Worth the wait

When I first moved to San Francisco in 1999, I received a special housewarming gift: a bottle of 1973 Inglenook Estate Bottled Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon. The person who gave it to me had apparently worked at the winery during crush that year and had taken home several cases for his pains. He had no idea how the wine had held up after 26 years. And because I didn’t want to waste what could be an amazing experience, I didn’t open it. If I was alone and it was wonderful, I wouldn’t be able to finish it in a timely fashion, because I’m a lightweight. (And if I had friends over and it was terrible, we wouldn’t be able to drink it at all.) So I tucked it into the cabinet where I keep my wine rack, and I looked at it curiously from time to time, but I never seemed to find the right occasion to uncork it.

Earlier this week, though, my wine-loving friend Jon was in town. When I told him I still had the bottle, now 38 years old, he got the kind of hopeful look in his eye that I ordinarily associate with a black lab facing someone with a pocket full of bacon. With someone on hand to help me appreciate it properly, it was time to open that wine.

This proved to be easier said than done.

After removing the foil, we were relieved to see that the cork was still intact — but while the cork had held together firmly in the neck of the bottle, it was, shall we say, no longer structurally sound. Using the corkscrew merely drew up a core sample and scattered bits of crumbly cork across my countertop.

Stymied, we had to consider alternate ways to get to the wine. Shove the cork into the bottle? It would disintegrate. Try a cork puller? Ditto. We decided our only option was to go through the cork.

So we reapplied the corkscrew in order to bore a hole all the way to the bottom of the cork. Then, using a lacquered chopstick with a round point, we slowly wiggled the hole larger, trying to minimize the amount of cork dropping into the liquid. Eventually we had an opening of just under half an inch.

At this point, I put my nose to the bottle. One whiff and my eyes widened: it was still wine, not vinegar. I couldn’t wait to try it — but we still had to get the wine out of the bottle, and bits of cork out of the wine.

Lacking a carafe or a proper strainer to remove the crumbled cork that inevitably got into the bottle as we operated, we made do with my coffee pot and fine-meshed gold filter. It looked ridiculous.

It worked perfectly.

It was delicious. Almost like port. We polished off most of the bottle in an hour.

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