The light in Rob Moose’s refrigerator won’t turn on. This is intentional: Moose, a rangy, tumble-haired rock guitarist, violinist and producer who has spent much of the last decade working with the likes of Bon Iver and Sufjan Stevens, taped the switch down.
“So as not to disturb the wine,” he said. Inside the refrigerator are a dozen bottles, some upright, some supine, a long-necked harem-in-waiting. Two dozen more are stacked in a nearby wine chiller, acquired after his previous one failed and “cooked a bunch of bottles,” he said with a sigh.
The stash in his Harlem apartment constitutes less than a 10th of his wine holdings, which he estimates at 500 bottles. The rest are stored off-site, at a climate-controlled warehouse in White Plains that delivers by refrigerated truck with 48 hours’ notice, and in a EuroCave wine cabinet that he bought secondhand at a Salvation Army store and keeps at his parents’ house in rural Pennsylvania.
Occasionally, Moose, 33, who turned to oenology after a foray into cocktails (“I’d taken that as far as you could go with geekiness”), wants to drink a wine before its time. So on his kitchen counter, among recently emptied bottles, stands his Coravin, a tool that looks like a minimalist’s stun gun and acts like a hypodermic syringe.
When clasped around a bottle’s throat, it pierces the cork with a hollow surgical-grade needle and injects argon, an inert gas. This creates pressure, forcing a small amount of wine out through the needle while protecting the remainder from oxidation. After the needle is extracted, the puncture in the cork naturally closes up.
“It’s an interesting combination of science and magic,” Moose said. He uses the device to siphon a bottle slowly, over the course of a week, or to take sips from different vintages as a kind of “personal tasting menu.”
The Coravin, which retails for around $300 (“Outrageous,” his mother said), was a Christmas gift from his parents. As a child, he had simpler toys: miniguitars, an autoharp, a conductor’s baton. Everyone in his family, including all four grandparents, sings or plays an instrument (piano, violin, cello, double bass). Moose started piano at 5 and begged his mother for violin lessons at 6. When she hesitated, he cried.
He went on to study violin at the Manhattan School of Music. Guitar was just a sideline until 2005, when, in the midst of a master’s program in American studies at Columbia University, he was asked to join Antony and the Johnsons on tour. He brought textbooks along and abandoned them somewhere in Spain.
Now, he spends eight months of the year on the road. Weary of the same bottles of whiskey backstage after every concert, he finds that local wine is a kind of anchor. “You’re moving so quickly,” he said. “It’s nice to drink something that speaks of a place.”
Touring doesn’t leave him much time to cook at home. In any case, the temperature in his refrigerator is turned down low for the wine. “I can’t keep food in there,” he said.
Half of his collection is Chablis. “I’m specializing in something I can afford,” he said. He has bought a few bottles from his birth year, 1982. “It’s cool to drink something that’s the same age as you,” he said. “To think about what stage a wine is at in its evolution: It’s time to look back on what I’ve done, formulate what I hope to do.”
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