“Old Wood to Burn, Old Wine to Drink, Old Friends to Trust.” — Francis Bacon, Apophthegmes

There are evenings when the wine, the room, the people, and the hour line up so neatly that you look around the table thinking: this is the one I’ll remember. Last night was one of those.

Lisa and I are still inside our 45th anniversary, stretching it out across a long, indulgent season the way you’d stretch out the last hour of a really good book. The celebration began earlier in the spring and shows no sign of slowing. After 45 years, we feel entitled to a little stamina in the celebrating.

This particular evening took us back to Hilton Village, to Circa 1918.

A Lucky Wrong Turn

Almost ten years ago, I came down to Hampton Roads to interview with ICM. Lisa came with me, as she always has on the consequential trips. We were strangers to the area then — strangers to Virginia and the Chesapeake altogether, really — and we had an evening to ourselves before the interview. So we did what we always do in a new place: we went looking for dinner.

What we found was a tucked-away storefront in Hilton Village, the planned community built in 1918 to house Newport News shipbuilders during the First World War. The first federal war-housing project in the country, in fact. The neighborhood feels like a postcard out of a quieter era: gabled cottages, English-village street plans, brick sidewalks that hint at the careful hand of the architects who laid the place out. Sitting in the middle of it, named for the year the village was born, is Circa 1918.

There is a quiet luck in wandering into a place you’d never have found by searching for it. The food that first night was extraordinary. So was the service. We left already planning the next visit, and ten years on, we’ve made the 45-minute drive many, many times.

Kip

The thing that turns a good restaurant into a favorite restaurant is almost never just the cooking. It’s the people. And at Circa 1918, the gravity that keeps pulling us back is Kip Mullin, general manager and host extraordinaire.

Over the years, Kip has become a friend. There is really no other word for it. He greets us at the door like neighbors. He remembers the wines we’ve brought before. He decants the way a librarian shelves a rare edition: carefully, knowingly, without ceremony. We have sat with traveling sommeliers in Tuscany and négociants in the Rhône, and Kip belongs in their company. An evening at Circa 1918 simply isn’t itself without him.

The Wines: A Lesson in Patience

We came armed for celebration.

We started with a bottle of 2016 Le Rêve from Domaine Carneros, the flagship Blanc de Blancs from the Carneros estate Claude Taittinger founded in 1987 and that the formidable Eileen Crane shaped over thirty-three years. Le Rêve is 100% Chardonnay, rests six years on tirage, and arrives in the glass with that particular Carneros tension between California sun and Champagne restraint: Meyer lemon, ginger, orange blossom, a whisper of brioche, all carried on a very fine bead. It is, simply, a wine that says something good is about to happen. Bubbles do that to a table.

Then Kip decanted a bottle I had been a little nervous about: a 2012 Palmaz “Brasas” Cabernet Sauvignon. Brasas is Spanish for embers, and this is Palmaz’s bold, food-friendly Cab built on a Cabernet spine and softened with Merlot, Malbec, and Petit Verdot. The Palmaz story is one of my favorites in Napa: Julio Palmaz, an Argentine heart surgeon who actually invented the modern stent, and his wife Amalia, restored Henry Hagen’s nineteenth-century Coombsville property and then dug an 18-story gravity-flow cave straight into the side of Mount George.

For all that engineering, what first showed up in the glass was a little reticent. The tannins had softened more than I expected, and the wine seemed shy. I confessed to Kip that I was worried we had held this bottle a vintage too long. He just smiled — that let-it-breathe smile sommeliers have. A few minutes of conversation with oxygen later, the Brasas was spectacular: pink peppercorn, mulberry, savory spice, fully integrated tannins, and the kind of length that lets you set the glass down and keep tasting.

After the Palmaz, we moved to a 2013 Hope & Grace Cabernet Sauvignon, also decanted. Charles Hendricks named the label after his two daughters, and he is quietly one of the most experienced winemakers in Napa: four decades of helping launch other people’s wineries before launching his own. The 2013 vintage in Napa has aged into something rare, and after its own brief reintroduction to air, Hope & Grace proved it: rich without being heavy, generous without being loud, a wine entirely at peace with itself.

Both reds taught the same lesson, which is the lesson of long marriages and long friendships. Give it a minute. Let it open up. It will reward you.

Old Friends, New Plans

Our friends Rich and Bridget Kidd joined us for dinner. Rich is the executive recruiter who first brought ICM and me together, which means that same lucky trip south gave us Hampton Roads, Circa 1918, and the Kidds in the same week. The working relationship turned, over the ten years since, into one of the friendships Lisa and I now count as essential. Our own kids were already grown when we met; theirs were finishing high school and heading off to college. We met one another at an unusual hinge in family life, and the friendship has only deepened from there.

We caught each other up on kids’ journeys and family news, traded a little shop, and lingered over the slideshow-in-our-heads of a trip we took to Sonoma a few years back. Healdsburg mornings, hot afternoons in the tasting rooms, late dinners on the square. We started shaping what the next trip might look like.

There is a kind of conversation that only happens when the wine is right, the room is right, and the company has nothing to prove to one another. We had that conversation last night.

The Math of an Anniversary

Forty-five years with Lisa. Ten years with Circa 1918. Ten years with the Kidds. (Both, as it happens, gifts of the same lucky trip south.) Hours in the decanter for the Palmaz. Minutes in the glass for the Hope & Grace. Each one a small argument for the same big idea: the best things take their time. Patience is itself a kind of love. And the right people, in the right place, with the right bottle and long enough to settle into it, will tell you exactly who you are.

To Kip and his team, who keep the lamp lit on Warwick Boulevard: thank you. We will be back. We always are.