Originally published on August 9, 2008.
One of the things I like most about being a retailer is dreaming up cool ways of selling wine – hang tags with quirky tasting notes, 2 or 3-packs that play on a theme or a varietal, rotating displays and features, and so on. For a while, I’ve wanted to put together some 12-bottle cases that play on different themes – summer whites, a Bordeaux starter case, a wine course in a box – the list could be endless. But the day to day of the store seems to always come first. But when I heard that one of my distributors was pre-selling some Chateau Musar back vintages, I decided I had to act!
Chateau Musar is one of my all-time favorite wines with a back story that’s the stuff of legends. Winery and vineyards are located in Bekaa Valley, Lebanon. Founded in the 1930’s, with wine produced in nearly every harvest despite battles waged among the vines. Cellars that served as bomb shelters in the 80’s. Certain vintages that taste of gunpowder.
What I really like about Chateau Musar is that it tastes like nothing so much as itself. When describing wine to customers, I’ll often compare regions and grapes, like some wino-version of a Hollywood pitch (it’s like a Beaujolais on steroids with a little bit of Shiraz-spice thrown in.) But with Chateau Musar, there are no comparisons. It’s a blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Carignan, Cinsault and a few other grapes. It’s a constantly evolving mix of exotic spices, stunningly vibrant fruit, earthy, gamey, meatiness. It lasts practically forever and is a classic example of a wine that you want to keep tasting as it changes. You want to grow old together.
Ah, growing old with a wine – buying a case or two of a specific vintage, drinking one bottle every year or so until you decide it’s just the way you like it and then polishing off what’s left. Such is the dream…You read that advice everywhere, but it’s not so practical in real life.
So when I heard that the Musar importer was putting some of the back vintages up for sale, I decided I was going to put together a little Musar cellar-in-a-box. 12 bottles of various vintages, including one bottle of the highly obscure Musar white.
It will include:
- 3 bottles each of the 1997, 1995, and 1994 vintages – three very different young (for Musar) wines to be opened now, later and much later to see how they evolve
- 1 bottle each of 1991 and 1988 – two older wines that are generally thought to be the two best vintages of the last 20 years
- 1 bottles of the 1995 white, which is a whole other bottle of uniqueness – read about a recent vintage here
While it’s not cheap, I’ve priced it to be a much better buy than purchasing all the bottles individually (if you could even find them.) And it’s still much less than buying even one bottle of a top Bordeaux.
I think it’s a pretty cool concept. We’ll see if anyone else does.