Wine Stands Up To Hurricane

It was a most unusual wine tasting: On the dining table of Roy Weiner, a physician and wine collector in New Orleans, one recent Friday evening, was a pair of bottles of Chateau Lafite Rothschild, vintage 1985. Except for a yellow dot pasted on one bottle, they seemed identical. But their recent histories varied dramatically. One bottle had just been delivered from a temperature-controlled cellar in New York. The other bottle had lain in Dr. Weiner’s 1,100-bottle wine vault in his garage, where most of the wine was classic Bordeaux in vintages going back to the 1960s. There, the temperature held at a constant 56 degrees – until Hurricane Katrina hit last August.Dr. Weiner and his wife, Marjorie, joined the exodus from New Orleans on the eve of the catastrophic storm. The hurricane had a devastating impact on the city, its citizens, its economy, and its cultural life. The Weiners were relatively lucky, but far from untouched: In their absence, Katrina ripped roofing and siding off their house, and the power was out for almost two weeks as the temperature soared into the 90s. The effects trickled down to the wine in their now-steamy wine vault.The question was, just how bad was it? Had the sudden heat impacted the wine? Dr. Weiner, director of the Tulane Cancer Center, and a colleague, geneticist Prescott Deininger, decided to taste test the “Katrina effect.” They’d pair wines that had been through the sweltering days with those that had not.I was the Weiners’ guest over a weekend during which six pairs of wines, four of which were hallowed names of Bordeaux, were sampled. On Friday evening, we tasted that first pair of bottles of 20-year-old Lafite Rothschild. My host kept me in the dark about which bottle was which. While both wines had the cedary, darkfruited aromas and taste of classic Pauillac, my preference was for the “yellow dot” bottle. The other bottle seemed rougher-textured and lacking in the trademark Lafite finesse. Dr. Weiner saw it the other way around. Both bottles, in any case, seemed to gain amplitude during the meal, undoubtedly helped along by the Black Angus steaks that Dr. Weiner had expertly grilled on the terrace.Initial, post-dinner verdict on the Katrina effect: none, only a hung jury. Those at the table were evenly split in their preference between the two bottles of Lafite Rothschild. Apparently, nothing disastrous had happened to the Katrina wine after two weeks of heat.”My belief,” Dr. Weiner said, “is that that these wines may have lost 10 years of drinkable lifespan.”The next evening, a dozen guests gathered at the home of Prescott and Celia Deininger. This time, five pairs of wines would be tasted. Six months after Katrina, the Deiningers’ upscale neighborhood still lacked basic telephone service and many nearby homes remained abandoned. As at the Weiners’, mail service was limited.The evening’s first wine pair was from Bordeaux’s priciest property: Chateau Petrus, vintage 1975. Both samples were deep and dense, cherry- and coffee-inflected examples of the great Pomerol.”You could stick a straw in these wines and it would stand up,” Dr. Weiner quipped. Neither bottle seemed betrayed any obvious signs of a Katrina effect.The next pair, Chateau Lafite Rothschild 1975, proved to be a kind of moving target. At first, the dotted bottle was graceful and balanced, but lacked the intensity expected of an iconic wine in an intensely flavored vintage. More thrust came from the first glass of the unmarked bottle. But an hour later, the dotted Lafite Rothschild had fleshed out with spicy flavors, while the unmarked bottle seemed grittier. Once again, any Katrina effect had yet to show itself clearly.The final pair of 30-year-old First Growths, Chateau Haut-Brion 1975, was disappointing. Feeble on the nose, the dotted wine managed only a potpourri of odd flavors. The unmarked wine smelled and tasted dank. With time, a leathery character came forward. Of all the wines tasted over the weekend, these Haut-Brions were the only ones that to me seemed to have gone into decline.In the Deiningers’ second-floor wine vault, the temperature had regularly hovered near 90 degrees for almost six weeks until electricity was restored, far longer than at the Weiners’. But Dr. Deininger’s paired bottles of Chateau Siran 2000, a highly rated Margaux, were equally abrim with fruit and could not be told apart. The same was true of a pair of Ponzi Pinot Noirs, vintage 2002, from Oregon. Both of these examples glowed with pure, sweet cherry fruit and cinnamon spice.”When I tried to buy a couple of bottles of the 2002 Ponzi directly from the winery to pair with mine,” Dr. Deininger said, “I was told it was no longer available. But then the winery’s sales director, Maria Ponzi, wrote to me that she was contributing two bottles of the 2002 Pinot Noir from her own cellar.”As the evening ended and all paired wines had been tasted, Dr.Weiner finally revealed the secret: The unmarked bottles had all been through the hurricane. Those with dots had been shipped this year to New Orleans.What had been learned from the weekend tasting? Dr. Deininger concluded that the wines, whether young or old, had proved to be unexpectedly resilient – much like the city of New Orleans. “I’ve always been meticulous about having wines shipped to me only in cool months,” he said.”Now I’m wondering whether we’re unnecessarily babying this stuff.”For those of us who live in New York apartments without controlled-temperature wine vaults, there may also be a lesson from the Katrina experiment that is confirmed by my own experience: Wines stored in a corner closet for a season or two most probably will come to no harm.

Wine Stands Up To Hurricane

Wine Stands Up To Hurricane

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