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- stevebody - 05-13-2003
WW (et al)
In the Musar lecture, Hochar told a wonderful and surprisingly moving tale that was elicited from him by Bartholomew Broadbent, the host of the tasting, who called Musar "my favorite wines in the world" and served nothing but their '70 at his wedding. The following is as I recall it, which will be sadly innacurate but will capture the gist of one of the most remarkable wine events I've ever attended:
"I was told that the fighting was moving out toward our area...this would have been, oh, perhaps ten years ago...and the police superintendent who came out implored me to take everyone and go to the cellars. To my great amusement, he also asked me to take as much wine from the house to the cellar as I could. I called everyone into the kitchen and told them that they should take cover and they began to prepare food and drinks to take underground.
I sat in my personal wine cellar for what seemed a long time before finally going down and checking to see that everyone was safe. I slipped out and closed the door behind me and took two bottles of my 1970 with me upstairs to my bedroom, pulling a comfortable chair up to my window. I sat and sipped my beloved wine and watched as the shells began to fall. When I could take the tension no more, I curled up on my bed and continued to drink my wine and to think about my life, my family, and my country. I became, of course, quite drunk (laughter from us all, and a few tissues) and fell asleep with the bottle cradled in my arms.
When I awoke, all was quiet. I went to the cellar and found, of course, that everyone was worried sick about me. I couldn't tell them exactly why I took that risk but I have never regretted it once. It was the main thing that brought it clear to me how much I love my wine, my home, and Lebanon."
One of the most memorable wine coups of my life was finding four bottles of Musar 1993, mismarked at $16.99 each, at K's Beverage and Deli here in Bellevue, two years ago. I, of course, bought them all, and savored each one to the last drop.
It's great, to me, that nearly every submission to this thread has included something of the emotional connection that wine has to our lives. This, as much as anything else, IMHO, is what makes a wine truly great. Drinking a Giacosa Barolo, Mouton-Rothschild, DRC, Caymus Special Selection, Grange, Dal Forno Amarone, or any one of a hundred fabulous wines is about the anticipation, expectation, and sense of discovery that it creates. I drank the Lehmann Stonewell one hot evening in July with my gal, after resisting it for a year and a half. We just stood in her kitchen, sweating like horses, and sipped it while cooking, just as though it were a simple table red. The emotion of that moment is with me even yet: the sunshine (a real event, here in Seattle), the cool breeze through the curtain sheers, the smell of the flowers outside, the way Judye looked in shorts, with her hair swept up off her neck. It was, of course, before her accident and she seems so tall in my memory. Maybe that wine isn't really as transcendent as I think it was but the emotional content can't be subtracted from a wine any more than the grapes could. I appreciate the generosity everyone has shown with their memories. I loved reading this stuff...