Recently, my wife Deborah went to an estate sale.
She returned home with a framed colour photograph of what must have been an oil painting.
Its subject - two dusty bottles, Château Haut Brion 1919 and Bouchard Ainé & Fils Meursault 1904.
To the left of the bottles were a rather bedraggled label of Mas de Daumas Gassac and two corks, one branded Rausan Ségla, the other an unidentifiable St. Emilion.To the right, a label of Château Margaux 1949, in excellent condition, and an old-fashioned corkscrew standing upright.
Now, this montage can only be described as ‘oeno-porn.’
There is no other pursuit – or maybe I should say ‘obsession’ – that triggers the compulsion to become a collector than wine. I’m not talking necessarily about the amassing of bottles of wine without drinking them, rather about all the appurtenances and paraphernalia that go along with the service and consumption of wine.
For the purposes of this blog, I made an inventory of all the stuff we have in our house that is wine-related.
There is a cabinet full of glasses of different shapes and sizes - 150 of them, plus boxes of unused glasses in the basement (we tend to break them, so we buy them compulsively). Sitting on the top of the 500-bottle wine cabinet are 8 decanters and 2 ice buckets. In the kitchen drawer there are 14 corkscrews (one of which is for left-handers) and there are others secreted around the house and in the car in case of emergency.
In the drawer where we keep the wine coasters, there are 3 packets of drip stops, 8 table napkins with grape variety names and a matching tablecloth, a Coravin, and a wine aerator/strainer/pourer with a stopper. In addition, there are the following: a water jug that looks like a bunch of grapes, two sets of six place mats – one featuring Bordeaux labels, the other that says ‘I Sapori d’Italia,’ decorated with a bottle, glasses and grapes.
There are 20-odd wine region maps, rolled up in the garage that I never look at and old wine dinner menus signed by chefs. We even have a set of place mats made from cork that we bought at MOMA in New York.
And my wife has a handbag I purchased for her in France. It’s also made of cork and it can accommodate a chilled bottle and a corkscrew and that’s about all.
On the wall in our kitchen is a large red and blue metal oval plaque - a genuine license to sell beverage alcohol in a Paris bistro (liberated by my French brother-in-law, no questions asked).
I also have a collection of the metal discs from champagne corks. These are called ‘muselets’ (from the French verb museler, to muzzle.) Which makes me a practicing placomusophiliac (the term for nutty collectors of these colourful discs like me). Currently, I have dozens of them sitting in a drawer, waiting to be framed.
I used to collect wine books and at one time I had over seven hundred. Now I’m down to a more reasonable one hundred. I also collect memorable bottles (empty) that have been signed by the winemaker and these have moved with me three times – much to my wife’s chagrin. (Are you nodding your head now, empathizing with me or in sympathy for her?)
I also, may heaven forgive me, own a hand corking machine which I use to recork unfinished wine once I’ve applied the wine-preserving gas.
And don’t get me started about wine labels. I used to have photo albums full of them, but I donated them to my friend Alain Laliberté who is in the Guinness Book of Records as the proud owner of the world’s largest collection – 230,000 and counting.
Now back to that object from the estate sale my wife brought home. It cost her $5.
I wouldn’t part with it for ten times that. (Well, maybe.)