It’s only now that I can tell this story. Time has passed. Therapy has helped.
There are moments in a wine lover’s life that test one’s character. This one of them.
It was a year ago, the day before Valentine’s. We had just got back from a trip to the coast the day before and were getting back into the swing of things. I was upstairs enjoying a cup of tea and plowing through the inevitable accumulation of emails that follows any absence when I suddenly heard that sound that no one with a wine cellar ever wants to hear.
CRASH!
It took only a nanosecond for me to identify the noise. Not a falling book. No.
Crash!
I bolted down the stairs. Halfway down the stairs another explosion went off.
Crash, crash!
The scene was a grim one. As soon as I saw what had happened, the horror and the carnage, I raced over to hold up a rack leaning at a treacherous angle like a drunk at last call, with one hand whilst with the other I pushed back bottles that were teetering on the edge of certain demise. My wife came running in and I shouted at her to put shoes on before getting any closer. There are few things more unforgiving than a floor slick with wine and shards of glass.
Bottles had plummeted from above, crashing onto unsuspecting bottles below. Red and white wine ran together amongst broken glass bottles.
Her instinct was to clean. Sensible. Rational. Entirely wrong. This was triage. Rescue first, mop later. With admirable composure, she began removing the endangered bottles one at a time, ensuring that no sudden movement would trigger further losses. Bottle by bottle, they were relocated to the refuge of floor and counter. It was painstaking work, performed with the concentration of bomb technician – albeit in a more aromatic environment.
Only once the last precious bottle was secured did we turn to the debris.
We did not cry. We are not amateurs. But there was a silence heavy with calculation: retail value, replacement costs, memories attached to labels now reduced to burgundy-tinted shrapnel. We both showed a lot of fortitude keeping to the task at hand and not shedding tears in the process. After all, this wasn’t milk, it was wine!
Once the mission was complete, the broken shards of glass gingerly picked up and removed, the wine mopped up, and the tiny pieces of glass swept up, and then dust-like particles vacuumed up, and the damage assessed, things were not as bad as they could have been. As the old adage goes, things can always be worse. I was so thankful that this hadn’t happened while we were away. The chain reaction would have gone unchecked, a slow-motion massacre echoing in an empty house.
Once all the wine had been removed from the top section, the cause was clear. Despite all being good for five years, while the screws holding the upper rack were long, they were pathetically thin. Years of accumulated bottles had finally overwhelmed their cowardly spines. They pulled free and fled the scene.
I drove to the hardware store in a state of grim determination. Bigger screws. Heavy metal strapping. If gravity wanted another fight, it would have to bring artillery.
The cellar, thus fortified, is now secure. Short of major seismic activity or thermonuclear intervention, I am confident it will hold.
(All photos – Sam Hauck)