Sommelier Tries A 94 Year Old Red Wine

[dramatic music]

This wine was bottled nearly 100 years ago.

We're gonna open it up. See what's inside.

Hey, I'm sommelier Andre Hueston Mack.

And today we're gonna be tasting a 94-year old wine.

I think there's a lot of excitement

around a bottle this special.

It's a hundred years old.

To me I start to look at it a lot like history.

I'm like what was going on when the wine was made?

Most wine is actually supposed to be aged

anywhere from five to 10 years,

but there's also special wines from special areas

that you could age the wines for 50 years.

Wine can definitely get too old.

And so we have our fingers crossed with this one

to see if it still stands the test of time.

I love drinking old wine.

I'd have to say that it takes a little bit of time

to get used to it.

It is an acquired taste in a way.

We're opening a time capsule, right?

So this is gonna transport us to France to Bordeaux.

So this is from Bordeaux.

This is from the Left Bank called Medoc

within that there's a sub-region called Saint-Julien,

and this is Chateau Branaire-Ducru.

So, and this is 1928.

This is considered one of the greatest vintages in Bordeaux.

So you can imagine that this wine is pretty coveted.

28 was very dry, not a lot of rain

and pretty perfect growing conditions

for this particular vintage.

So what we're gonna drink and taste today

was really dependent on what the weather was like

almost a hundred years ago.

So it's a really, really special moment.

What this bottle of wine cost,

upon release, back in the twenties?

I would probably say somewhere around three to $5.

Three to $5 almost a hundred years ago was expensive.

I know I'm gonna get killed for saying this,

but this represents value,

a nearly 100 year old bottle of wine

that you can get for $800.

Now, granted, I understand that most people

couldn't even fathom spending $800 on a bottle of wine,

but in that realm, that's why it creates value.

A bottle of 1945 Bordeaux went to auction for $150,000.

I'm excited to open this up.

All right, so I think at first

we're gonna do a little visual analysis on the wine

and just kind of take a look at it

and see what we can tell from there.

I think the first thing that I see when I look at it

is that it's dirty.

I wouldn't be alarmed by that.

I think that's kind of a good thing. It is pretty old.

I would expect that it was in some dark cellar.

Looking at the label,

it has everything that's supposed to be on the label.

So it has the vintage, 1928.

So it has the name of the Chateau Branaire Ducru.

It has the region that it's from Saint-Julien

from the Medoc region of Bordeaux.

It's in pretty good condition.

Just looking at the label, intact,

and the bottle and everything.

You know, sometimes I've seen the labels that are moldy

or have fallen apart or stuff like that.

Also looking at the bottle a little further

it looks like it was wrapped in Saran Wrap.

You see these little striations here.

These are actually from it being wrapped in Saran Wrap.

Saran Wrap doesn't really do anything to the wine inside.

It's more about preserving the label

and integrity of the label, which tells you the vintage.

Other things that I look at here,

it has the foil on it, still intact, except for the top.

If you look here on the top,

seems like it's come undone a little bit here,

but that doesn't worry me at all.

I think for me, what I would really be looking at

is if there was any seepage or leakage.

If you detect some type of seepage,

normally that would mean that there was a fluctuation

in heat or something like that.

That the wine started to expand and seep through the cork

and that's not a good thing.

In my opinion, it looks like it's been stored

in a consistent temperature.

I would probably say the most surprising thing

is what we call the ullage.

So where the actual wine sits in the bottle.

In a lot of wines you'll see the ullage kind of fluctuate,

not a lot, but there's some evaporation over time.

This is pretty remarkable,

considering that it's nearly 100 years old.

The interesting part about this label and wines from France,

they don't talk about the grape varietal

anywhere on the label.

So you have to know a little bit about wine

to kind of know what you're getting.

In Bordeaux we know

that we can get a blend of five different grapes.

Bordeaux has a sense of place and where it comes from.

And so you're allowed to use these different grapes.

