A Glass Act — the finest California wine, served strong

There is a long and noble tradition of using academic breaks to reflect deeply on the collegiate experience. To sit quietly. To journal. To emerge renewed.

We drank wine instead. Quite a lot of it. The penmanship in our tasting notes suffered in direct proportion to the bottles opened, such that by Thursday our journal looked less like the work of aspiring sommeliers and more like field dispatches from an earthquake. We regret nothing.

Among the many bottles consumed in the name of education, one demanded its own column. Another gifted bottle — because the universe has apparently decided we should receive great things the way the truly lucky always do: free of charge and without warning. Klinker Brick Winery. Lodi, California. The Felten family launched this winery in 2000 with a single bottling of Old Vine Zinfandel after nearly a century of farming for other people. The name comes from the dense, dark bricks in Lodi’s historic buildings — chosen for strength and durability. The wine tastes like that sentence reads.

2017 Mokelumne River AVA. $32 retail. 15.4% alcohol, which we noted while pouring and chose not to treat as a warning. Some of the vineyard blocks in this bottle are 120 years old. Your great-great-grandmother may have been alive when these vines were planted. Think about that the next time you complain your wine needs to breathe.

It was served in the chunky glasses. Thick-walled, short-stemmed, no business holding something like this. We became, within one glass, different people. The bread came out. The cheese came out. We were no longer reviewers, though many could argue we never truly were. We were conducting — waving cured meats like batons while the wine played its symphony and slowly was depleted.

Nose: Dark cherry, raspberry, black pepper, a little earth. Vibrant in the truest sense — bold enough to announce itself, composed enough not to shout. Both eyebrows went up on the first sniff. They stayed there…seriously, how do we get them to go down?

Taste: This is where the wine stops being polite and starts being honest. The fruit hits with a force that is, frankly, startling for something that retails at $32. Rich, dark, layered — eager to please but under no obligation to be gentle about it. We set our glasses down. We looked at each other. We picked them back up. There was nothing else to do.

Finish: Long. Warm. Unhurried. If the nose was an introduction and the taste was the main event, the finish was a full massage — working its way through every corner of the palate with the kind of thoroughness that at 15.4% alcohol, eventually extended down the entire table. One by one. Nobody complained.

Pairings: Assorted meats, aged cheeses and grapes, though these are simply for decoration as the wine is very clearly the headline act. The feeling of being a Soprano — not in the criminal sense, we want to be clear, but in the bread-waving, someone-put-on-Dean-Martin sense.

Verdict: Lodi has spent decades being quietly, almost rudely, correct while everyone else was busy being impressed with themselves. 120-year-old vines, delta breezes, sandy California loam and a family patient enough to farm for others for a century before putting their name on a label. At $32, this deserves your sincere attention and, dare we say, devotion. We, humbled, have nothing left to offer but a standing ovation and a sincere request for another pour.

Rating: 9.1/10. The chunky glass docked a full point. The wine itself has no notes.

— Gabe Evenocheck & Ben Bugbee Senior Fellows, Institute for the Advancement of Drinking Wine From the Wrong Glass

(This column is intended for readers 21 and older. The 15.4% alcohol was disclosed responsibly and consumed irresponsibly. Our tasting notes from the second bottle are available upon request, though they appear to be written in a language we no longer speak.)