dinner at American Harvest, a restaurant in Germantown, a municipality abutting Memphis on the east, owned by John Grisanti and helmed by his son-in-law, Peter Katsotis. The event was organized and hosted by Ed Chidester, then owner of Mt. Moriah Wine & Liquors in Memphis, a store where I regularly went looking for unusual wines.

It constantly amazed me at the time, and was a source of gratification, that even though I had been writing my newspaper wine column only for three months that doors were continually being opened, giving me the opportunity to try all sorts of wines. This was largely due to my new association with “Big John” Grisanti, who promoted me, nurtured me, educated me and, yes, badgered and browbeat me.

I also didn’t record what courses were presented at this dinner, so I can’t tell you what the 58-year-old wine was paired with. It was, not surprisingly, fully mature. A bit of mustiness blew off after a few minutes, and the wine, which displayed a modestly diminished garnet color, stood up like a soldier with a complement of dried spices, that St.-Julien signature of cedar and tobacco, and gently macerated and fading red and black fruit flavors over some mossy earthiness, before making an honorable retreat. What a treat!

Ownership records for Chateau Lagrange go back to 1631. The Bordeaux Classification of 1855 ranked Lagrange as a Third Growth, at which time the estate consisted of about 700 acres. The Cendoya family bought the estate in 1925 and sold it to Suntory in 1983; by then, the property had been reduced to about 392 acres, and the quality of the wine had been in decline for decades. Suntory spend million of dollars upgrading the estate and the facilities and replanting vineyards.

The label from 1926 is a work of art, of its kind, clearly based on late Renaissance models of printmaking craftsmanship. Notice how the pair of soldiers-at-arms is carefully differentiated, from their armor and helmets and plumes to their magnificent mustaches and beards. A riot of typefaces and curlicues, the image is indeed busy, but elegant and authoritative for all its doodads and devices. By comparison, the contemporary label is bland and generic.

In September 1984, a friend of ours, Jane Sharding, one of the city’s best organists and choir directors, was going to Paris, and she asked me, in full blithe innocence, if she could bring me something. You know how people do that on the eve of departure, with a little laugh, expecting you to say, “Oh, don’t bring me anything, just send a postcard.” Well, I had been poring over Steven Spurrier’s The Concise Guide to French Country Wines (Putnam/Perigee Books, 1983), and I replied to Jane’s jocular aside with goober-like seriousness and a list of wines and directions to Spurrier’s intimate, little shop, Les Caves du Madeleine. Spurrier is the Englishman who engineered the famous “Paris Tasting of 1976″ in which a California chardonnay and cabernet sauvignon “beat” exemplary models from Bordeaux and Burgundy.

Anyway. Jane came through like a good sport and a trouper and returned to Memphis with three bottles of red wine in a sturdy cardboard carry-box. They were: Château de Beaupré Cuvée Spéciale 1981, Coteaux d’Aix-en-Provence; Domaine des Féraud 1981, Côtes de Provence; Domaine du Souleillou 1980, Cahors. The first two were interesting, educational, enjoyable; the third was the knockout.

I had read in various books that Cahors, dominated by the malbec grape, there called auxerrois, produced tough, rustic, full-bodied “black wines” that provide appropriate accompaniment to the local hearty cuisine; it’s perfect with cassoulet. Cahors lies athwart the Dordogne river in a rugged area southeast of Bordeaux and is even today not easy to reach. I visited the region and city in 1990, driving up from Toulouse by a wildly picturesque route.

The Domaine du Souleillou 1980 wasn’t exactly black, more like deep, dark ruby-garnet. Rustic, though, yes, I will admit to that quality, by which I mean unpretentious, unsophisticated, honest and forthright. But not simple: There were complexities of ripe, dusty currant and plum scents and flavors, sort of buried in briery tannins, port-soaked fruitcake, woody spice and mossy-like earthiness. This was intense and heady stuff, unlike any wine I had encountered. I didn’t record what we ate with the wine; it was clearly not made for lighthearted sipping. I opened it on Oct. 4, 1984, so I assume it went with something flavorful and autumnal.