And it's more like the chef making a pasta sauce

because it's all to taste.

And in an old world and definitely in Bordeaux,

a lot of times it's about taste

and they use those five different grapes

to be able to blend in to create the taste and style

that they wanna make.

So now that we finish the visual analysis,

I'm super excited.

It passed the test, and now I'm excited to open it.

There's a little bit of preparation that you have to do

if you're gonna drink any old bottle of wine

but definitely something this old.

You wanna make sure that the bottle has been upright,

standing upright for at least 24 hours.

Most bottles of wine,

they tell you to store it on its side and that is correct.

But 24 hours before you wanna drink it

you wanna stand the bottle upright

so all the sediment falls to the bottom of the bottle.

So that makes decanting it a lot easier.

If we pick this bottle up

and turn it on it's side and turn it back,

we just mix the sediment in with the wine

and it's gonna be a little bit more difficult.

So now we're gonna open the wine.

I just wanna cut on the side of the foil.

So all of these foils contain lead.

So you don't want the wine to come in contact with lead.

This looks pretty loose and can come right off.

I'm gonna take my serviette and kinda just wipe off the top

and around the sides here, see what we see.

No seepage on the top part of the cork.

So that looks great.

So pretty clean, no mold, nothing seeping out.

We have our special wine opener here called a Durand,

made specifically to open old wines like this.

Before this existed, which is called a helix,

this existed, this is called a Butler's Friend.

It is a wine opener that slides itself

on either side of the cork in the bottle.

And you kind of wedge down in like this

and then twist and turn and you can pull it out.

And then you have the helix in the middle

to make sure that you grab all the cork.

So we'll go ahead and insert the helix here.

So I'll just screw that down.

So we're just gonna insert the ah-so

on either side here and then in that motion

we're just gonna kind of rock back and forth.

So it's just sliding down in between

the neck of the bottle and the cork.

You know, the wine has been in here

for almost a hundred years.

The cork is kinda attached to the side

and sometimes that's really hard to break.

So if you're just using an old cork screw

and you screw it in and you go like that

it just might rip out the middle part of the cork.

And then it starts to crumble and fall in.

So this is one way

to be able to to separate the cork from the bottle.

And then also the helix keeps it intact.

Let's see what's inside.

You guys ready?

I feel like this is like Geraldo in the Capone tomb.

All right.

So we're just gonna pull and turn. Pull and turn.

So that went great. No breakage.

So that's cool.

The cork's intact, looks great.

There's some seepage on the side

but not all the way through the top.

So looks like it was stored properly.

I can smell the wine, which is a good thing.

It actually smells like wine.

So that's great.

If it was corked,

a lot of times you can get a whiff of that.

I don't get that yet.

That doesn't mean that we're free and clear yet.

We won't know that until we actually taste it

but those are some signs

that feels like we can move forward.

Next up, we're gonna decant the wine.

Sediment you might add, you know,

it's kind of the sea monkeys

or the crunchy things on the bottom.

They won't kill you. They won't harm you.

It just makes the wine taste granular.

And those particles that you find in the bottom

are generally the phenolics in wine, mainly tannin.

And as the wine ages, they kind of collect together

and then they fall out of the wine to the bottom.

We'll need a light source here

and I'm just gonna use my phone.

And so by illuminating the neck

that just shows us once the sediment starts to flow

and then once it gets close then we'll stop pouring.

So when you wanted to decant an older wine

it's generally to remove the sediment from the wine

to have a more pleasurable drinking experience.

There's the sediment.

And voila.

I think we're good to go.

It smells like Bordeaux.

[airy music]

So looking at that, just a brick red color,

it's pretty clear, free of debris.

As a wine ages the color tends to fall out,

becomes a little bit lighter.

So you can definitely see that it's light in color.

There's creme de cassis, it's a little bit of graphite.

Kind of reminds me of like when I was in third grade

going up to sharpen my pencil.

Leather, a little bit of like Sage

and a slightly herbaceousness.

