Channel Your Inner Tortoise When Drinking 1989 Bordeaux!

Stop here and unfollow me if you're a wine snob - if rules and convention mean something to you. What I did last night might give you a permanent case of arrhythmia.

I put a 1989 Chateau Lynch Bages Pauillac, Bordeaux - carefully delivered through the time-space continuum to my dinner table - into a coffee mug with a soup blender.

Setting the Table

My good friend "Philip" was our invited guest on Friday, "Open That Bottle Night" Eve, and offered to bring one of from his well-stocked vault of well preserved wine: the 1989 Lynch Bages Bordeaux. I immediately planned my menu around the wine and started the process of ingredient lists and final plating sketches:

Dinner tonite: Kobe rib eye w/caramelized onions, roasted beet avocado salad, garlic-y green beans & fried chick peas. Poured w/'89 Lynch Bages Brdx! about 21 hours ago via web (Twitter)

The plan was for Philip to arrive around 5:30pm whereupon the open bottle would have 90 minutes at least to comfortably adjust to the time zone difference and fulfill its manifest destiny.

Our guest arrived at 7pm.

As a result I decide to experiment between the tortoise and the hare method of getting our wine ready. I don't have these crazy contraptions for aerating wine - but I do have a decanter which we promptly poured all but one half glass. This last half glass (without sediment) I poured into a clear coffee mug and suggested to all that we taste this before applying my soup blender to it.

Wine Notes

We all agreed the wine was muted, lost in a fog, with only tremors of what it would become. I stuck my soup blender into the mug and pulsed twice for a total of about 3-5 seconds. At one moment I had a beautiful red foam before it settled back down.

Our second taste now seemed to be on the entirely opposite extreme - only slight more appealing. This time there was a perspiration to the wine - like it was in a runner's high after a marathon race. There were vivid notes of fresh, slightly sauteed tomatoes. Not unpleasant but below our expectations. Only the decanted wines poured aggressively into our glasses and left alone for about 30 minutes lifted the fruit notes of cassis, dates, and berries from a cushion of tobacco, leather, and beautiful oak.

A fun experiment but with only 1 bottle to share, next time (if I'm lucky!) I will devote the entire contents according to the motto, slow and steady wins the race.

Anything you would have tried? Am I nutz? Please comment!