Memorable wines

Wine critic and writer Michael Fridjhon recalls the more memorable wines he has drunk.

It started with a casual glance through a Sotheby's auction catalogue sometime in the second half of the 1970s. "Property of the Duke of Northumberland - from the Cellars of Alnwyck Castle: Constantia 1791 or 1809." The note which followed explained how the Duke's ancestors had bought both vintages but that their records didn't show which had been stored in which bin.

The estimates - as I recall - were R300 per half bottle (not a trifling sum in those days - a current release Yquem would have cost no more than R40). Still, the idea of tasting a wine so rare that when Professor Saintsbury wrote his Notes on a Cellarbook in the early 20th century he observed "I wonder if there is anyone alive who has tasted real Constantia…" made the idea of a bid irresistible.

I was not the only South African scanning the catalogue however. In no time it became clear that there would be a lot of interest in these Constantias. There were several bottles on auction however - and, what we didn't know at the time, plenty more for sale if the prices achieved made sense to the vendor. In the end, all the buyers were satisfied and there were bottles enough for the academics to analyse, the collectors to cellar and the wine tasters to taste.

Over the years I've sipped them, drunk them, donated them and I've received them. Nothing in the world of old dessert wines however can prepare you for the experience of consuming - even in minuscule quantities - one of the finest beverages ever made. Truly old wines are usually past their best. Yet here was one, bottled in the lifetime of Napoleon, which, every time I have been privileged to taste it, shows a freshness and intensity which mocks the centuries it has survived.

The first bottles were opened to considerable fanfare. The late Peter Devereux, driving force of the International Wine and Food Society's Johannesburg chapter, asked me to help source some old Yquem (we had the 1959, I think), some Tokaji Essencia, and a Trockenbeerenauslese.

In fairness, only the Yquem had the stature to be playing in the same game, and fearfully, it was a no contest. In the bright glare of the kind of lighting required by TV cameramen in the pre-digital era, I extracted the cork. Most of it came away like crumbling cheese, saturated by nearly two centuries of contact with the wine. It seemed as if this would be a sommelier's nightmare - hundreds of cork fragments to contaminate a fluid so old - and possibly so fragile - that by the time the bottle contents were filtered the wine would be deader than the men who had made it.

Using a 19th century perfume bottle corkscrew with a thread so fine it could pierce the remaining cork without moving it, I lifted away the last segment, a disc-shaped plug about 3mm thick crusted into a solid mass from its contact with the sweet wine. As it came out, it gathered all the remaining particles. At that point the bouquet, trapped since before the Battle of Waterloo, emerged like a genie from the bottle.

The wine was a dark but seductive amber. The aromas were honeyed, with hints of molasses, nutmeg, Chinese five spice and marmalade. On the palate it was sumptuous, rich rather than sweet, full rather than cloying, intense yet hauntingly evanescent. The next morning I picked up my glass - which I had drained clear to the last drop the night before - and it was all still there, unfaded and ever-fresh, exactly what you would expect of a vinous immortal.