Rioja Vieja

 Were I out looking for it I should never have encountered it. The bottle was a decade old, arrayed on a single shelf among some younger, nondescript wines, a few years' worth of dust around its shoulder and clearly not going anywhere soon. I might have overlooked it for the garish display of junk food packets just below the wine shelf.

I was returning from a birding excursion with my friend Rafa, the birder par excellence of Sonora, and we had stopped for something else at a little roadside tienda outside of town. But the bottle caught my notice and I asked to see it. Over its lengthy tenure among the Dorito packets the price had not increased - I took it for 200p (MXN), or about $10 (USD), a Rioja crianza 2015. It was a calculated risk, though not much of one in the scheme of things. Ten bucks is worth the flutter when you might well hit a home run.

I cradled it, carried it outside and held the bottle up to the sun. Through the glass darkly shone a deep, perfectly clear garnet, free of sediment, none of the raisin-browned tinges of a corked bottle. If this is still a good bottle, I thought, then it deserves to be approached with discretion. So I let it rest on its side for a few days; the cork was certain to be dry after years of standing upright through hot Mexican summers. 

Impatient, curious, I opened it a few days later, gingerly corkscrewing into a spongy mass of soft cork. The farther I turned it, the dustier became the bottle neck, until the cork was a pile of wood dust and had bottomed itself into the wine. I had a fine sieve and pitcher at hand, strained the cork out of the wine, poured a bit into a glass, and looked again at the wine through light. The same garnet tones, no inky purple tinge of a too-young bottle, no sign of floating cork - fine so far. A swirl, a genteel sniff, not much bouquet to it at all. A good sign though, since it also didn't give off the musty signs of a turned bottle. 

My first sip was underwhelming, as though secrets were being kept. Very well, I would wait. A half hour passed, another sip and the wine had stirred a bit. What had once been edges had softened, the tannins had settled away; what remained was a nuanced and subtle mouthful of dried mint and anise, a ghost of black pepper - no offputting noise of jammy, fruity over-familiarity. Well, I thought, this may do.

It wasn't really all that old but its indenturement in a hot little snack food joint along a hot dusty highway had aged it beyond its decade. It had all the earmarks of an older wine. Old wines, as compared with recently vinted ones, seem attenuated and understated. They require attention, judgment, discernment - in a word, they deserve as much time and consideration as will recompense a long and perhaps wearisome embottlement.

We live in a time and a culture in which a cellar is now merely a basement. Cellars are for wines. Basements are merely for our existential detritus, the stuff we bought from Amazon and wished we hadn't, rubble for our next garage sale. Our belongings more often than not reside in cardboard cartons in storage units, awaiting our next removal to newer digs. How many people in one's acquaintance still live within a day's travel of wherever they were sired and born? Who can remain settled enough to keep a decent cellar? Consequently wine is made for a market of transients and vagabonds, people impatient of stasis and extended attention. So wine has become, like golf, a democratic amusement and not much more.

The Rioja was soon gone, but in the course of sipping it I remembered a cellar I once had, of wooden crates along the cement floor, of other wines old already when I drank them - austere, brown-tinged clarets; sturdy Italians; fat, complacent late-harvested Alsatians, the kind of wine that winks and says naughty things like, "I would taste no better with a bit of fois gras, but the fois gras would certainly taste better." 

It is a geezer's lament. But I very much like old things, things that keep.