The opening pages of the Cellar Book, 1935
Looking at the real thing was different from reading about it. My father’s essay had removed all the complications, and also much of the flavor.
As I leafed through the pages, I recognized all the great names from my childhood, some of them in the company of Great Years. There were the Premier Cru Bordeaux. Château Margaux ’29 (first laid down 10/18/35, one case, $25). Château Latour, ’28 (first laid down 12/23/36, a gift). Château Haut-Brion ’26 (first laid down 10/1/37, one bottle, $1.95). Château Lafite Rothschild ’28 (first laid down 4/7/37, one bottle, $1.75); my father noted that it had “turned” and was replaced ten days later with a second, more satisfactory bottle. Château Mouton Rothschild ’28 (first laid down 3/10/36, two bottles, $2.35 each). There were several of the Grand Cru Burgundies I’d learned to recognize by the time I was in the sixth grade. Chambertin ’29 (first laid down 10/1/37, one bottle, $1.65). Montrachet ’29 (first laid down 10/1/37, six bottles, $1.65 each). Grands Échézeaux ’33 (first laid down 10/1/41, one case, $35.40). There was Château d’Yquem ’25 (first laid down 4/18/36, a gift). Holy Moses, there was Château Branaire-Ducru, the so-obscure-it-should-have-been-impossible-to-guess claret from the Roald Dahl story about the wagered daughter! This one was a ’29 (first laid down 10/18/35, one case, $17.50).
The proper nouns induced a sensation somewhere between shivering and crying. I could remember only one other time I’d felt like that. Two decades earlier, I had written a profile of a Nebraska monk. I had asked what the monastic tradition offered him to compensate for giving up the company of women. He answered by reciting, without further explanation, the names of the fabled medieval abbeys: Tintern. Cîteaux. Wearmouth-Jarrow. Lindisfarne. Fountains. Rievaulx.
Great names.
Lindisfarne and Grands Échézeaux conjured worlds that were old and noble and beautiful. I might not wish to participate—chant matins at 4:00 a.m., swallow the Burgundy—but the words made me want to fall to my knees.
My father did not comment on every wine in his Cellar Book. The most famous bottles were often recorded without annotation, as if assessments would profane them, though he did remark that a Clos de Vougeot ’21—from the vineyard that Napoleon’s soldiers were commanded to salute as they marched past—was “one of the finest Burgundies I have ever tasted.” When he made a note, it was brief and confident. “Gorgeous.” “Insipid.” “Passable.” “Superb!” “Bigness, no greatness; but very satisfactory.” “Lovely; ready now.” “Still hard; wait.” “Great breeding + suavity; might be still better in five years.” “Sound, good nose, but a little thin.” “Young, green, mediocre.” “Trifle faded.” “Too quininy.” “Touch of acid; ’26’s not keeping.” “Pleasant little affair.” “Swell.”
There may have been some blank spaces under “Remarks,” but never under “Price Paid.” My father and money: always a tight couple. The Cellar Book, which was laid out in double-page spreads with vertical columns, looked a lot like the spreadsheets on which he kept track of his stocks. I could tell how much pleasure he had taken in filling in the prices. Every dollar sign said I can afford this. I know about this. I am going to enjoy this. It was like a bank book. These wines were his life’s savings.
On the first day of his new life as a wine collector, he bought nine hundred and eight bottles. He spent well over a thousand dollars, the equivalent of more than fifteen thousand dollars today. That was a wild spree—undoubtedly one of the largest expenditures he’d ever made—but as time went on, his spending grew more careful. (It was never exactly thrifty. Though he was frugal in most other areas, he never stinted on wine, books, or his children.) Sometimes he bought cases, but often he bought single bottles to sample before he invested in larger quantities. Château Cantenac Brown ’28 ($1.45) was “lovely; + will develop; buy.” Château Beychevelle ’34 ($.98) was “a buy,” as was Château Pape Clément ’34 (also $.98). He complained when he overspent. A Margaux ’34 was “Good—not worth $5.39.” A Richebourg ’37 ($6.95) was “perfect, but the price!” He exulted when he underspent. Château Canon ’26 (one case, $18) and Aÿ Brut champagne ’28 (four cases, for a New Year’s party, each $42) were both a “bargain at the price.”
