This column originally was published in 2005. John Kessler will resume writing fresh columns soon.
My wine cellar began with 60 bottles of wine I never asked for, didn’t want, and, for a long time, couldn’t get rid of.
This orphan wine belonged to — let me get this right — the son of a friend of a colleague of my wife’s whose name was Pierre. It arrived at our house one evening about 13 years ago, hand-delivered by its previous guardian. He explained that Pierre was living in Europe on sabbatical, and would, by all accounts, return in a year or two.
“Just stash it somewhere,” he told us cheerfully as he lugged the fifth and final crate into the living room. We never thought to get Pierre’s number.
At the time, we lived in Colorado in a house without a basement — not uncommon in those parts but not ideal for accidental wine collectors. We thought about putting our liquid charge in the attic, but figured, correctly, that the stifling heat wouldn’t be an ideal environment for the bottles.
And so the wine ended up on the floor in the closet of our baby’s room. I looked at a bottle or two — Whitehall Lane cabernet sauvignon, Joseph Phelps Insignia — before slamming the door shut.
Two years passed, and we didn’t hear from the mysterious Pierre. The boxes were soon buried under a heap of mittens, pink snowsuits and headless Barbie dolls.
Curiosity eventually got the better of me, and I had, in the interim, looked at each bottle. Pierre had apparently taken a driving tour of the Napa Valley and picked up a bottle here, a bottle there — some heavy hitters and some everyday drinking wine that people normally don’t cellar. He also had a few French reds (burgundies and Cotes du Rhones) that came from well-regarded appellations.
One night, I came home from work to find my wife in the kitchen with a glass in hand and one of Pierre’s bottles open on the table.
“Wine?” she offered, with a little mischief in her voice.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“We’ve been holding this wine for two years and have no idea when this guy is coming back,” she said, pouring my wine. “We deserve a bottle.”
Was it right to do this? I fretted. I paced. I weighed the ethics. And, alas, I sipped.
Another year passed, and we hadn’t heard from Pierre.
My wife had grown irritated and figured it was our prerogative to divest Pierre of the occasional bottle in exchange for the open-ended storage arrangement. I still wrung my hands in true weenie fashion, but took it upon myself to at least select the bottles that he probably wouldn’t miss too much. We wouldn’t go near the Insignia, but Lord knows he wasn’t saving the Clos du Bois for a special occasion.
Another year came and went, and another baby arrived. The room became an official mess of clothes, toys and stuffed animals. We also endured a ferocious summer; it was the first time we wished our house had air conditioning.
We weren’t as miserable as the poor wines. One day, as I was going through the kids’ closet, I noticed some small red dribbles pooling on the floor. Two of the French wines, which were probably bottled under low-tech conditions, were on the verge of losing their corks.
“We’re really killing these wines,” I lamented to my wife as I brought the two bottles downstairs. “What should we do?”
Did I need to ask? One bottle tasted like cooking sherry, and we dumped it down the sink. The other was extraordinary — supple in texture and as dark as blackberry juice.
By this point, we had plucked off about two cases of Pierre’s less illustrious wine. We a) liked wine, b) wanted our closet back and c) hadn’t received as much as a Christmas card saying, “Thank you, people I don’t know! Thank you for nurturing my joy juice!”
Still, the ethics of the situation were troubling. And the really good bottles were tempting.
My wife thought we could claim squatters’ rights by this point. I thought we first needed to go through every channel to contact Pierre. My wife reached his father in Chicago and told him that we were sick of waiting. She was on the phone for a long time.
“What did he say?” I asked.
“Drink ’em!” she said with a big smile.
After that conversation, the paradigm shifted. When we had guests over, I’d survey the wines in the house — both my own small, burgeoning cellar in the dining room china cabinet and the Pierre cellar upstairs — to find a good match for dinner.
The dreaded phone call came about five years into the course of our dubious guardianship.
“Mr. Kessler?” came the faraway voice. “This is Pierre.”
Trying to speak, I said, “Ahh. Muuumm. Uh, hi!”
Pierre was calling from Switzerland. He was on his way to Denver to collect his belongings, and couldn’t wait to see the wines again. He thanked me profusely for watching them. He’d be by tomorrow.
Click.
I wish I’d chosen a different course of action the evening of Pierre’s visit. To my everlasting regret, I did not confront him with the sad, diminished state of his wine collection. No, I left that messy business to my wife. When the doorbell rang, I ran to the back room behind our garage, jacked my headphones into the computer and blasted Nirvana into my ears.
After a half-hour, my wife came and joined me.
“Well,” she said, “I told him that some of the wines were destroyed, which is true, and that we didn’t know when he was coming back.”
“How did he react?” I wondered.
“He kept looking at the remaining bottles over and over again. What’s he going to do?”
Pierre left with a case of his best bottles. One of these days, I’d love to meet him and share a bottle with the man who got me hooked on wine. In honor of my wife, I’d pick the best bottle in the cellar.
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