A friend received a 1996 Bolli Grande Annee from a vendor and passed it along saying “we don’t really like champagne.” I opened it last week and it was a-ok. I get by with a little help…
A double magnum of Lafite from my birth year- presented by my father on my 21st birthday.
Did some personal tax work for a partner when I was a junior associate. He gave me a 69 la Tâche as a thank you.
A bottle of '45 (my YOB) Chateau Montrose for my 65th birthday, from a friend.
The Durand
I should have noted that, too. A fellow Berserker brought me one on a cycling trip with my nom de guerre engraved on it. Had no prior idea how awesome this opener was.
I had you pegged as someone who uses the Ah So.
Did you open it for your 60th?
1961 Latour A Pomerol (It Was Spectacular!)
A few month’s later, the same person got me into a 1961 First Growth Tasting (For Free!)
TTT
2002 Cristal Rose from a banker after we closed an unusually large deal together. Opened with friends at a holiday party and it far exceeded (in deliciousness) any champagne any of us had before. Opened my eyes to premium champagne.
i apparently need some spendier friends.
last year for Christmas my parents split the cost of my 115 bottle wine fridge with me. that was a pretty helpful gift.
Over the years, students, when they graduated, have given me bottles of wine. One gave me a Durand.These have been my most treasured wine gifts.
I’ve received so many wonderful or thoughtful gifts related to wine that were special to me, it would be really hard to pick just one. The wine trades I do year-in-year out have been one of the greatest sources of enjoyment and excitement in friendship…in the end, the friendships that are also a part of my wine experience have been some of the greatest gifts of all.
At the outset of our wine journey several years ago, someone gave us a 2001 Dominus they’d cellared since release. That has since set us down the path of wanting to try them all
Oh I forgot one from this year, not a gift per se, but my friend gave me his wife fridge. I took he and his wife to a fancy dinner in thanks, popped a mature Bordeaux, next day spent a few hours getting the unit and paying a college kid to move it. Take it home, set it up, and the damn thing never cooled. My friend had unplugged it 1.5 years earlier and had not bothered to check it, ugh. So it became the worst wine gift!
His wife fridge? Oh, soooo many possibilities…
Lol, a very bad Freudian right there!!!
I’ll leave it as is.
Probably just needs to be charged with Freon.
Potentially yes, but since I do not know how to do that, I didn’t want to spend the money to have an A/C person come out to the house. I ditched the unit the next day. I’m my 'hood, you put anything out on the edge of the driveway on a weekend, and it’s gone in hours! I’m sure it went to good use.
You can call it a gift if you like, but bizarrely in the mid-90’s I twice found a wallet on exactly the same Upper East Side Manhattan intersection sidewalk many blocks from where I live and on each occasion I tracked down the owner and arranged a rendezvous in the lobby of my building. The handovers were made and both of them soon after left a bottle with my doorman. One was a 1989 Grand Puy Lacoste and the other a Kendall Jackson Chardonnay. All this before the inter web.