Sometimes, It’s More Than Just Wine

Posted by | Posted in Grape Adventures | Posted on 10-04-2012

Every now and then, I encounter a bottle that provides a particularly special experience. Usually, these wines are older — fully mature or close-to-mature wines from highly regarded vintages and producers — and are utterly thrilling and compelling to drink, with flavors harmonizing seamlessly and conveyed with a remarkable sense of delicacy and grace.

A couple of weeks ago, I was fortunate enough to experience something particularly unique; a bottle that was not just remarkable and memorable for its flavors, grace, and maturity, but for its historical significance and what it represented.

At dinner with a small group of very generous friends, a bottle of the 1945 Huet Vouvray Le Haut Lieu Moelleux was produced and poured around the table. Huet’s reputation is legendary for producing stunningly balanced, long-aging wines. Through the generosity of others, I’ve been able to experience stunning bottles of Huet from other old, heralded vintages, such as the ’47 Le Haut Lieu Moelleux.

The ’45, however, was more than a great wine or a great vintage. Sublime flavors and fragrance with the harmony, seamlessness and polish I usually find in old Huet; but with the added historical context of a wine made at the end of the second World War, by a man who not long before harvest had been imprisoned in a POW camp. Gaston Huet returned to vineyards that had been challenged by an early frost and heat later, and the wine he produced that we enjoyed, as one of our group put it, was nothing less than a monument to the human spirit.

Comments are closed.