This is, by the way, my favorite kind of wine label, nothing gaudy, neither ostentatious nor tricked out with japes and frippery. It’s as honest in lay-out and typography as the wine was in its construction and essence. The fact that the words “Domaine du Souleillou” are set on a slight curve and that the name of the proprietor is in cursive lends this artless label a touch of elegance. I’ll let Benito, who ought to have a separate blog about wine labels, offer his knowledge about the typefaces, but I think he would agree that this label illustrates the epitome of clarity and good sense.

Continuing the Chronicle of the 100 Most Interesting or Important or Educational Wines I tasted in my fledgling years as a wine writer, we’re still in 1984, when I launched my wine career with my first column in The Commercial Appeal newspaper in July. Within two or three months, I was being invited to public and private tastings and had begun to receive press releases and even a sample wine or two. Wow, doors were opening! As I mentioned in a previous post in this series, by this time I had met two people who were very important in my wine education and who became valuable friends, Shields Hood and John Grisanti, both of whom figure in today’s post about the first great champagnes I encountered.

On Sept. 17, 1984, Shields held a tasting of 17 champagnes and sparkling wines at the warehouse of the wholesale distributor for whom he worked. Most of the people at the event worked in retail. This is the day on which I first tried Dom Pérignon.

Dom Pérignon, the flagship champagne of Moët & Chandon, fills a hallowed niche in the pantheon of highly recognizable and heavily marketed grandes marques that includes Taittinger’s Comtes de Champagne, Veuve Clicquot’s Grande Dame and Perrier-Jouët’s Le Belle Époque. Founded in 1743, Moët & Chandon is owned by LVMH, the giant luxury goods conglomerate. Cuvée Dom Pérignon, as it is properly called, is named after the legendary monk who is supposed to have claimed “I’m seeing stars,” after drinking the sparkling beverage that had accidentally re-fermented in the bottle. I’m no monk, but I make equal claim after drinking too much champagne. The special label was introduced with the 1921 vintage and was produced in 1928, ‘29 and ‘34, but it was the 1943 vintage that was fermented inside its own bottle, according to Tom Stevenson in World Encyclopedia of Champagne & Sparkling Wine (Wine Appreciation Guild, revised edition, 2003).

My reaction to Cuvée Dom Pérignon 1976 was the succinct “Wonderful champagne!” To which I added in my notes, “Yeasty, dry, nutty, well-balanced. Very elegant.” The price? (If you have tears, etc.) $67.

We’re getting out of sequence with the Perrier-Jouët Blason de France Rose, but I wanted to present this trio of champagnes together. So … quite a few months after the Dom Pérignon encounter, my first wife and I were invited to a small Perrier-Jouët dinner at a long defunct restaurant here, The Palm Court. The national sales rep for the importer, which then was Stacole (I think), was at the dinner to talk about the champagnes and to present the Palm Court’s chef-owner, Michael Cahhal, with the Perrier-Jouët Award, whatever that signified. (Perrier-Jouët was founded in 1811 and is now owned by Pernod Ricard.) Anyway, I was enthralled by the Blason de France Rosé, the color of which the sales rep described as “the blush on the thigh of an aroused nymph,” a line, with a whiff of Fragonard, that will never be bettered and which, I confess, I have borrowed several times over the past 25 years. We were told that the P-J Blason de France Rosé was the house champagne at Chateau Mouton-Rothschild; I wanted it to be the house champagne at my house. My note offers one word: “Divine.”

Not long after that occasion, a group of gentleman gathered in the wine cellar — an actual cellar, as in below ground — at John Grisanti’s house, to taste this thing and that. These were collectors, all far more experienced than I at the tasting and assessing of older vintages of Bordeaux and Burgundy and vintage champagne. Anyway, Big John opened a Taittinger Comtes de Champagne 1961, a 24-year-old bottle. While the others present were sagely exclaiming over its irresistible qualities, in my little notebook I was writing, “Stinky, caramelized, oxidized.” Now I know that the British have this thing about old champagne, or are reputed to, but this ‘61 seemed way over the hill to me.

The last time I posted an entry in this series about the wines that I learned the most from — not necessary the best wines, though many are — I said that during the great educational year of 1984 the best wines were clearly the Chateau Lafite-Rothschild 1970 and ‘75 that I tasted on September 11. Well, I’m not unhappy to drink my words and say that I was wrong. There were too many “best” wines to name just one.

