My First Time.
Whether you’re into baseball, skiing, or auto racing there are a million movies that go hand-in-hand with your interests. But if you’re into wine you have really two flicks to chose from; Sideways and Bottle Shock and that’s pretty much it. So please forgive me for referring to a particular scene in Sideways, it’s just that I only have two movies to choose from.
So here we go: We all remember the scene: Miles (Paul Giamatti) asks Maya (Virginia Madsen) how she got into wine, right? I believe that she said it was a Sassicaia (although the vintage escapes me).
Whenever I watch that scene, I fondly recalled the bottle that “did it” for me so many years earlier, and something tells me that I am not alone in remembering such an event. I think we’ve all had that one defining moment when we took a sip of something tasty and said, “yeah, I could really get into this”, and before we knew it we were researching and buying nice bottles and heading off to wine country in our spare time.
Some of you might hate me when I tell you which one got me hooked. It was a 1976 Chateau Lafite Rothschild – no BS. Before you assume that I’m some sort of trust fund baby that feasts on filet mignon for breakfast and drives a different Bentley every day of the week, you could not be more wrong. I was raised a middle class kid with working parents – a basic normal red-blooded American guy.
It all went down at Thanksgiving about 14 years ago at a family friend’s home. At the time my mother and father had recently divorced, and I was sort of a man without a country, so to speak. Neither one of my parents were in the mood to have or attend Thanksgiving, so asa a result my grandmother arranged for my brother and I to accompany her to this shindig, and of course we reluctantly went along.
Aside from the fact that there weren’t too many blood relatives with me on this turkey day, it otherwise seemed very similar to my family’s Thanksgiving – lots of arguing, lots of commotion, and lots of food. Maybe I was a little bitter about my family situation, as I remember not really speaking to anyone in great depth, I just sort of kept to myself and hoped that my grandmother would have the good sense to get us out of there soon. Little did I know that my attitude (and life) was about to change.
As we all began to eat, one of the hosts of the party left the dinning room for a second and soon returned holding a huge 3 liter bottle. He explained to us all that his father-in-law had purchased the bottle several years earlier at an auction. Well, unfortunately his father-in-law had since passed on, and the family figured that Thanksgiving was as good a time as any to open it up. So there we all sat, staring at an enormous double magnum of Chateau Lafite Rothschild, circa 1976. Prior to this day I really wasn’t much of a wine drinker, and all I can say is that after my first glass I was completely hooked. The aromas, the taste, the amazing color of the wine, and the best part it was an ALL YOU COULD DRINK affair. An amazing ending to a day that I thought was going to be absolutely terrible.
Being brand new to all of this I left the party thinking that people always brought out really expensive bottles of French wine and I couldn’t wait for the next time an occasion such as this would happen again. So far, it’s been about 14 years, and no sign of another magnum….
