Chateau Dirty Diaper: An Historic Journey

Jonathan and I attended a wine tasting at the South Beach Wine and Food Festival on Friday afternoon. Chateau Haut-Brion, a French winery, provided ten samples of it’s finer red and white wines from the last twenty years. During this “Historic Journey,” a writer for Wine Spectator asked them questions, compared the vintages, and revealed the prices of what we were imbibing. We learned about planting densities, the hint of toasted oak, and the debate surrounding alternative closures.

Yes -- essentially, one pays $150 per person to sip $200-$500 per bottle wine while listening to a sales pitch. Not generally how I would choose to spend a Friday afternoon, but Jonathan and I were out of the house together and without the boys. We could’ve been shoveling manure for all I cared. More about manure later.

Note: we did not pay for these tickets. We were entertaining clients.

I’d never tasted twenty-year-old wine before. It tasted good, but not twice as good as last year’s vintage, as the difference in prices suggest. Since the latter was nearly $200 per bottle, the point was moot for me anyway.

Regarding one of the wines, the owners suggested we begin open the bottle in five years and drink it for the next fifteen. I don’t know whether it was the wine or my atrophied brain, but it took me a second to realize that he didn’t mean take a sip each month from the same bottle for fifteen years.

[Also, I must pause here to admit that it wasn’t until half-way through the presentation that I realized that the strange nickname they had for their winery was actually it’s proper French pronunciation.]

We had bottles of Evian and a few Carr’s crackers to cleanse our palettes. One of the owners was spitting instead. Note to event organizers: for $150 a pop, something more than a few crackers, please.

The red wine of 1990 was the most expensive of the lot, but I couldn’t get past the smell. It was the same aroma that formulates when we accidentally forget to take out the boys’ dirty diapers overnight. This odor is called “gaminess” by wine connoisseurs and, based on the price of the bottle, is an attractive feature.

Hmmm, maybe we could market a home-made “gaminess” ourselves. (Speaking of which, this past Christmas Jonathan’s uncle served a liqueur made from manure. Not his own, though. From cows or pigs or something.)

To cleanse our palettes of all things gamey, Jonathan and I shared a Subway sub on the ride home.