A Century of…Fives

BY NEAL MARTIN | JUNE 17, 2025

My annual “Century of…” article revisits vintages on their decennial anniversaries. For many years, I tethered vintages to a contemporaneous timeline of music, since nothing evokes a sense of time like a melody. For a change,  last year, I decided to tie vintages to FA Cup Finals. This year, it is literature’s turn—books published in years ending in five, Poe to Kafka via Tolkien and Murakami. The main wellsprings of tasting notes are 2005s opened at Burgundy domaines last autumn and then at Bordeaux châteaux during primeur. Older notes are culled from the Académie du Vin dinner and the “five” dinner held at Domaine de Chevalier. These are augmented by various other events, including Jordi’s 50th birthday lunch at Nando’s, a 1985 dinner at Noble Rot and Meerlust’s half-century anniversary, all in London. Readers can expect another tranche of 2015s from the South Africa blind tasting, but those will form a standalone piece. I hope you enjoy this as much as I enjoyed writing it.

1845 – “The Raven” – Edgar Allan Poe

Published on January 29, 1845, Poe’s narrative poem “The Raven” boils down to some bloke sitting by a fire moaning on about the loss of his love…to a bird. No need to tell you what type of bird. I empathise with the man who put the Poe into poetry. After a tough day in the office, I often return home and let off steam at the pet budgie. The Raven made Poe a celebrity, later inspiring Baudelaire, Nabokov and the American football team, the Baltimore Ravens. They are surely thankful to be named after Poe’s most famous poem instead of Nabokov’s most famous book, “Lolita.”

The cavalcade of bottles ending in “five” lined up at Domaine de Chevalier, spanning 170 years.

Whilst Poe was racking his brain thinking of words that rhyme with raven (haven, maven, John Craven), grapes were being fermented for what eventually became a multi-vintage 1845 Bual Solera inside Cossart Gordon’s lodge. Vintages were added to that base wine, though which exact years are lost in the sands of time. Now, what are the odds that two invitees would bring the same Madeira? Sure enough, we had not one but two bottles, one stencilled, the other labelled. Of course, it is always a privilege to drink a time-defying Madeira, and both bottles had stood the test of time, one slightly more oxidized in style than the other, yet both with an inner core of sweetness.

1865 – “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” – Lewis Carroll

Rowing up the Isis River with a friend and his three daughters, Oxford don Lewis Carroll ad-libbed a story about a girl called Alice who lived in the undergrowth. Three years later, in 1865, the most famous Victorian nonsensical novel hit the bookstores, its pages filled with white rabbits, Cheshire cats and the Madhatter’s tea party, a precursor to today’s wine dinners. “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” has never been out of print since. I read it as a child. I found its surrealism unsettling and returned to the safe haven of Enid Blyton. At least the Famous Five did not play croquet with flamingos.

A tiny handful of Bordeaux 1865s already exists in the Vinous database. This is a legendary pre-phylloxera vintage on the Gironde, a favourite tipple of Michael Broadbent. The vintage was equally revered in Burgundy, hence my unearthing a single note from the epic La Romanée vertical a decade ago, this one bottled by Bouchard Père & Fils.

1915 – “The Metamorphosis” – Franz Kafka