Silent, upon a peak in Darien

IT happens rarely, but when it does, it stays in your memory for a long time. It is the occasion when a wine leaves you silent and still, once you've tasted the first mouthful. The wondrous impact of its taste in your sensory cortex and the lingering remnants on your palate leave you desperately finding the right words to quantify and describe its content and nature. At moments such as this I am reminded of that immortal sentence "Silent, upon a peak in Darien" from John Keat's On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer.

Keats' poem describes the feelings of the Spanish explorer Cortez, who was looking for the Pacific Ocean while he was exploring in the province of Darien in Panama. He had advanced alone to the summit of the mountain from which he had been assured he would see it. He did, and the sheer sight of the ocean left him speechless in awe.

There are such wines, not necessarily the same for each of us, which do not need words. Two months ago, at a Chinese dinner, it was a 1988 Faiveley Corton Charlemagne Grand Cru, a 25-year old at its peak. Beautifully balanced, very intense and long from the very first mouthful, its beauty completely unexpected. I sat for a moment speechless and disbelieving. My previous experiences with the wine had left me unprepared for this beautiful maturity. In its youth, this wine had been good but certainly did not show such promise.