Grape image borrowed from: www.thewinenews.com
A few months ago my husband and I were walking on Lakeshore avenue in Oakland, CA when we decided to pop into a liquor store and browse the selections. I headed to the back and let me eyes scale every inch until a few dusty, splits on the top shelf caught my eye. I got on my tippy toes and reached for the bottles. A 1984 Bonny Doon Sweet Muscat? Really? It was standing straight up in what was possibly the hottest place in the store with halogen lights beating down on it. Probably the worst environment one could imagine for wine. An old price tag said $19.95. I looked at a few of the other bottles: a sauvignon blanc from napa and some other rather uninteresting white. Only the Bonny Doon deserved pondering. I thought: if any wine can survive that kind of environment, it’s a sweet wine with higher brix because the sugar helps preserve. However, I did not want to spend 20 bucks for potential crap so I negotiated the price down to 10 dollars and left happy. On Tuesday, my husband and I went to dinner at Masa’s in SF. He suggested that we bring the wine to make the sommelier (Alan Murry) laugh and enjoy it with us in the OFF chance that it was any good. Alan wasn’t there but we did end up opening it. We asked Pepe to pour it into a decanter over cheese cloth (LOTS of sediment). The wine was SPECTACULAR!!! Beautiful dark copper color, gorgeous burnt caramel sweet almond nose and medium viscosity. And it still had acid! We shared it with every staff member and proceeded to have a series of deserts to match the wine. Delicious. What a find. Thank you Randall Grahm. From Bonny Doon: 