All right, so it passed the smell test.

I think we should taste it.

[dramatic music]

I like it.

I think, so I'm not gonna make any excuses for it.

Generally speaking, you know, you'll age a wine

in order to kind of reduce the fruity elements

to kind of expose other elements of the wine

and some wine you can overage and you lose those things.

You end up losing fruit.

This wine has lost a little bit of fruit.

It, to me, would be a little bit more pleasurable

if it had more fruit, but I can respect it for what it is.

I would serve this to anybody who ordered it.

I think it's amazing. This is cool.

This is cool to be able to experience.

Consuming and drinking and appreciating old wine

is a very different experience than drinking young wine.

There are some characteristics of fruit

but it's less fruit

and kind of more like a little bit of underbrush,

wet dirt, mushroom.

But also to me I can always smell that it's old.

I can always smell it,

because it smells like a little bit of soy sauce, to me.

What I really enjoy about the wine

is that it's still intact.

It still has some acidity to the wine.

Expressiveness of this particular wine, eight, nine.

I mean, it's expressive,

but just not in a way that I thought it would be.

I thought a tad bit more fruit, but this is an awesome wine.

With a wine this old, you know,

you really have to pay attention

to how long it's been open.

Oxygen is the enemy.

It starts to attack a wine

and break down the particles in wine.

A wine this old it could turn it into vinegar

[fingers snapping] pretty quickly.

It's been open for about 10 or 12 minutes.

And the wine kind of has taken on

a little bit different character.

Now I get like a little like cola, like sarsaparilla.

The leather is still shining through,

there's some cedar, like from a cigar box.

And on the pallet you get some acidity on the side.

It still has like the core kind of sweetness of the fruit,

but you don't taste a lot of fruit up front.

It doesn't expand across the pallet, which is great.

I mean, even for a wine this old, I wasn't expecting that.

Something like this

you probably wouldn't want to leave in the glass

for a long time or in the decanter.

It's evolved probably as much as it's gonna evolve.

Within 45 minutes

you're probably gonna get the best example of this wine.

Anything after that, I would think that it would fall apart.

So now that we tasted this 94-year old bottle of wine

we actually have a bottle of wine

from the same producer, produced in 2009.

And so I think we should open that up

and compare and contrast.

This is the same Chateau.

So as you can see, 2009, the labels look very similar.

So we're gonna compare the same way.

Give it a little rock.

And we got everything out.

We can turn them on the side.

So if we look at the 2009,

so that has like a watery rim on the outside.

That's called a meniscus.

And that indicates that the wine is youthful.

And you don't have one here on the 1928.

So if you swirl and look at the glass here

and you can see how fast the teardrops form

or the legs form and how fast they fall.

That means that the wine is high in alcohol.

So then if you look at the 1928, as we swirl,

you see how it's taking a very long time

for them to fall and to form?

Means it has less alcohol.

So alcohol is also one of those phenolics

that will tend to fall out of the wine over time.

All right, so now I'm gonna taste the 2009.

So right off the bat, tobacco, cedar

but strong, kind of jumping out of the glass.

There is some cassis but also feels like it might be

like blueberry syrup or boysenberry syrup.

Right, really thick, really strong.

A little bit confectionary.

Not necessarily sweet, but that fruit is very ripe

and very consistent and very like in my face.

So a very long finish.

So I'm still tasting the wine now.

There are some tannins there.

The insides of my cheeks are starting to dry out.

There's definitely more tannin in this wine

and more fruit, than the 1928, by far.

The 2009 is not a young wine either, it's been 13 years

that this wine has been in bottle.

So it has some bottle maturity to it, but not 94 years.

And so you know they're two different wines,

drastically different,

but they do feel like they come from the same place.

A lot of the things that I'm getting in the 2009,

1928 has some resemblance of those,

although that they might be faded.

Young wines, youthful wines tend, from this area,

have big mouth feels, big rich style wine mouth feels.

This is less of that.

