A special bottle with a special story from a special winery, a story of patience, and lots of other random stuff.

I am not the most patient person on the planet. In fact, I am probably closer to the other end of the spectrum. I want what I want, and I want it right freaking now. It has always been that way, and I can’t imagine it will change at this point in my life.

So, that kind of attitude really doesn’t work well in the world of fine wine. It needs to age, and since not many wineries do that for you (at least, not enough), you need to do it. That takes patience.

We have been buying wine for, I dunno, around a decade. I started up this blog in 2013, which was probably not long after we began our journey into wine, so it’s probably slightly less than a decade, in fact. But in that time, we have amassed quite a collection. The fruits of our labours, and the patience we have shown, are really starting to pay off.

(BTW did you know that studies estimate that 90% of all wine purchased in the USA is consumed WITHIN 24 HOURS??? That is awful. We have so much more work to do in educating the wine-drinking public).

Yesterday, I ventured out of the house to our offsite cellar. We had 6.5 cases of wine that needed to go in, through our various spring wine clubs and not to mention the wine we bought at the Vancouver International Wine Festival just before we ended up quarantined due to COVID-19. I don’t leave the house that often these days, but with some simple precautions, I am pretty unlikely to catch the virus dropping off and picking up wine at our cellar. It’s unlikely that I’ll run into any people there (and I didn’t), and the wine itself has been in the cellar since long before COVID-19 existed. And since I didn’t have room in our storage lockers to put 6.5 cases in, well, a bunch of “ready in 2020” wine had to come out.

Five cases, in fact, came home with me. This is where the patience is paying off. Many of these bottles have been in the cellar for many years, and looking at the vintages that are coming out….2010, 2011, 2012, 2013…..these wines will have aged beautifully. And I’m not just talking about those ‘special’ bottles either, a lot of the wines we brought home yesterday are just your everyday, easy drinking wines that might be fine to consume at their release date, but they’ll be much, much better now.

The only downside, of course, is that it’s not like I had room in our wine fridges for 5 cases of wine! Far from it. This is what the wine room looks like now.

All the wine you see in these pictures is “overstock” LOL. The fridges are jam-packed, not to mention there are 4-5 bottles of rosé and white in our actual fridge. You can probably tell that we have not been entertaining for quite a while!!

Why all this talk about patience? Well, another instance of patience paid off last night, as we cracked open our first bottle of wine from Leonetti Cellar. We have tasted a few of their wines at tastings and had a couple bottles at restaurants in Vegas, but this is the first one we had opened at home. We spent 2-3 years on the waiting list just to be able to buy wine from them, and until last night, everything had gone into the cellar (and nothing had yet come out). This particular bottle came aged already, and although it would undoubtedly got even better with more time, you gotta drink this stuff sometimes, right?

Also yesterday, we enjoyed these two beautifully aged BC Chardonnays. The 2013 came home from the cellar with me yesterday, while the 2015 is actually the current vintage, as Checkmate does a bit of the aging for you!

Incidentally, my wife, who’s palette I totally respect, thought I transposed the scores on these two wines; she enjoyed the Checkmate just a tad more.

Oh, and speaking of drinking beautifully aged wine, from time to time you might get lucky and find a winery that is pulling some very old stuff from their cellar and putting it on sale. That was the case with this bottle that we bought recently. It was so good, we had to buy a couple more.

And to finish up this report, a bunch of random stuff we have enjoyed in the past weeks, including another off-the-charts-delicious Pinot Noir from Hartford.

That’s it for today, coming up soon is part 2 of the BC rosé report, plus a ton of other random stuff to report on. I have pages and pages of reviews to prepare and submit. Stay tuned!