Drinking the 1971 Chateau Ste. Michelle Cabernet Sauvignon
The year was 1967. Venerable winemaker Andre Tchelistcheff became a consultant to the American Wine Growers company, helping them launch a new, premium red wine label. The label was called “Ste. Michelle Vintners,” quite catchy if you ask me.
To give you a sense of how important this move was in Washington State, one of the biggest changes that Tchelistcheff helped bring about was to work with Howard Somers, the AWG winemaker at the time, and use vitis vinifera grapes to make their wine. This happened only 40 years ago. Think about that for a minute: AWG made some of the first vintage-dated, vinifera-based wines in Washington State…40 years ago! Only Associated Vintners (now known as Columbia Winery) seems to have been making similar wines way back then; other famous Washington wineries, such as Quilceda Creek (1978 - first vintage), came later.
Flash forward to 2007. I’m at Ray’s Boathouse with my wife and one of her friends from college. I’m looking over the wine list and chatting with the new sommelier at Ray’s. Out of the blue, she says, “Hey, you want to try something interesting? I’ve been looking for a reason to open this one wine and I won’t charge you for it if it doesn’t taste good.” Hey, I’m always up for something exciting!
So she comes back with a bottle of 1971 Chateau Ste. Michelle Cabernet Sauvignon. Except, this wine is too old to be a Chateau Ste. Michelle wine. It’s actually a Ste. Michelle Vineyards release from Ste. Michelle Vintners, Seattle, Washington.
Whoa. Check out the bottle!
Crazy, huh? Looks like Bon-Vin, Inc. of Houston, Texas is the place to get more of this wine. If I lived in 1972. At the bottom the label says this wine has 12% alcohol and was “Produced from Cabernet Sauvignon Grapes grown in the Yakima Valley.” The back of the bottle is equally interesting (and better photographed on my part):
I like the part about being aged in “small white oak barrels and in glass.” Nice. I also like the “Vintage-dated Varietal wine” statement up near the top. Again, in 1971 Washington State wineries were mainly known nationally for their fortified jug wines. Yuck. At first I was almost surprised not to see a Web site address printed at the bottom. Oh yeah, there was no Internet in 1971, not even in Al Gore’s house.
This wine was intriguing. The fill level and, as it turned out, the cork were quite good on this bottle. The wine smelled pretty good but didn’t quite stand the test of time: It never got off the ground and was mostly acidic and cranberry-tasting on the palate. The bouquet was actually nice at first, though, which surprised us all. In the end, we let the sommelier take the bottle away for her staff and bring us a 2004 Kestrel Syrah instead. Still, it was an amazing experience just to see this bottle. I was shocked that a single varietal Washington wine existed back in 1971. I wonder if any of these bottles that still exist are good to drink…this one was close, but not quite there anymore.