The curious story of our bottle of 1992 Corbans Millennium Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon
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In the early 90s, we collected good wine. We loved visiting the vineyards, doing the tasting thing and buying the ones we liked for long term cellaring. We also entered a few wine tasting competitions and even did ok.
Sometime about 1993 or 1994, Corbans Wines made a limited edition Cabernet Sauvignon called the 1992 Corbans Millennium Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon Limited Edition. It was a magnum and they were only going to make 1000 bottles, or some similar amount. The company placed an ad in the paper, you had cut it out, fill it in and send a cheque. I can't recall the amount now, but maybe something like $500. They were going to have annual member tastings there was discounts for other wines for members. Anyway we decided we wanted to add that bottle to the collection so sent the cheque off. Some months later they wrote to us to tell us we were successful, gave us our bottle number and they would send us the wine when it was bottled.
We were living in Glendowie at the time, in a quite awful, cold ex state house on the main road and had an opportunity to move to a nicer but smaller flat over in Epsom for cheaper rent. Because we were moving and still didn't have our wine I had to call Corbans tell them the bottle number we had been assigned and gave them our new address. The nice person on the phone said "Thanks for calling, I'll give Kathy your new address so that you get your wine".
A month later we moved house. And then about a month after that there was a knock on the door. She introduced herself as Kathy from Corbans Wines and she had our magnum of limited edition Millennium Reserve in her arms. Of course we were a little surprised that she had hand delivered it, but she said it was no big deal.
It was no big deal because Kathy was our neighbour. She lived in the flat next door. Her flat was touching ours. 6 months earlier we had purchased a bottle of wine from a newspaper ad when we lived in another part of the city and then managed to move right next door to the marketing manager of Corbans.
A couple of years later we attended an auction where a bottle of Millennium Reserve sold for somewhere around $1500
The Photo
It's the youngest daughter in the front of the helicopter on our trip up to see Aoraki
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