Wine Stories...

For our 5th wedding anniversary, Jimmy bought me 20 bottles of red wines from our wedding year, with the intent that we would drink one per year on our anniversary. The wine store sales clerk helped him to choose wines that could age over 20 years. When we moved overseas, we left the stash of wine behind at Steve and Carolyn’s in North Carolina. When they downsized a few years ago, they shipped the wines to Dad and Ann’s house. 

I figured it was time to finish off those wines—those that hadn’t gone very obviously bad that is. Leigh and Rich joined us for a pizza dinner one night and humored me by drinking a few of what might have once been great but were now just mediocre wines.

There were two additional bizarre wine experiences. The first was drinking this old Marilyn Monroe wine bought by Dad’s younger sister, who died several years earlier. It was pretty decent, but then I don’t have high standards and I love Marilyn movies.

More interestingly was coming across this old bottle of wine. On September 16, 1995, Jimmy and I were the witnesses for Sharon and Brett’s elopement in Idyllwild, California, in undoubtedly the most romantic wedding we’d ever attended other than ours. The following day, we took a long hike, during which Jimmy thought it would be fun to bury a bottle of wine in the forest for us to dig up years later. 

We all wrote messages on the label. I wrote: Opee made me do this. Of course, this predated smart phones and portable GPS, so how we could ever find the spot again was a mystery to me.

There were two important things that we didn’t take into consideration. One was that there was no soil; it was just solid rock. We made multiple stops for Jimmy to use his spade, but it was useless so we brought the bottle back to San Diego. I don’t remember why we didn’t just give it to Sharon and Brett. Instead that bottle moved with us to North Carolina, got left behind with our friends and then shipped to Dad’s. After storing it for over 25 years, the cork had completely rotted and the contents spilled. The second thing we learned is that a $9.99 bottle of wine can’t be stored for that long. Sadly, Sharon and Brett had planned to visit us in Holland to celebrate their 25th anniversary, but COVID derailed those plans.