The chance to taste this wine has always been a dream of mine. 1979 Krug Clos du Mesnil’s face is on the Mount Rushmore of wine. The more I drink aged Champagne the more I realize its all I really want to drink. We had this in Nantucket with my wife (then fiancee) and my good friend with his family. We were celebrating my upcoming marriage and life all together. We went to swank little restaurant on the island and popped this bottle with canapes and oysters. There were 6 of us at the table and my friend and I had caught the sommelier’s eye and motioned to him to go a little heavier in our glasses while the others weren’t paying attention. I am confessing this now. Hope you’re not pissed, guys. Anyway, this wine had a reputation preceding it. Some say its the greatest (and first) vintage of Clos du Mesnil ever produced. Some even say it’s the greatest Champagne ever made. I must say it wore its expectations well, like a precisely cut British suit. The greatness of the wine was immediately evident from the first sip. My wife’s eyes grew large as she tasted it. She knew it too. I bet if you handed a glass of this wine to man who lived among wolves his entire life and had never tasted wine before, let alone even know what wine is, he’d say, “Woof Woof” and lap the stuff up. Great wines like this are universal. You do not need classes nor curriculum to understand it. It’s all there in the double helix of its DNA. Its intuitive. I remember as I tasted the wine it rose in my mouth like air. It was like a weightless nimbus cloud that simply levitated for minutes on end. Clean, precise and weightless. Magic.
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