Scary wine moment in honor of a scary holiday
It being Halloween and all, I was trying to think of an appropriate topic. The best I could muster, seeing as how there are no ghostly wines, is a scary wine experience. Though there are haunted wineries…a good friend had to leave Guenoc, where she and her husband were staying for their honeymoon, in the middle of the night due to the ghost of Lily Langtry.
Several years back, early in my wine trek, I was over at a friend’s for a hair-cutting party. His mom owned a liquor store at the time, so that, coupled with his love for the beverage, earned him a nice little collection.
I was the only person who brought wine that evening, and after we finished that bottle, Babette (the hair cutter) wanted more. She decided to open one of Chris’s bottles and I only half-heartedly tried to stop her.
Needless to say –when Chris got out of the shower, he was looking for his gun. The realization of what we (mostly she) did was a cross between fear, embarrassment, and shame. Turns out, the bottle had been a present from Lesley (she who fled the ghost) that they were going to drink together on a birthday.
Babette and I looked everywhere for that bottle, drove to Louisiana one night, asked people who were headed to Memphis and Atlanta to be on the look-out. We couldn’t have wine shipped to us or that would have been a solution.
Somewhere down the road, Babette found it and got it to Chris. Then when I was living in Montana, I spotted it in a drug store of all places. That bottle of 97 Franciscan Magnificat is sitting in my wine cooler as I write, good until 2010, as it’s a Bordeaux-style blend.
I think I mentioned to Chris once that we should drink it together. He’s got babies now and I’m in California, so that might not happen. But I’ll never forget how I felt that night. And I will NEVER allow someone’s wine to be opened without permission, cause I know how piping mad it would make me…
opening wine, wine goofs, Franciscan Magnificat
November 1st, 2006 at 4:31 pm
i remember when this happened… glad chris couldn’t find his gun or knife that night… but those were some good times in that house….
June 22nd, 2007 at 8:49 am
[...] The second bottle to fall prey, though, was the star of the evening: ’97 Franciscan Magnificat. I bought this bottle when I was living in Montana—at a drug store, no less (one of the best selections in town). Despite my budget, I had to purchase it due to this story. [...]