A Magical Wine

In 1961, in a stony vineyard in Chateau Neuf du Pape some magical grapes were grown. They were carefully made into wine and shipped halfway around the world to Kansas City. One day, a young couple ventured into a wine store and purchased a bottle of wine made from those grapes and decided to save it for their new baby girl's wedding day. That baby girl was to become my wife, Melanie.
More than twenty years later with her father having passed-away, her mother in poor health and with no immediate prospects for marriage, it was decided that the special bottle should be consumed before it was too late. A rendezvous was arranged in celebration of the rekindled relationship with my family (we had been overseas for a long time) and fortunately for me, I was also invited.
A big dinner was prepared and we opened that "magic" bottle of Domaine de Mont Redon 1961. It was wonderfully rich and velvety, and drinking perfectly. That wine and that dinner were to become the standard by which we would judge all of our important dinners. For my parents it was a perfect evening spent eating, drinking and chatting with an old friend, but for me it was something entirely different.....It was the point at which I realized for the first time, that someone else in the world had the same interest in wine and food as I did and what was even more important... she happened to be a beautiful young girl who seemed to be interested in me too! We soon married and the rest as they say is history. So you see, that was magic, it cast its spell over us and we have been its happy subjects ever since!
We drank that lovely bottle of Mont Redon nearly a quarter of a century ago, and in 2004 we visited the winery for the first time. We were very surprised to see they still had some of the 61's left and the wine maker allowed us to buy one, which we enjoyed on our our 20th wedding anniversary in May 2005 and it was still drinking perfectly!