My Father's Wine

Acquiring a rare French wine after dad's passing proved to be a much--needed connection.

by Elizabeth R. Elstien

This unassuming bottle of wine looked like any other bottle, except for the label. The label was discolored and ripped in a few places. The adhesive on the right side had lost its effectiveness and was taped to the bottle with clear, wide, packing tape.
I had just pulled it from a box my brother sent to me from the last of my father's collection. He died a slow and mind-numbing death from dementia nearly four years before and had a dozen or so bottles left. Wine is how I best remember him.
I clearly recall his nearly 100-bottle wine cellar he had built in our large basement that partly functioned as an entertainment space--train set, photography room, art corner, table tennis--away from the oil furnace. I was young and this dark, cool, windowless space was a mystery that my brother and I were not allowed to enter. As we apparently couldn't be trusted, dad kept it locked.
It was his space. Very organized, like my dad, with a list of wines, dates purchased, quantities, and locations on the shelves, as well as cellar temperatures. Sometimes he let us peek in when he was deciding what bottle to pull for dinner or a special occasion. These were the days when Napa and Sonoma were not even a whisper.
Carefully researched cases of wine were brought home and stored in that cellar. My 6-year-old mind couldn't understand why dad needed 12 of the same French wine, for instance, but my doubts were overshadowed by the excitement in his eyes when he opened a new "box". I knew that there would be a liqueur-style glass of wine for me to sample with dinner that night.
How grown-up I felt at the table while I watched dad pour his newest purchase into a "real" wine glass. Quietly, I listened to dad and mom talk about the wine, while dad poured, waited, looked, smelled, swirled, and tasted it. Swirling wine in dad's big, clear wine glass and watching how it fell fascinated me, but it just wasn't the same in my small, ornately etched glass. I laughed when my dad first told me how the swirled wine falling down the glass was known as legs. Sometimes they were very long.
Eying the bottle of 1945 Grand Vin de Chateau Latour in front of me, I pictured celebrations at the end of WWII with the French people smashing empty bottles of wine long into the night in defeat of the totalitarian fascists.
This was no ordinary vintage. In 2017, a wine review author on the Doctor Wine website rated this wine a 100 out of 100 with a then-current bottle price of 4,000 Euros (about $4,800 US figuring 2017 rates). In early 2023, bottles were priced as high as $6,751 from fine-wine distributors.
This good a vintage when the wine was made the last year of WWII and the vineyard was in a poor state with frost in early May affecting the vines? The Chateau Latour website describes the vineyard and harvest in 1945 as being "mainly from old vines that produced comparatively little". The vinification (winemaking) was difficult, but the "resulting 54 barrels of Latour were rich and concentrated." No matter how we try to control situations, there are no givens in winemaking or life.
The imagined taste of the garnet-red Bordeaux wine touching the back of my mouth and trickling down my throat was anxiously anticipated. With its intense oak, fruit, and spice tastes that I had only read about, I wished my dad was there to share this wine.
I removed the slightly damaged, red-foil capsule from the green bottle. Its cork looked misshapen and dry. How long did dad have this special bottle waiting for the right time to open and decant it?
Sadly, he wasn't there to tell me when, where, how many, and why he purchased that particular vintage. Before the disease hit, dad knew everything about WWII, so perhaps this year was a good fit for his collection.
Expectations of an unmistakable experience welled up while setting a stemmed wine glass on the custom-made wood counter. I thought about setting out a second glass for my dad in spirit. With a mix of excitement and dread, I placed the corkscrew into the cork and started turning. The cork started breaking up into tiny pieces and would not entirely come out, instead falling into the bottle.
My hopes were dashed. I knew the wine inside was compromised, unbalanced, and could not be drunk. Pouring it into the sink with its shrunken pieces of cork, dark sediment in the bottle stayed in the sink basin refusing to easily go down the drain. Just as my father had tried to retain his memory, but it failed him in the end.
On November 11, 2015, before dad's memory got too bad, he said something to me during our phone conversation that I've never forgotten. "I know less and am enjoying it more," dad told me in a lighthearted voice. Our conversation soon went from him talking to me to him talking about me, as he forgot who he was speaking with, but I was still in his thoughts.
I don't think he realized just how true was this poignant remark. This disease was going to be a rough one for us both. My father, like the wine label, was becoming unglued.
Dad had always bought wine for me, dry or semi-dry, as were my preferences. He would give me a few bottles to take home when I visited with my family. When mom and dad--and then just dad after mom died--came to visit us, he would always leave several bottles of wine on the kitchen counter, explaining to me the nuances of each, how some were boutique wines, and what to eat with them. Sometimes, we even went shopping for wine with him always teaching me something new.
At the start of the COVID pandemic, my husband and I bought a wine refrigerator for whites and a wood and metal rack for reds. This was over two years after dad died a thin man who hadn't communicated with anyone for days. There was nothing we could do, doctors told us.
Wine was the link. Unlike dad, we bought mixed cases of reds and whites selected for us based on our preferences and shipped to our door. While wines from Europe are always a pleasure to drink, those from Australia, New Zealand, and the western US--where we live--also made a welcome splash into our glasses where we swirled and watched the wine fall in legs or sheets.
Cutting through the clear packing tape on the boxes, the same type of tape used on the wine label, reminded me of my childhood and watching my dad zestfully inspecting each bottle of wine in the case. Now, I'm on my own journey--although I know less than my dad--to learn what regions and vintages I enjoy the most, while my father and his wines will forever ferment in the barrels of my brain.

*****

NOTE: A jpeg of the wine label is available.

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