The wine I’m going to mention today constituted my introduction to great red Burgundy. I had tried a couple of red wines from Burgundy in 1983 and 1984 but hadn’t had much luck with the quality or the year. In fact, up until this point, the best wines I had tasted made from pinot noir grapes were from California: the Simi Pinot Noir 1974, Alexander Valley; a Beaulieu Pinot Noir 1979, Los Carneros; and an Au Bon Climat Pinot Noir 1982, Santa Barbara County. Where, oh where, was I going to find a Burgundy that was like the wines I read about in books.

In Big John Grisanti’s cellar at home, that’s where.

I was at Big John’s house on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon, Sept. 16, 2004, and he asked me where I thought my wine education was lacking. “Burgundy, as in pinot noir,” I said, explaining that the models I had tried didn’t seem real or authentic or very good, at least from what I had read. In Burgundy (Faber & Faber, 1982), Anthony Hanson writes: “A fine wine will have a lovely colour, an attractive bouquet, and the balance, flavour and smoothness to be expected of it. A great wine will have all these things, but in addition something that makes the pulse race, to make one exclaim: ‘How can it smell and taste like that? That is amazing!’ A fine wine may remind one of flowers or spices or fruits, but there is something animal, often something erotic about great Burgundy.” That’s what I wanted to experience.

“Well,” Big John said, “let’s look around and see what we can find,” and he perused the racks in the cellar, and this was a real underground wine cellar, big enough to hold thousands of bottles and 10 or 12 adults standing up. He pulled out a bottle, checked the fill — the level of wine in relation to the neck and shoulder of the bottle — blew off a little dust, and said, “This should do it.”

The wine was a Mercurey Clos des Myglands 1971 from the venerable house of Faiveley, founded in 1825 and still owned and operated by the family. Mercurey is the most prominent commune of the Côte Chalonnaise, south of Côte de Beaune and north of the Mâconnais and Beaujolais. The 15.59-acre Clos des Myglands vineyard, a Premier Cru, is a monopole for Faiveley, that is, a rare instance in which an entire vineyard in Burgundy is owned by one producer or domaine. Now one does not expect truly great wine from the Chalonnaise; one is gratified to be rewarded with authentic pinot noir suppleness and earthiness and fruit. While my experience in 1984 with great pinot noir, especially from the grape’s homeland of Burgundy, was close to nil, I couldn’t help feeling a sense of keen expectation while Grisanti pulled the cork from the bottle and poured the wine.

The color was medium ruby fading to brick red at the edges. The bouquet, well, how could I find the words? Autumn leaves, moss, smoke, loam; an immediate sense of delicacy bolstered by confidence; and then something bigger, richer, almost meaty. Lord have mercy! In the mouth, the wine was quite full, vibrant and intense, yet creating an impression (again) of delicacy, mellowness, suppleness and subtlety, a feeling of warm satin flowing through the mouth to a long, dense, flavorful finish.

Need I say more than this: That Big John Grisanti and I sat in his cellar and slowly savored every drop of this remarkable wine.

By the way, Dreyfus, Ashby & Co., has not imported the wines of Faiveley for years, that task having passed to Wilson Daniels.

I promised to keep this Chronicle of the 100 most significant (not necessarily the best) wines that I encountered during my education about wine more current, but things have a habit of getting away from me, there are many wines and many meals and dishes to write about and, well, here it is, more than two months since I last entered a post on this subject. Before I get to the wines in question for this post, I want to pause to make note of two men who had a profound influence on my education about wine, Shields Hood and John “Big John” Grisanti, both of whom I met during the late Spring or early Summer of 1984.

Late in 1983 and early in 1984, I wrote a couple of articles about wine for a local magazine, not thinking that they would necessarily lead to anything. Then, in May 1984, my former father-in-law, Ed Harrison, took me to a wine tasting at his church, saying that he had met someone at a previous event whom he thought I should know. As we stood in front of one table, sampling a few wines, Shields Hood stuck out his hand and said, “Hey, I’ve been looking for you!” Shields, who is from Leland, a small town deep in the Mississippi Delta (and he had the accent to match), was wine manager for a large distributor in Memphis. We struck a relationship and then a friendship that lasted about 18 years, until I lost touch with him. He was extremely generous, setting up tastings and appointments for me, opening untold amounts of wines to try, helping me with wines that I presented to different groups around town. Shields was (and still is) heavily involved with the Society of Wine Educators, serving as the organization’s president for several terms, and he was an influential, popular and funny wine teacher in Memphis. He was the first person I ever heard say, in public, “Hey, I could date a wine like this!”

