Years ago Viv’s dad excitedly pointed at a bottle of red wine in the wine-cellar of The Spanish Table. He was interested in it becasue it was branded as “Marques de Caceres,” and his Spanish ancestors hailed from that locale. We bought the wine, a ’94 rioja, not expecting anything and in ignorance of riojas in general.

The wine was magnificent, huge, amazing.

A few months later the same vintage began appearing in Costco, and I bought a bunch. I turned my dad on to it and he bought a case. Since then, we have often picked up vintages of this wine.

Yesterday, I realized that rioja is supposed to be a relatively volatile wine, with a limited and somewhat short shelf life. We have a couple bottles of that ’94 still hanging about. I’m happy to say that my palate is sufficiently ignorant to remain happy indeed as I drink it.

Samantha is back, it appears, from her first international trip. From the gleanings, I gather it was satisfactory.

At Daymented’s going away party, we talked a bit about the at-that-time-upcoming trip. I sort-of told her about trying to let my parents know about Tienanmen Square back in the eighties – they had flown to China and were in the air when the Army began the crackdown. In the end they did not get any of the messages I left for them. I had started to tell this story, and realized that it was really fairly inappropriate to share with someone who had just told me that this was her first trip outside the country.

My own first trip outside the country must have been in 1968, leaving the US on the way to live in Chile. I was two.