Christmas dinner with a wine older than me....

... I finally opened it.

I had cooked an amazing fore-rib of roast beef that I knew would be perfect with a very special bottle of wine.

So I took the 1966 Lynch Bages from the wine rack and proceeded to prepare it, bringing it up to room temperature slowly, but when I started to open it the cork broke in half - bugger I thought, I've left it too long, or it wasn't stored correctly..... all the things race through your mind. Luckily I managed to get the rest of the cork out without issue. I had a quick sniff of the cork and the now open bottle. No it didn't smell of vinegar, nor any sign of mustiness or any other off putting whiff.

I left the bottle to rest for a while, then decided to decant it, just incase there were large sediment deposits, which suprisingly there weren't, just a stubborn streak of sediment down the side of the bottle and a little towards the bottom of the bottle.

Then a little taste pre-dinner, just to make sure it was alright.

What an amazing wine! All the tanins mellowed to nothing, blackcurrants and spice with chocolate were all the aromas and flavours I could think of as I tasted it.

I bought this bottle years ago as it was the closest I could get to my year of birth, I chose Lynch Bages as that was the first really good growth Claret I ever tasted at the age of 17 working in a restaurant.

Sadly the 1966 Krug I bought in Bentalls 15+ years ago hasn't survived as the cork gave up the ghost a while ago, and the level is now below the neck label, so this is probably quite expensive vinegar by now. Luckily it looks like the 1967 Port I found a few years ago in Berry Brothers & Rudd is very much intact and the level is well in the neck still. Win some, loose some.