50 Year Bottle of Wine - Dave's Midwestern Ohio Memories

Series of Guest Blogs by an out-of-state Fish Report reader originally from this area about fond memories of growing up in Midwestern Ohio during the 50’s & 60’s

50 Year Bottle of Wine

About 35 years ago, I was visiting a local wine shop and ran across a bottle of wine with the vintage of 1972, the same year we were married, so I bought the bottle as a keepsake, storing it in our wine rack ever since. The wine was produced by the Beaulieu Vineyards in Napa Valley, California. If I recall the price was $35 even though the bottle has an old price tag of $74.95, pretty expensive for a wine back then, but it was the right year so I made the purchase.

As shared in a recent blogpost, my wife Debby and I celebrated our 50th wedding anniversary. To commemorate the milestone, we along with our son Reggie spent a wonderful week in the Rockies trekking around the Grand Teton Mountains and visiting Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Some photos follow.

Rather than taking the chance of a leaky or broken bottle, we chose not to pack the old wine in our suitcase and instead opened it upon our return. After 50 years, the cork had somewhat disintegrated so the only way to open the bottle was to push in the cork. To filter out the fragments and settlings, we strained the wine through a piece of cheese cloth.

We used two different wine glasses with a history, one of which we “borrowed” from a wonderful restaurant in Paris called Chez Francis we ran across just off the Chance Elyse on our last night in the City of Lights celebrating our 30th anniversary. The other was a wine glass engraved with Dad we chose when dividing up items before selling my in-laws home.

Debby took the first sip of the 50 year old wine and nearly spit it out. She described it as sour and tart. So we tried it with some food after letting the old wine air out for a while and it became tolerable, at least to me!

I finished Debby’s glass after polishing off mine, gaining a nostalgic taste for the aged wine. I did notice a little hangover-type headache the next morning, most likely from the high level of sulphates in wine of that vintage. At least that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it! We used another cork to plug the bottle until we are inclined to try another sip at some point! When empty, the bottle will take a prime spot on our bar, cork inside and all.

To celebrate our 40th anniversary in 2012, we travelled to Napa Valley in California. We enjoyed a hot air balloon ride over the wine country and also a trip on the wine train through the valley, including an opportunity for a taste testing of the current vintage of the Beaulieu wine. The vineyard has quite a history going back over a century, founded by Goerges de Latour, who was the first to bring grapevines from France for planting on the slopes of Napa Valley with perfect weather cooled by the gentle winds of the Pacific.

When noticing this quote inscribed on a beam in the vineyard's tasting room, we knew our 1972 vintage was a good choice and vowed to open the bottle to celebrate our 50th wedding anniversary:

“I’d wager that there are so many Napa Cabernets made today that if you stacked them one by one, they’d reach all the way to the moon. But if you stacked them in order of historical significance with the most profound bottles forming the base, the number one bottle would have to be Beaulieu Vineyard’s legendary Georges de Latour Private Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon.”

- Jonathan Cristaldi, Food & Wine magazine

Today’s vintages continue to be outstanding as evidenced by the 100 point rating and a steep price on their 2019 vintage cabernet reserve as shown below.

So you might ask what we'll do to celebrate our 60th wedding anniversary? You can bet wine will be involved!

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