It was a bottle I had passed over dozens of times without thinking about it, a long-time resident of that part of my cellar where bottles fall into the category of almost-forgotten gifts and purchases to be tried “maybe sometime later.”
This time, however, I stopped, pulled the bottle from the shelf and thought, “This could be a good older wine to taste as a novelty.” Although well past its prime, it nevertheless could be slid in somewhere among the eight to 10 current releases I had selected for a dinner the coming Saturday with a few wine-loving friends.
Its label read “1966 Mähler-Besse Cheval Noir Saint-Émilion.”
By Sunday morning a few days later, the old bottle had launched a pleasant string of memories that I wouldn’t have anticipated as I carried it upstairs for dusting off.
But even then, coming up the stairs I was recalling how, when I first started writing about wines in the late 1970s, such bottles of shippers’ wines from France and German dominated country club and fine dining menus in an era when wines from those two countries were about the only premium wines Americans drank.
They were called “shippers’ wine” because they were made and sold by négociants or wine shippers assembled from a variety of vineyards within a region – Macon or Sancerre, Pauillac or Rhône – as either raw wine or grapes and made into regional wines under the shippers’ names. But by the time I was discovering them, that era was already ending in Bordeaux, partially because of an incident in 1973 known as “Winegate” when the popular Cruse brand was caught adulterating some of its Bordeaux labels with wines from the south of France.
Although négociant wines are still popular today in Burgundy and the Rhône in particular, their dominance was also lessening by the 1980s as an emerging core of American wine enthusiasts began favoring wines made from a single estate or vineyard regardless of region.
But the year 1966 preceded all that.
And in Saint-Émilion in 1966, “The growing season neither disappointed nor wowed, but remained relatively average, delivering the slightly cool summer that Bordeaux was known for before the warming effects of climate change began to be felt,” a writer for Wine-Searcher.com recollects from sources.
For older readers, 1966 might also be remembered as a year in which the Vietnam War escalated, riots against that war and racism were breaking out in cities and on university campuses, and Chairman Mao in China was starting his catastrophic Cultural Revolution. In sports, England won the FIFA World Cup, Texas Western embarrassed Kentucky in the NCAA basketball finals, the Orioles swept the Dodgers in the World Series, and the NFL and AFL decided to merge.
But for me personally, 1966 is remembered as a life-changing year. That year I was married in January (60th year coming up), graduated from college in May, and that fall my bride and I left West Virginia forever, driving away in our green VW Bug to live in graduate housing for married students at the University of Illinois in Champagne-Urbana. I had not yet been introduced to fine wine.
What I can’t remember is when I purchased the ’66 Saint-Émilion, but it was most likely late 1990s or early in this century, sometime shortly after I resumed by wine-writing career in 1998 as a columnist of the NewsJournal in Delaware after a 15-year writing interlude. I do remember that when I first saw the bottles at a local wine store, I wasn’t sure if I should take the 1966 date and the wine’s provenance literally – after all, a then-40-year-old Bordeaux, even a shippers’ wine, in the bargain bin?
Not longer after, I was surprised to be introduced to Ferdinand Mähler-Besse, a scion of the négociant family, at some wine function in Pennsylvania by Alain Blanchon, a salesman for Monsieur Touton, the firm that imported the wine. The young Mähler-Besse explained that négoces sometimes did library releases of old vintages cluttering their warehouses and that my 1966 M-B Saint-Émilion was quite legitimate. He also invited me to visit the family’s large warehouse in Bordeaux, still located in the traditional Chartrons neighborhood along the river where the all the wine merchants were once located but which has since been gentrified.
I took him up on his invitation in July of 2007 when I was in Bordeaux. He showed me the company’s stock of Château Palmer, of which Mähler-Besse is a major owner along with the Sichel family, as well as the inventory of Cheval Noir, which was and still is in production.
Not trusting my memory, I sought out an old notebook that contained the interview for nuggets to relate as the wine was being served at the upcoming dinner.
“We don’t have contracts with the Saint-Émilion producers,” Ferdinand told me almost 20 years ago. “Instead, we always have a courtier between us and the estates. He is more diplomatic and so keeps relationships good for us.” Mähler-Besse then grabbed a bottle of ’95 Palmer, and we crossed the Garonne for dinner at La Bastide along the Quai de Queyries.
That dinner and the ’95 Palmer was another pleasant memory…but enough of the past.
On the day of our Saturday dinner, I gingerly opened the old bottle of Cheval Noir along with the other wines to be assured they were sound, and they all were. The ullage was good on the wine, with very little wine having evaporated, and I was able to extract the cork intact with gentle assistance from an Ah-So opener.
To say that the 1966 Mähler-Besse Cheval Noir Saint-Émilion was the best-tasting red at the dinner would be an exaggeration, but the wine was certainly the main wine attraction. Everyone was amazed at how well it had held up, considering that the Bordeaux region has made almost 60 vintages since the grapes in this bottle had been picked.
The wine’s color was good with still some red, though it definitely was slightly browning. The flavors were of amazingly fresh black raspberries, with good length and minerality and only modest oxidation. As was the norm at the time, the alcohol was a modest 11.5%.
I was anxious to try the old wine the following morning to see how it had made it through the night, but as we’ve cleared away the dishes and the bottles, I discovered that the Cheval Noir was the one bottle in which no liquid was left.
And so the cycle was completed, and the taste of the 1966 Mähler-Besse Cheval Noir Saint-Émilion is now itself just a lovely memory.