The Wine Cellar

This is the story of my wine cellar.

The year was 1982 and we had just moved into a new house. I suffer from allergies and the house was surrounded by fields of wild flowers and all kinds of grasses. Not what I really needed…

One day a traveling salesman showed up at our front door holding a large black case. He politely asked if I would be interested in tasting some of the wines he was promoting. He assured me that they were very good and not available at liquor stores. Because of my allergies, I was always searching for wines that would not throw me in a sneezing spree. I invited him in and that started both my education and enjoyment of wines. Five of the six wines he was promoting were white German wines by Ferdinand Pieroth. One of my favorite was a Spatlese from the Nahe Valley in a beautiful sculptured blue bottle. To my delight, other than the superb taste of the wines, I noticed that I was not having any allergic reaction to them. And although I had not been a fan of German wines till that day, I ended up ordering six cases of the Ferdinand Pieroth wines. I have been a follower of Pieroth and German wines since then.

Along with the excitement of discovering these wonderful wines came the challenge of “where do I store all these wines?”, and, more importantly, “how do I do so, without downgrading their quality?” Till that time, I had never bought more than 2-3 bottles at a time, and I had not really paid a premium price for wines–didn’t have the cash and couldn’t distinguish low priced wines from expensive ones. Now suddenly, I was confronted with the challenge of having a large quantity, medium to high-priced wines in need of a proper home.

The solution to my dilemma wasn’t very far. Under the stairs leading to the half-basement of the house there was an underutilized space where I built my first wine storage area. There in a cool and dark environment I could store horizontally most of my wines. I was happy to have found a decent home for the wines, but also excited about this new found hobby. I would go down the stairs and look at the bottles in their rows and columns and dream of having a real wine cellar some day…

The wine rack under the stairs served me well until I moved to Arizona where there are no basements and no cool places to store wine. In the meantime, my collection of wines had increased along with the commitment to preserve them as well as possible. I had to find something suitable and quickly. I was able to locate the supplier of EuroCave, self-contained wine cellars that recreate the natural cooling environment of a château wine cellar. I was thrilled with this discovery, as was not aware that such things existed, and rushed to buy one of their units that could hold about 250 bottles. It was like Christmas when the unit arrived!

While I had found a proper place for the wines, I was becoming acutely aware of how little I knew about wines. I decided to learn more and one of the new things I learned was that in addition to preservation, there is wine ageing too. You see, wines do age just like all living things. And this aging produces all kinds of secondary flavors that enhance the taste of wine and make the wine lose its bite. “Given the vagaries of vinification, much Greek wine will not have lasted long, succumbing either to oxidation…or to spoilage due to inadequate storage, the risk of which was noted by Aristotle”. (The Oxford Companion to Wine by Jancis Robinson). Old wine was highly regarded by the Greeks so the process of ageing wines has been practiced since antiquity. The comic poets of ancient Greece had noted that men preferred old wine but young women… I was not about to break this practice.

As I continued my enjoyment of and learning about wine, I realized that having the EuroCave wine cellar was some type of a transformational event for me. What started as a solution to storing and protecting wines from spoilage, evolved into a new science and experience that was destined to become my life’s passion.

For the second time since I started my wine collection, I was faced with the dilemma of what to do with my wines. I had accepted a position overseas in what I considered at the time would be a two-years assignment. I lived in Boston at the time and my wines and their EuroCave home had made their first cross-country journey from Arizona. Had barely settled there and couldn't even think about another move...

On top of the usual headaches associated with major moves, I learned that the customs duty for bringing the wines into Egypt was a staggering 5,000%-yes, five thousand percent. That made it cost prohibitive to take them along. I couldn't even consider the option of selling them. I was attached to them and some of them were aging beautifully. Had to find another option.

My boss and good friend Ed offered to keep them at his home in Boston for a while, but I needed something long-term as my two-year assignment was turning out to be much longer than originally planned. So, the wines and EuroCave started their travel again. First, to a storage facility and eventually to a much farther destination--my village in Greece. I came to realize at some point that no matter where I would end up living, I would always have a connection with my birthplace. That was a timely and wise decision and destined to be the conduit that brought me to this blog and this story.

Shipping my wines and the EuroCave cellar to my village in Greece was made possible with the completion of a home we built on an ancestral land located a mile and a half outside the town. It was something that culminated a decade's extraordinarily wonderful rediscoveries. After living in the US for 27 years, I was now working and living in Alexandria, Egypt--a mere 40 minutes flight from Athens. My father was still alive and was eager to see him and spent as much time as possible with him for the little time I was fearing he had left in this life. I was going to make up for lots of lost time...Every chance I had--long weekends and every holiday--I would come to my village. It was like a very tired and thirsty man had reached an oasis after being lost in the desert...

Other than spending most of my time with my father and sister and her family, I would walk out in the neighborhood where I grew up and wonder in the village's two squares (platias). I would stop in the village's bakery--being operated by the same family since 1908--and receive my usual fresh baked bread, free of course since the propriator who still remembered me as the young 10 years old boy wouldn't have any other way...It was the warmest and most wonderful feeling I had felt for a very long time. I was again 10 years old and I had come home. Finally, the circle that had taken me to three continents had closed...but the story continues...