Wine of the year is 1988 Chateau d’Yquem ‘Y’

Each year, I name an official Wine of the Year. They’re the wines that move me in the moment (don’t think for a second I won’t start weeping over a bottle of Barolo) or that make me fall in love with wine all over again. I try to keep a running list of contending bottles in my phone’s notes app, this year, with the pandemic’s tampering of nights out at restaurants and wine-fueled get-togethers, the list is pretty short, just seven bottles. This list is varied, reflecting my own personal maxim of always drinking as diversely as possible. Never the same grape or region twice in one week is my rule of thumb.

It’s topped by a wine that encapsulated everything that 2020 was as a year: the 1988 Chateau d’Yquem “Y” ($160). Chateau d’Yquem is a Bordeaux producer that’s deservedly famous for its ultra- sweet dessert wines.

These golden-hued bottles can easily fetch prices with multiple commas, but their “Y” cuvee (pronounced eegrek) is made in a dry style. The wine is a traditional Bordeaux blanc, a blend of sauvignon blanc and semillon, a citrusy companion to the region’s more famous reds.

This bottle in particular was an afterthought. I’d found it covered with dust at the bottom of a wine rack at a friend’s home in late February. “We need to open this,” I’d said, thinking that we’d likely be opening it and pouring directly into the sink. Chateau d’Yquem’s sweet wines are famously long-lived, but a 32-year-old dry white wine that has spent who knows how long tucked away at the bottom of a closet under a staircase … well, let’s just say that I wasn’t expecting much.

The cork disintegrated around the worm of my corkscrew — not a good sign. I took a whiff of the bottle, looking for signs of life, and surprisingly I found them: notes of dried apricots wafted up at me with hazelnuts in burnt sugar and the sweet, wispy smell of honeysuckle nectar sucked straight from the flower filled the room. I quickly poured the amber liquid into everyone’s glasses and for a quiet moment, we savored those few precious drops of liquid time.

The wine was old, absolutely on its last legs, but for a few brilliant moments, it shone its brightest for us that afternoon, a testament to the talent of the winemakers and to the transcendent beauty of nature. To think that 32 years ago, what we were drinking was just fruit on a vine, little more than food for the birds until someone picked it and turned it into liquid gold.

The splendor didn’t last. Just minutes after we poured it, the wine began to fade, reaching the end of its life in each of our respective glasses. Its fruitiness, which had once been able and refined, became bruised and tarnished, a sallow few ounces of decades-old grape juice.

I’m not naming this my Wine of the Year because of the way it tasted, though truly, for those 10 or so minutes, it was divine, but because the experience of drinking it encapsulated so much of what was in store for 2020. That joy, even in its briefest of moments, has to be treasured whenever and wherever it can be found, even when you find it at the bottom of a glass of wine.