San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
The bottles saved when fire threatened.
When wine is your livelihood, there are no easy choices
“Do we have room for any of the wine?”
It was early evening on Aug. 18 when my husband and I received a mandatory evacuation order due to the LNU Lightning Complex Fire. The cars were packed with our most important belongings, the cat was in her carrier, and the fire was still burning many miles away. So, knowing we weren’t in immediate danger, my husband and I headed for the wine cellar, set in the back of our landlord’s garage.
“The Brunello!” I exclaimed, thinking first of the bottle we’d purchased on our honeymoon to Italy three years earlier. We had planned to open it on a milestone anniversary.
Swiftly and efficiently, we began to pull bottles that I, a wine writer, and my husband, a winemaker, had collected together on trips to Germany, New Zealand, South Africa and Italy. Not only did these bottles carry the most sentimental value in our cellar ( especially those my husband brought back from harvests abroad), but we also knew they’d be the hardest to replace. Many were picked up from small producers with little or no distribution in the United States.
Next, we shifted gears to our most valuable bottles based on price, age and exclusivity. I’m not talking grand cru Burgundy or firstgrowth Bordeaux, which cost hundreds to even thousands of dollars a bottle. ( If we had those, the selection process would have been slightly different.) We did, however, have several cases of pricey, highend Napa Cabernets, yet only room for a choice few. We started with the oldest bottle in our cellar: a 1975 Georges de Latour from the historic Beaulieu Vineyard in Rutherford.
Working at what felt like warp speed, one of us would shout out a label and the other would respond with a curt “yes” or “no.” There was no time for debate or discussion, and we mostly agreed. The third and final selection round was based on bottles we’d bought recently, many from a summer road trip to Oregon and Washington, and weren’t ready to part with so soon.
In the end, we were in the cellar for about 10 minutes and drove away with three cases of wine — leaving roughly 200 bottles behind.
When we returned eight days later, our home safe and evacuation orders lifted, the wines we’d taken with us stayed at my inlaws’ place. There were still two months of fire season to go.
Almost exactly one month later, we were jolted awake at 4 a. m. to a neighbor banging on our door, yelling “fire!” The sky was an apocalyptic orange, and we could see flames about a halfmile from our house.
This time, we had to act fast. We grabbed the cat, a few irreplaceable belongings, a small bag of clothes each and fled. Less than 48 hours later, we received the devastating news: Our home, and those of many of our neighbors in Napa’s Deer Park, had been reduced to rubble in the Glass Fire.
In the days and weeks since, we’ve desperately searched for silver linings. We’re fortunate to have renter’s insurance, and we joke that this will be the easiest move we’ve ever done. And at least we still have those three cases of wine.
When I inventoried our hasty selections from the first evacuation, I realized they paralleled the items we saved the next time fire bore down. The first things we grabbed were sentimental and irreplaceable — photos, paintings, scrapbooks and wedding memorabilia. Like some of our most expensive bottles, we also managed to take a few valuables, like computers and jewelry. The last thing I threw together was a carryon suitcase of clothes, discovering later it was mostly filled with items purchased in the last month. They weren’t particularly practical outfits, but similar to the bottles from our summer road trip, I was reluctant to lose them before popping the tags.
Both evacuations have left us with some regrets. Randomly, we will remember something important we left behind, like my grandfather’s film camera or the love letters my husband and I wrote to each other early in our relationship. Looking through my husband’s cellar app, we have a short list of treasured bottles that got away, too.
So far, the three cases of wine we saved remain untouched. Despite the temptation to drink them, these bottles have skyrocketed in emotional value. They’re the survivors of an important chapter of our lives that’s now a big pile of ash and memories — ones we’ll clink glasses to on 36 future occasions, like this Thanksgiving, when we’ll open the S. A. Prum Riesling from a 2018 trip to Germany in our new place and drink to the beginning of new chapters.