Some wines age. Others simply become old. This was our experience with two bottles, drunk several months apart, of a 1964 Nebbiolo riserva by the great Piemonte producer Luigi Nervi of Gattinara (the estate was bought by Germano Bocciolone in the 1990s). The nebbiolo of Gattinara is known locally as Spanna and, according to Joseph Bastianich and David Lynch’s Vino Italiano, “represents the purest expression of nebbiolo of the northern zones.” Oh goody!
We approached opening the first bottle with gingerly anticipation, like supplicants gently and perhaps fearfully dancing toward the altar of some wine deity. A properly aged bottle, in this case dating from the first full year of LBJ’s presidency, is to be revered by anyone who drinks wine. Aldo and I, in fact, have often debated whether the ordinary palate can fully discern and describe what one experiences from such a bottle, and this merely fueled the anticipation.
Aldo thinks there are very definite limits to most people’s sensitivies—he makes an obvious exception for the likes of Robert Parker, Jancis Robinson and Meryl Streep when she is playing Julia Child. His ideas about his own sensitivies, he once revealed to me in a tipsy confessional moment, have been stamped by his grade-school reading of a child’s biography of Thomas Aquinas, in which the saint was described in boyhood as being mocked as “the dumb ox” by the other students. I asked Aldo why he would identify with this aspect of Aquinas, since after he grew up to display a rather discriminating intelligence. …
At any rate, the point is that Aldo was not at all sure he would be wowed by the Nervi, but he said he was willing to blame himself should that prove to be the case.
But I prefer to anticipate great things, all the better to experience them.
As a result, when we opened the first of our two Nervis, I was more forgiving of its unattractive nose, which was decidedly musky and lacking any fruit. Aldo thought it smelled like a swamp or, worse, a sewage plant. You may notice, by the way, that he was not especially self-doubting after all.
In the glass, I have to admit, the Nervi was not pretty. A thick, sluicy brown, it looked like chocolate syrup thinned with lemon juice.
Eventually the nose neutralized, which at least was a step forward, but on the palate—mmmm, there was a strong possibility we had a dud. The taste was not technically spoiled or bad, just not pleasurable. There was still a little structure, some dark flavors that might be dried fig or a dried cherry if you are talking about cherry that had been dried back about the time Pope Gregory reformed the calendar.
At any rate, we finished the thing, but with a spirit of disillusionment. You can accept that a bottle can be off, but when it has spent its entire fermenting life—the passage of several generations—only to finally be revealed as an under- or even non-achiever, it’s a sad occasion. All those seasons, all those holidays, all those presidents, and the bottle sat them out in shadow, waiting, waiting, waiting for that moment when it would be opened and allowed to reveal itself to delighted oohs and ahs, like a butterfly with a perfectionist streak that had spent a prolonged gestation in its cocoon.
But the wine just comes out blah, its moment is gone, and no one will ever have anything nice to say about it. Those grapes are doomed to a forgotten eternity.
And of course I had paid for the bottle, cellared it for a few additional years, savored the vinodrama of it all. That didn’t lighten the mood, either. Aldo said the experience made him think of Flaubert’s Sentimental Education—something epic in spirit but, in the payoff, dribbling ironically to anticlimax.
A few months later, we uncorked the second Nervi, this time with our expectations reversed. And this time with a better payoff.
Off the bat, it was more attractive in the glass: a ruddy garnett. The nose was strongly musty, and mossy, but there was still spice to it, some dark fruit, a light whiff of cherry. The acidity had held up well, and there even remained a trace, a slight tug to the cheeks, of tanins: The structure had kept the wine essentially intact for four decades. Fruit had almost vanished from the palate, but what was left behind was a satisfying blend of earth flavors, coffee, tar and fig, and the leisurely finish left a lingering flavor of anise.
Was this second Nervi profoundly, sublimely good? No. But reassuring, satisfying. It was like hearing an old recording of, say, a very good tenor: The surface imperfections are unavoidable—but the voice comes through, and you can perhaps imaginatively reconstruct the instrument at its peak. This wine would have been a richer experience if opened ten years ago, but you can argue that it could also have remained corked a little longer.
Ah well. This is part of the aesthetic gamble of wines worth aging instead of being labeled “drink now” in the bin. A few nights ago at a family dinner we uncorked a 15-year-old Beaujolais Moulin-à-Vent by Georges Duboeuf—a magnum—and it had mellowed beautifully. In the glass, an opaque mulberry. On the palate, good acid and flavors that revealed themselves on the back palate: plum and rhubarb. And, as one guest noted, “it even gives a good buzz.”
November 27, 2010
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