Master Somm Opens 100 Year Old Bottle of Wine!

This is a Volnay Coulee Blondo from Camille Guiroux, one of my favorite wines. I've been had great success with this wine over the years. For a wine that's 82 years old it really has been unbelievable. So let's see if we get a good one here. I've had, like I say, I haven't really had a bad one of these 37s and I've had six or eight of them over the years. Sometimes these old corks are really problematic. Different tools you can use. I'll use this, I'll use this Durand which is kind of a combination screw pull corkscrew. You know old wine, only the greatest vintages make it and the wine doesn't get better unless it's got fruit to start with. So sure there's a lot of old wines out there in the world but the ones that last are only from the superior vintages like 37, 45, 49, 53, 59 for Burgundy's. But a lot of these old Burgundy's, I remember doing a tasting when I was a younger man and it was old Bordeaux and old Burgundy's from the 20s and I thought wow the Burgundy wasn't going to have a shot against the old Bordeaux. But in reality it was superior in many ways and a lot of times these wines were fortified a little bit with cognac back in the day and I think that kind of helped stiffen them up a little bit. A lot of people use a candle for decanting but I find a modern light source works better. The color on this looks fantastic. Typically when I do these, you know a lot of people say you don't decant old Burgundy but I think that's a fallacy. I've decanted and drank so many old bottles that you'll see that the sediment if you look at the sediment in old Burgundy like this is really fine. To me I always decant. I want this wine clean. I want it to be as fresh as possible and that is spot on. Wow that is smoking good. That's so delicious. Again this wine does not fail me. It is a winner. So long, so good, so pure. It's got that cherry, popsicle, orange, marmalade, kind of slightly marzipan-y, tangerine. Cocoa powder. With old Burgundy I get cocoa powder a lot because I'm doing an old and rare tasting and I have you know 50 different bottles. I don't have decanters for everything and plus I don't want this wine to oxidize so I'm just going to pour it back into the bottle after I clean it up and get the sludge out of it. And then we put reductive pours on them so everybody can have little sips of this great wine. It'll be a nice treat for everybody and the screen will kind of clean up any little floaters that you might not have caught. There we go. Now let's try this bad boy. This is the 1934 Pommard Epinot from Dr. Barelais the Henri Villamont bottling and he was a collector that took old and rare bottles and kept them in a cellar. Now when I have, I've stood these up because there's so many of them but typically if this was on its side in the cellar you'd want to carefully bring it over in a basket. A lot of people open these things upright standing up like these have been standing up for over a week so all the sediment most of the sediment's in the bottom of the bottle but if I open it upright and I have a problem with the cork the fine sediment from the cork is going to fall into the wine where if I have a problem with it on an angle like this I'll have a chance to pick that cork out of there and not get any of the fine cork into the wine. And again these corks do get problematic when they're 80 plus years old. I'm going to try the straight screw pole on this one. This is the tool they don't make anymore but I find it's fairly useful for old wines. You just have to turn it and you can't break it. We'll see what we get. That's coming out pretty good right away. Cracking a little bit. A little breaky there. Again these things so now I'm because this wine shed this cork's shattering a little bit. I'm going to back this tool out here and then I'm going to come in with it sideways really delicately. I'm just going to throw that right down in there and get that and then I'm gonna just put flex on it see and I can get that out of there. You see if this was upright and I had opened that straight up and down this would have fallen into the wine. A bit more haze on this one. Color looks good though for 1934. Now this particular funnel goes right down the center. I have other ones that would put it down the side and if I was actually decanting this in a restaurant I'd probably pour it right down the side of the glass just not to bruise it as much as I'm doing here but wow again real pretty. Delicious and beautiful cherry fruit. Again that cocoa powdery which is a sign of old burgundy smell. You know I used to think what am I smelling here but it's a Nestle's quick smell. I mean that is really good for 1934. That's bravo I'm happy. These old Dr. Garlay bottles were classic. Kind of a cool little bottle too. You can see it's all hand blown with the weird weird glass here. I find that these older burgundies because they are slightly fortified can take a little oxygen like I'm giving this guy right now and hold up just fine. Like that 37 that we opened a little bit before will actually get better in a couple hours as opposed to falling apart. Some of these old wines fall apart but it's going to be good. Parmigiano Reggiano. Cool that's going to be a big hit at the tasting. 85 years old. I hope I'm in that kind of shape when I'm 85. That's amazing.