This edition of Full Belly Files was originally emailed to subscribers on May 13, 2022. To receive Matt Kettmann’s food newsletter in your inbox each Friday, sign up at independent.com/newsletters.
There’s magic, mystery, and misery in appreciating older vintages of wine, as I was reminded while tasting through four dozen French and California wines from the 1960s to the 1990s.
This wasn’t the plan, but today’s Full Belly Files can be considered a second chapter to last week’s newsletter about history, wine, and my trip to Santa Cruz Island. Though I did discuss my past articles about the Rusacks and their Santa Cruz-meets-Catalina Island wine project, I did not mention that I managed to snag a ride back to Santa Barbara with them on their comfortable yacht, the Torqua.
While crossing the Santa Barbara Channel, Geoff Rusack and I wound up talking about — you guessed it — wine. Specifically, our conversation concerned older vintages of wine, which tend to mean those that date back at least 20 years, but sometimes as much as a half-century or more.