Nine tenths of the wines in the Cellar Book were French. A handful were German. From Spain, only sherries, Montillas, and Riojas; from Portugal, only ports, including one from 1891, the oldest bottle my father bought—sans nom, just like the port at Kim’s birthday. Italy didn’t exist. Australia and Chile and South Africa didn’t exist. America didn’t exist; Prohibition, which had been repealed less than two years before he bought that case of Clos des Lambrays, had seen to that. I was reading the account of a lost world, written in a dead language. My father’s Cellar Book was a record of the time before a case of Premier Cru Bordeaux cost as much as a used car. Before cryo-extraction, micro-oxygenation, electrodialysis, inert gas streaming, reverse osmosis, and cross-flow filtration. Before Robert Parker, the wine critic whose hundred-point rating system popularized thick, inky wines with lots of fruit, lots of oak, and lots of alcohol. Before the introduction of three-dollar wines from California’s Central Valley, some of whose vineyards yield twelve tons of grapes an acre, as compared with four tons in the Napa Valley and just over two tons in the greatest vineyards of Burgundy and Bordeaux. Before the rise of low-acid, low-tannin wines that are ready to drink immediately—in fact, that must be drunk immediately, because if you waited for decades they’d taste like something poured from a fish tank. Before the United States surpassed France as the largest consumer of wine (in volume, not per capita). Before twist-off caps.
The Cellar Book was also a record of my father’s life. On October 18, 1935, when he started collecting wine, the Depression had not yet ended, but the economy was improving. During its leanest years, Simon & Schuster, which he had left six months earlier, had cut his salary from one hundred to eighty dollars a week. He was now two years into his tenure at The New Yorker. It must have been thrilling to realize that he could afford to hang the expense. He was thirty-one: poignantly young. His marriage to Polly was still happy; Jono was three; for both him and the country, it was a time of gathering optimism.
On the first page of the Cellar Book, he noted that he both bought and stored the wines (what Manhattan apartment would have space for nine hundred and eight bottles?) at “B+S”: Bates and Schoonmaker, the wine-importing firm co-owned by Frank Schoonmaker, who advised him on his purchases and made plenty of money in the process. On May 15, 1937, which, of course, I recognized as my father’s thirty-third birthday, “B+S” was replaced by “Sherry”: Sherry Wine and Spirits (later Sherry-Lehmann), the wine shop that Sam Aaron and his brother had taken over in 1934 from a Prohibition-era bootlegger. Sam had entered his life.
Another big day was October 1, 1938, when he bought fifty-six bottles. October again, just like his first splurge. Autumn was his favorite time of year. To nature lovers, the season of new beginnings is the spring, but to people who excel in school, it’s the fall. That fall my father felt flush, because he was four months into his job as emcee of Information Please, making $150 a broadcast, with the promise of $250 as soon as the show was commercially sponsored. (Canada Dry signed up the next month. By the early 1940s, when the sponsor was the American Tobacco Company, he was making $1,500.)
There was a gap in the Cellar Book between 1943 and 1948. His first marriage was falling apart.
Then, on October 1, 1948—true to his calendrical pattern—he had another big day. Not only did he buy eighty-seven bottles (from Sam), but they were all magnificent: one case each of Lafite Rothschild, Margaux, Mouton Rothschild, and Haut-Brion, all ’45; two cases of Volnay Clos des Ducs ’43; and three bottles of Clos de Vougeot ’43. He had met my mother.
In June, July, and August of 1950, he noted—under the heading “We drank:”—thirteen wines, almost all of them half bottles, a mix of red and white, grand and modest. My parents had married in February, and my father was t
eaching my mother about wine, being careful neither to press large quantities on her nor to assume she would prefer a Margaux to a Pouilly-Fuissé.
The last entry in the Cellar Book—a case of Poret Corton ’37—was dated October 3, 1950. My mother had just found out she was pregnant. On this go-round he had resolved to be a more attentive husband and father. He might have felt guilty if my mother had caught him fussily transcribing prices and writing “Quite pleasant but overpriced.”
