Just Old: A Home Experiment Kit

The global financial meltdown means that we've found some outstanding bargains at auction recently. Our favorite online auction site is Winebid.com. Winebid begins a new auction every Sunday night, just after that prior auction closes. A few weeks ago, we decided to buy the most old and least expensive bottle on the site.

Just to see what OLD tastes like.

(This is an experiment you can try at home!)

We successfully bid on a 1964 Jouvet. It's a mere split (375 ml), but from grapes grown, picked and squeezed 44 years ago. We paid $20, plus hammer and shipping.

Through extensive, almost spastic, Googling, we were able to find out next to nothing about this wine. It's from Saint-Julien, a region at the center of the Haut Medoc known for it's aromatic wines and gravelly soil. It was bottled by a negociant named T. Jouvet for the importer Munson G. Shaw of New York. Shaw once imported, amongst other things, the wines of Baron Phillippe de Rothschild. Shaw's company was acquired in 1963 by National Distillers.

In sum, all we know is this was a basic red table wine on its best day. And that day was long ago.

But we're curious about the wino's age fetish, so we'll open it under Laboratory conditions.

Stick around.