Sharing the best wines, and the cost
When my phone chirped with an invitation to an "old goats" wine-tasting, at first I thought somebody was kidding me about my age.
Turns out the "old goats" were wines, chosen by Johnson Guo, the affable sommelier at the South African restaurant Pinotage in Beijing, in a tongue-in-cheek salute to the Year of the Ram.
The oldest goat was a revered one: a 1988 Chateau Mouton Rothschild Pauillac, a cabernet sauvignon made rich with three decades of aging. Guo concedes that the wine had probably peaked after 20 years, but for most of us around the table it was the grandest drop we'd ever put in our mouths. Quite delicious right out of the bottle, the wine's smooth leatheriness came to the fore after decanting, when we had a second round of tasting.