The Cellar Book was a book with one reader. My father had written it; I was the only person who had ever read it. I was the only person who could read it. It was like a coded manuscript. I knew that B+S meant Bates and Schoonmaker. I knew the chronology of my father’s career and his personal milestones. I knew that all his life he preferred Bordeaux to Burgundies. I knew why the dollar signs mattered so much. I knew that some of the wines he tasted here, perhaps for the first time, returned at the most significant moments of his life: Latour at Kim’s twenty-first birthday party, Lafite Rothschild at his own eightieth. I could decipher his handwriting.
“I turn the pages of my Cellar Book,” he had written in the last paragraph of “Brief History of a Love Affair.” And that’s when he’d quoted T. S. Eliot: These fragments I have shored against my ruins.
These really were fragments: a jumble of torn, mismatched pages. But the Cellar Book was the least fragmentary thing he wrote. Many of his books went unfinished, but not this one. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. A whole book. The most serious book he ever wrote, the most heartfelt, the most honest. His other writing often buried what he most valued under layers of wit and irony and self-deprecation, but this did not.
My father enjoyed arranging books on his shelves and wines in their racks. “Merely to shelve a new book properly is pleasurable,” he wrote, “as filling a vacant space is. Similarly, to bin a case of wine—always alone, this is not a social pleasure—never fails to induce in me a succession of pleasurable thoughts, daydreams, images. A wine cellar, even one as small as mine, has a monastic quality; the fever and fret of the outside world can never penetrate to these tranquil life essences, living their careers of growing perfection behind translucent glass.” He liked thinking about a bottle waiting for decades in a hushed, dark place until a hand reached in, and the corkscrew did its work, and the wine came to life again, a life that had deepened while it bided its time. Opening the Cellar Book was like that.
My father stopped recording the wines he bought in 1950, but he did not stop drinking them. The WINE MEMORABILIA folder contained a list of the wines from his own cellar that he served on May 15, 1953—his forty-ninth birthday—at a small private dinner he and my mother hosted at a ritzy French restaurant called Maud Chez Elle. Their guests were the journalist Alistair Cooke and the publisher Donald Klopfer, who were named on the menu, and their wives, who weren’t. I thought that disgraceful until I remembered that at fifteen I’d addressed those letters from France to The Clifton Fadimans.
The wine list was a rough draft in my father’s handwriting. The blue-gray ink was fading, and the vintage of the champagne, a Moët et Chandon Cuvée Dom Pérignon, was hidden behind discolored tape. I was impressed by the geographic range of the wines: three French; one German, a Piesporter Goldtröpfchen feinste Auslese ’49; and one Hungarian, the dessert wine, an 1876 Tokay. (Like fortified wines, sweet wines can have very long lives.) I found out later that the Bonnes Mares ’23—a magnum—was the first-string choice to accompany the entrée, to be replaced by the alternate only if it hadn’t held up. It had. I wish it had proved unworthy. My mother was six months pregnant with me at the time, and in that casual obstetric era I doubt that she was discouraged from drinking wine. Bonnes Mares is a fine Burgundy, but I would have enjoyed thinking that I spent three months floating in amniotic fluid composed partly of the backup wine, Romanée-Conti ’33.
The Maud Chez Elle wine list, 1953
Tucked behind the wine list was a menu tied with a tasseled crimson cord. It must have been printed on very high-quality stock, since it was the only document in the WINE MEMORABILIA folder that wasn’t falling apart. The date was September 10, 1959. The venue was the “21” Club, a celebrity hangout that during its speakeasy days had hidden its wine in the cellar of the building next door, number 19, thus allowing its employees to deny truthfully that there was liquor on the premises. It had also been the venue of the 1958 Cigar Institute of America Ladies’ Smoker, at which my father had asserted that women were bad at conversation and knew nothing about wine. This, by contrast, was to be an all-male occasion, to which he invited six colleagues to celebrate his eighth anniversary as a columnist for Holiday magazine. It seemed to me that Holiday should have thrown the dinner for him, but perhaps it was better this way; if he’d been a guest, my father couldn’t have chosen the menu, which included eight courses and five wines, not to mention aperitifs, cocktails, and spirits.
