geo, I am not co-opting your "Red Wings and Red Rhones" theme, merely adding to the tremendous body of work you've established over the years.
As we prepared to sit down on Friday night to the first game of Stanley Cup Round 2 between the Wings and Ducks, I had a sense that the Wings were going to need some mojo after a very long layoff, having dismissed the Blue Jackets in the minimum four games. So out came our last bottle of 1988 Verset Cornas. The previous bottle of this wine had been fully corked, so I was prepared to go with a backup if necessary, but this bottle was a mature beauty. Curiously it took a while for some of the sweaty, leathery aromas to develop, and to my delight the nose at first had lovely violet-y smells, before the more classic aromas came on. We didn't rush the bottle, but sipped it steadily over the three periods, until Nick Lidstrom put the Ducks away with less than one minute to go. A delightful wine, and I'm glad I saved one of the original six bottles until now.
An amusing sidebar story: In the past this is one of the very few wines my wife has not enjoyed...something to do with the bouquet. Mind you, Robin can't tell a Brun Beaujolais from a ESJ Bassetti by looking at the label, she just knows what she likes, and she likes 99% of what I open. So when she arrived home late in the game I gave her a glass of the Verset, which she began to drink. After a while I asked her what she thought of it. (Mind you, we had our last healthy bottle five years ago.) "I don't really like it", she says.
Separately, my friend's wife is very easygoing about the wines he opens, but doesn't like Steve Edmund's 2002 "The Shadow". Go figure.
