When a forgotten bottle turns out to be a treasure

I had not drunk the wine for 20 years, and nearly all the information which I thought that I had remembered turned out to be wrong. It was a Californian pinot noir. I had given friends a case in the late 1980s as a wedding present and one bottle had survived by oversight, like a Japanese warrior in the jungles of Borneo. So was it a happy oversight?

The wine’s history was very Californian. In the late 1970s, two friends called Williams and Selyem started buying pinot noir grapes and making wine in a garage. To begin with, this weekend hobby may not have been an entirely legal operation: cuvée bootlegger, perhaps. But the wine’s fame grew as the friends took over vineyards in the Russian River Valley, Sonoma County. Until then, Sonoma had been regarded as a hillbilly relation of Napa, producing wines that often ended up in cardboard boxes and deserved no gentler fate.