1979 Acacia Iund Vineyard Pinot Noir & 1997 Acacia Carneros Pinot Noir

Not too long ago, just before this harvest started I had to move my private collection of wines from Tolosa to a couple storage lockers. We knew the vintage was going to be huge and that we would need every square foot of storage space for barrels. They had kindly allowed me to store the 150 or so cases for several years, so I was happy to oblige. One of the things that moving your cellar does is force you to handle every bottle or case and decide if they're really worth moving and storing. Roughly 20% of the bottles weren't for a variety of reasons, but many of them looked far better than I would have expected from an ullage point of view given their age. I set aside a mixed case of likely candidates to take home and drink over the short term. Two of the wines bracketed my time at Acacia - 19 happy vintages. A couple wine loving friends were over for dinner so I took the opportunity of opening them. The first was the '79 Iund. This was from my very first vintage at Acacia. The cork had held and the wine was at full fill level. Upon decanting we found the wine to be remarkably intact with the color still red and no maderized character whatsoever. The wine was old certainly - ancient by California standards, but it smelled pleasantly of earth, leather and spice. We had many bottles open that evening yet it held its own and most of it was drunk. The next bottle was the '97 Carneros. This was a disappointment. I've had other bottles of this wine recently that were very nice, but this one was faded and past its prime. We also opened a '97 Volnay for a rough comparison and that was the least preferred wine of the three. This particular bottle certainly didn't enforce the idea that red Burgundies outlive California Pinots. It was very sweetly nostalgic to taste these two bottles that spanned the course of my vintages at Acacia. The '79 was particularly resonant as it was my first vintage, and i didn't really have a clue as to what I was doing. By the '97 vintage I'd pretty much mastered my craft, and I recall in detail how this vintage showed as young wines. Both the Pinot and Chardonnay that year were light to medium bodied and always studies in elegance and perfume.