You know, the oak in these wines,

here it's more like cedar, here it's more tobacco-esque.

So you have those things,

cassis, so you're getting like this pencil lead

that kind of runs currently through both the wines.

I personally, would've loved to have tasted

this 94 year old bottle of wine maybe five years ago.

Five years ago the wine probably would have

a totally different expression.

I felt like it would have more alcohol,

more body and texture to it.

And then hopefully it had a little bit more fruit.

But other than that,

1928 kind of holds up to being a great vintage.

Now that you've opened it, we've tasted it,

we've enjoyed it.

What do you do with the bottle?

You paid for it, so you should get to keep it.

In the restaurants that I've worked in, in the past,

we would actually break a bottle like this.

So we would crush it, just to prevent counterfeiting.

So a lot of counterfeiters out there collect old bottles

and then they do their concoction and mix it up in there.

And so stuff like this

and some of those old and rare bottles,

if we don't keep them ourselves and keep them on the shelf,

we would crush them and they would go out with recycling.

So we've opened the wine, we've tasted the wine.

We compared it to later vintage of the same wine.

And I guess what we're probably all thinking to ourself,

how do you get a bottle of wine like this?

A 94-year old bottle of wine.

You won't find this bottle of wine

at every place that sells wine.

Like to be fair,

you're probably gonna have to go to a specialty shop

or visit an auction.

Or maybe you know a collector

or someone that has it in their cellar

or something like that.

But there's only a few avenues

that you can actually buy a bottle this old.

It's wine. It's a commodity.

It's a collectible thing.

So they can change hands from collector to collector

or from collector to store

or I think a big thing, people hand down wine

as part of their will.

They could be bequeathed a collection.

This bottle of wine

has probably changed hands quite a few times

over that span of a hundred years.

But we actually purchased this wine from a retailer,

Acker Merrall.

There's several auction houses of quality.

You think about Sotheby's, Christie's, Acker.

A lot of times when you buy wine at auction

is probably where you will find wines like this.

It's through the reputation of the auction house

that you're really depending or leaning on.

They back the wines and they got it from a great place

or an authentic place.

And that's kinda how you move.

You don't get a certificate.

Wine collecting is generally one of those things

where it's kind of collect at your own risk.

So one way to be able to check to see if it's authentic

is checking the cork

to make sure the cork matches the label.

So this is Chateau Branaire 1928.

And we can see that that matches the bottle there.

I think the hardest part is figuring out what it's worth.

Some people go by retail price,

but generally you would have a reputable auction house

come in, take a look at the wines

and then give you a fair price for all of it.

A case of this wine sold at Christie's Auction House

back in 2007, at $6,000.

So that was about $500 [bell ringing] a bottle

and now it's going for about 800 bucks. [bell ringing]

So you can use those previous prices

as reference points to what the wine is worth.

The most fascinating thing about collecting wine,

or that kinda thing is the only way to consume it

is to consume it.

Art is different, you consume art by looking at it.

This is like art in one way, that you get to look at,

but also to enjoy it you have to consume it.

And then once you consume it, it's over.

Today we opened this bottle of wine.

That just means

that there's one less bottle of 1928 out there.

I mean, today is special.

Anytime you get a chance to try wine from 1928,

to me, I feel like that's a great day.

When should you drink a bottle like this?

And to me, I think it's whenever.

You get to choose if it's a big enough celebration or not.

You can experience the bottle of wine

and then place it with something that was special

or some milestone that you were celebrating.

This wine has been in the bottle for 94 years.

We opened it today. We tasted it.

I guess my biggest takeaway, the wine is great.

It's sound, it still has some acidity.

I would just say it lacks a little bit

on the fruit component and the texture to it.

But other than that,

1928 kind of holds up to being a great vintage.

The wine is still alive and standing.

And for me, I would say a little bit more refined in a way.

It's just interesting to see how it's evolved.

I can express, if you ever have the chance

to do something like this,

that you should really partake.

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