Like the menu I’d calligraphed for Kim’s birthday, this one might have benefited from some proofreading (a compulsion in which my father and I both indulged reflexively and enjoyably, though he with greater skill). Whoever wrote it had drawn the accent over “Café” at the wrong angle and left the accents entirely off “Céleri,” “Rôti,” “Canapé,” “Crêpe,” and “Maître.” “Le Sorbet de Limon” was an unorthodox palate-cleanser, since in French “limon” means neither lemon nor lime; the diners had apparently been served Silt Sherbet. On the wine list, “Cellars” was misspelled.…
The “21” Club menu, 1959
Wait a second.
“Cellers of E. T. Gerry 1835.”
And on the line above it, “‘Hope’ Madeira.”
Oh my God, there’s my Madeira!
My father drank it with his oxtail soup.
I felt dizzy. I’d never thought about the contents of my bottle being consumed at a particular time or in a particular place. I’d never even pictured it having once been full. As I stared at the menu, my Madeira bottle, with its tobacco-colored pattern of sediment, sat on a shelf not ten feet away. I kept looking at the menu, and then at the bottle, and then at the menu and the bottle and the menu and the bottle.
The WINE MEMORABILIA folder contained one more item: “Remembrance of Drinks Past,” an article torn out of GQ. He had written it when he was eighty. I had never read it. A slightly different version, under a different title, was included in The New Joys of Wine, but although I had read the original Joys of Wine from cover to cover, I had assumed the later edition contained a few updates of interest only to—well, to people who really liked wine, and I’d stowed it under my bed, on top of its predecessor, since I had no shelf tall enough to accommodate them. “Remembrance of Drinks Past” recalled a quartet of what my father called “wine epiphanies.” The wines were the white Graves in Paris, the 1927 Cockburn port that had lifted his depression, the La Tâche ’49 he and my mother had drunk with Mortimer Adler, and the wines served at the dinner at “21.” Why did he keep the article in the folder after it had been published in a book? Not for himself. For the person who would find the menu from “21” after he was no longer around to explain it. It was like accompanying a photograph with a caption.
“I admit that I went all out,” wrote my father, “withdrawing from my modest”—yeah, right—“cellar the very finest wines I owned. The food was first-rate, but no Filet of Sole Marguery or Coq de Bruyère rôti sur canapé, even if superb, has the power to illuminate the memory twenty-five years afterward. Wine has.” He got all the accents right.
There was a description of the wine served with every course. For instance: “With the grouse was presented a magnum of Hospices de Beaune ’47—I think an Aloxe-Corton.” The assumption was that the reader, who of course was male and almost certainly not from Brooklyn, was on cozy terms with each part of that sentence: not only was he accustomed to eating grouse, but he knew that a magnum was a big bottle; that Hospices de Beaune was a fine Burgundy domaine whose annual charity auction was an important event in the
wine world; and that (but of course!) Aloxe-Corton, home to some of the Hospices vineyards, was a commune that produced the best reds in the Côte de Beaune.
Of my Madeira, my father wrote, “Though frail, it was still living at age 124, but you had to give it your close attention. It could sing only at piccolo pitch. Still, the notes were true.”
“Still, the notes were true.” Reading those words fifty years after he met the singer, I could tell how happy he had been when he wrote them. When he looked at the menu as an old man, it brought back everything: the food, the wine, the private dining room, the pride he took in being able to pay for such a dinner, the convergence of his life as a writer and his life as an oenophile, the conviviality that grew as the night continued and everyone had a little too much to drink but not enough to impair the quality of the conversation, some of which, I feel sure, was about the wines themselves.
My father may have felt like an outsider in many aspects of his life, but when he drank wine with friends, he always belonged. Unless he was with Frank Schoonmaker or Sam Aaron, he knew more about it than anyone else in the room. He was confident and playful and at ease with himself, the way one might be in the presence of a lover. As he had once written in a letter to an old friend, he never felt counterfeit when he was in love. He was in love with wine.
The folder seemed to glow with joy, as if the memory of my father’s pleasure was so strong as to render it faintly radioactive. Just as the menu had brought back the dinner at “21” to him, WINE MEMORABILIA brought him back to me. He occasionally appeared in my dreams, and they always made me glad, because they were the only time I got to see him. This felt something like that. As I stood in my study on that summer night, bending over the Encyclopædia Britannica bookcase, I remembered him more vividly than I had at any moment since his death.