Happy Anniversary to us

The house was in an older urban neighborhood, the sort of place where you’re more likely to find rusty cars littering the backyard than bottles of fine wine stowed in a cellar. We walked through a peeling white painted wooden archway into the back garden, which evidently used to be a green thumb’s pride and joy but now was overcrowded with towering weeds and an undergrowth of neglect, and knocked on the back door.

A short, rotund woman, a cross between one of the Oompa Loompas and Violet Beauregarde in her blueberry phase on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, answered our knock. “Come in,” the woman said in her peculiar East Tennessee accent, turning to lead the way through a kitchen in an extreme state of disrepair and a hallway littered with items for sale. “The wine rack’s in here.”

Though the house was in terrible disarray, its good bones shone through the clutter and outdated furnishings. Dark oak floors in need of refinishing hid under stacks of pictures and ugly sofas and chairs; a glass-tiled fireplace in the front bedroom promised nights of warmth if a chimney sweep would just clean it out. The wine rack stood in this room, made of unfinished pine and resting against a dark-toned wall stark and clean amid the dirt and mess of the house.

Several rows were still filled with bottles of wine and bubbly. “Does the wine come with the rack?” I joked, imagining from the layers of dust and the general look of the house that the bottles were full of cheap wine were meant to be drunk a decade ago.

“Sure, I’ll throw one in,” the woman replied.

I still couldn’t swallow the idea that this woman was a wine drinker when we went home to get the car, having agreed upon a price of $20 for the rack. We had learned quickly upon moving to East Tennessee that there are few people between the extremes of non-drinking Baptists and always-drinking beer and whiskey lovers. This woman, this house…the wine and the rack belonged about as well as Yankee cheerleaders at a Southern Civil War reenactment.

I sent Derek to get the rack, figuring there was no reason for me to be there to pick out a bottle. Whatever is on that rack isn’t worth much, I thought. How could it be, covered with dust in a junky old house in serious need of some TLC or a razing party?

“You can have anything but the Asti Spumante,” the woman told Derek as they worked together to remove the bottles from the rack. He suppressed a smile, knowing I would rather he brought home nothing than an Asti Spumante, a sweet, light sparkler best for those with a palate too underdeveloped to enjoy drier, yeastier wines with subtle fruit undertones.

As they piled bottles in a spare corner, the woman told Derek that her friend, an older gentleman who lived in the house, had died, and she was up from Maryville (Mrvll, as they pronounce it around here, quickly and without syllables) to clean the place out. “Do you want anything else?” she asked hopefully, gesturing around the crowded room at other furnishings for sale.

“No, thanks—just the rack,” Derek said. He told her about the built-in cabinet in the dining room of our 1900 craftsman-style house that was to house my grandmother’s china. “Now we need a spot for my wife’s wine,” he explained.

When Derek arrived home with a bottle and the rack, I inspected the bottle first. It was sticky with dust, but when I wiped off the grime I discovered he’d brought home a 1999 Schramsberg J. Schram sparkling blend from California, a cellar-worthy wine that retails for around $90.

Suddenly the old man who lived there was a much more interesting character. It’s easy to stereotype someone: old man, old neighborhood, old house in a city with Appalachian roots. Not much money, not much class. Clearly he had taste, a palate as refined as any urban wine connoisseur: Derek told me there was at least a case of this particular bubbly on the rack. Did he drink it by himself, or was he waiting for a special occasion? With only a friend (from a city half an hour away, no less) around to clean out his belongings, I wonder whether he had anyone in his life who would have enjoyed such a fine wine with him.

A sommelier once told me that our perception of how good a certain wine is has a lot to do with the occasion itself. We instinctively perceive value and taste in a wine, however inexpensive, served in good company.

I’ll never know how the old man drank his—alone in his crumbling house next to the fireplace, sitting on a peeling painted bench in the weed-infested garden, or surrounded by friends and family who took just as much pleasure in a rich, nuanced bubbly as he did.

Derek and I saved our special bottle for our seventh wedding anniversary. I had no expectations of its quality—who knows what the storage conditions were all these years? We were pleasantly surprised. The wine was a medium straw color with small, exquisite bubbles climbing the sides. I breathed in the aroma of crisp green apples and ripe pears, and tasted the creamy, yeasty, tropical flavors that swirled around my tongue before ending with a long, creamy finish.

We toasted our seven years together and our great find on Craigslist. And in my heart, I toasted the old man in the old house in the old neighborhood who collected ageworthy sparkling wine in spite of my stereotyping.

P.S. Today is our 8th anniversary. We don’t have nearly as nice a bottle to celebrate with, but we ourselves are better aged than ever.