It Was A Very Good Year
I was born on January 29, 1977. A few weeks later, some vines in northern Portugal began to awaken from their winter slumber. A few months after that, bunches of grapes were maturing on those vines, swelling with seaborne rains and basking in the summer sun. By the time I took my first step, the grapes had been pressed into juice whose sugars were beginning their metamorphosis into alcohol. When I was old enough to talk, the young wine was transferred to vats and fortified with a local brandy known as aguardente. Not long thereafter a little under a liter of the resulting elixir was placed into a dark glass bottle, labeled, and laid sideways on a shelf. At some point over the past twenty-odd years, this bottle made its way from the town of Oporto to the New World, finally coming to rest at a wine shop on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where it stayed until the night before my twenty-eighth birthday.
That's where my two little brothers found it, purchased it, and brought it to me as a birthday present last night. We drank half of it waiting for the clock to strike on the first day of my twenty-eighth year, after a dinner prepared for us by my youngest brother, who just started culinary school. Vintage port is only made in years where the grapes show special promise, and the 1977 vintage was one of the most magnificent in the past century.
How do you do justice to a wine that has been waiting your whole life for you to drink it? I have never seen anything the color of this port anywhere else in the world. I have never smelled anything so delicate or subtle. I have been drinking port for years, but I never tasted anything like this before. The sweetness of Douro grape sugars, mellowed by wood and sharpened with the fire of brandy, has been maturing for decades in this magical bottle, waiting for us to open it up and admire its sublime balance. This port was noticeably more alcoholic than most other port I have tasted; it is about 22% alcohol compared to about 19% for the blend I usually keep around the house. The extra bite of spirit is tamed by decanting and allowing the port to breathe for a while.
Aside from giving sediment time to settle, patience allows the wine to realize its full potential; just a sip of my birthday port lingered for several minutes, continuing to soothe and satisfy as it unfolded on the palate. As I turned a year older, surrounded by family, the smooth comfort of the port that grew up with me served as a reminder that the relentless flow of time carries with it special pleasures. We cannot always anticipate where they will come from or when they will cross our path, but they are surely ours for the taking, if only we will take as much time enjoying them as they take in readying themselves for us.
This blog started with a quest for the