Shields now lives in New Market, Va., and works as senior adviser to the Society of Wine Educators in Washington as well as in sales and marketing for several wine and liquor companies.

Not long after my first regular newspaper wine column was published, I received a telephone call at home; this was when we lived in Senatobia, Miss., about 40 miles south of Memphis.

A deep, gruff voice barked, “Koeppel?”

“Um, yes, that’s me.”

“This is Big John Grisanti. Get up here to my restaurant tonight. I got some wines for you to taste.”

“Uh … ”

“Make it seven o’clock.”

“Uh … ”

Thus my introduction to a man who was larger than life in every way.

Big John was a second-generation restaurateur, a raconteur, a connoisseur, a major donor to charitable causes. Always a master of the flamboyant gesture, he held two world records (in the late 1970s and early ’80s) for the most expensive single bottles of wine bought at auction, $18,000 for a jeraboam of Chateau Lafite Rothschild 1864 and $31,000 for a standard bottle of Lafite 1822. He turned around and auctioned each bottle by the sip, raising over $100,000 for St. Jude Children’s research Hospital.

Big John — who could, as I learned, be irascible and quick-tempered as well as kind — took me in hand and set about making my knowledge of wine deeper and wider. (I eventually learned that he had vetted the columns I submitted to an editor at the newspaper and was instrumental in my getting that job.) We would walk through the warehouse next to his well-known Italian restaurant — now the site of a Walgreens — and he would fill a carton with bottles for me to take home. “Here, Koeppel, you need to try this and this and, let’s see, this.” Or we would sit in a back booth in the restaurant, tasting glass after glass of wine, with a platter of ravioli in front of us. Or — the thrill of thrills — he would call me on a Sunday morning and say, “Koeppel, I need you to come over to the house this afternoon and pick out some wines for some people I’m gonna have over for a tasting in the cellar.” That cellar is where I had my first taste of Mouton-Rothschild, my first great Burgundy, my first aged French Champagne. You’ll be reading about a few of those wines in the coming months.

Generosity, unfortunately, does not guarantee longevity. Big John Grisanti died of cancer in March 1995. He was 66.

What was remarkable, in those months in 1984 after my first newspaper wine columns were published, is how quickly my experience of tasting wine increased. Suddenly I went from being a guy who bought two wines a week to a guy who was invited to wine events, to lunches with winemakers, to private tastings of old Bordeaux. My notebooks soon became inadequate, and it wasn’t long before I abandoned saving labels because I was tasting too many wines to keep up; it was a tedious chore anyway.

In looking through those almost ancient records now, I see that I will have to be selective in choosing the wines for this Chronicle, because I was tasting so many important or significant or educational wines. For example, in turning the pages of this second notebook, a three-ring, loose-leaf folder, I’m struck by the excitement of that time in 1984. For example, in June, Shields Hood asked me to attend a tasting of Bordeaux from 1981, now one of those “forgotten vintages” because it preceded the fabulous 1982, at his warehouse, among which we tried Chateaux Lynch-Moussas, Chasse-Spleen and Les Ormes de Pez. In September, I gave the first of what would be several tastings for the local woman’s wine group, Les Femmes du Vin — those were some events; among the wines were the Louis Latour Pernand-Vergelesses 1979; the Beaulieu Vineyard Pinot Noir 1979, Los Carneros; Chateau Gloria 1981, St-Julien; and Ridge Cabernet Sauvignon 1981, Mendocino, all excellent wines in their ways, but especially the B.V. Pinot and the Ridge Cabernet.

But I’m no fool, at least not too much of one. On September 11, 1984, Les Amis du Vin held a tasting of Lafite-Rothschild 1978, ‘77, ‘76, ‘75, ‘74 and ‘70, all drawn from Big John Grisanti’s cellar. If Lafite 1970 and ‘75 weren’t the best wines I encountered in 1984, a great year of revelation and experience, I’ll be a monkey’s Egri Bikavér.

Image of Shields Hood from dnronline.com.
Image of John Grisanti from commercialappeal.com.