Last night I took Nicole to local foodie favorite the Herbfarm for a birthday dinner. The meal was tremendous (bleu cheese ice cream…so good), but I’ll let Nik blog about that. What captured my imagination is a unique item only the Herbfarm offers. They call it “The Oldest Wine You’ll Ever Drink.” The Herbfarm has a very small amount of Madeira that was bottled in 1795 and forgotten in a Scottish castle for over a century. No other wine would be potable after 200+ years but because of the unique nature of Madeira it has continued to improve. When this wine was bottled, George Washington was still president of the United States. Napoleon dispersed Royalists with “a whiff of grapeshot” during the French Revolution, thus beginning his rise to power. George Peabody, the man my home town in MA was named after, was born. That Madeira is a taste of history I would like to have.
The problem, of course, is that it doesn’t come cheap. The 1795 Madeira is $365 per ounce. Yes, that’s per ounce. The taste of 1795 will have to remain in my imagination for the foreseeable future.