The Noble Rot

       

On the way to the car I passed McSorley’s. I could’ve let it slide. Nothing would’ve pleased me more in fact, except maybe an ice cream cone with nuts and sprinkles. But I had to stick it in. It had to be.

        The door dinged open and shut. I gave the bottles the once over. The last time I was in a liquor store it was five, six years ago, buying champagne for my birthday. My wife Corrie was pregnant and I was trying to cut down. I got two magnums of the dry pink stuff and a pint of peach brandy. That left the ginger ale and raspberry sorbet. Two weeks later, cleaning blood off the rim of the toilet, the reflection of my face in the water turned to pond scum. There was nothing left worth talking about. I never drank or smoked again.

        Usually, I don’t give liquor stores a thought. Just like Memorial Day. Why would I put on the uniform and march with those flag waving idiots? They don’t have anything better to do on Sunday? It’s that old legionnaire’s disease, the poisonous nostalgia. Like I’m gonna put it on a bumper sticker what I did.    

        The experience of alcohol is different in a liquor store and a bar. Bars are hot,wet and loud. They smell of human ferment, kisses and smoke. You can eat pizza, peanuts, pickled pig’s feet and hard boiled eggs in a bar. In a bar, you can piss on the garbage, you can curse god, lie to your bookie, beat on your husband, cheat on your wife, double cross your partner. You can masturbate, dance with a best friend, weep or play checkers. You can’t do any of that in a liquor store cause a liquor store doesn’t smell. The air is dry and cold. You know nothing of the fruit. You can’t tell that the grain was mortified in a nunsbelly and resurrected into one of those squat round bottles. In a liquor store the plants have their kingdom of the dead: cactus, corn, and rye, potato, grape and sugar cane, arising out of particular and unique miasmas into volatile fraternity. Here the green becomes like emerald, the honey like amber; the clear and gold absorb and flash the light like hazel eyes and auburn hair, headlights in the rain.

        But a liquor store has its smell, of boxes and paper and swept wooden floors. Of old stock rooms and bills of lading. It’s the smell of commerce then, of other people’s money, of the middle man, the cut. Like a box of cigars and a fresh stack of newspapers.

        On the floor were the wine racks: just the basics. On the walls, shelves of booze. Your hard hitting popular brands of gin and scotch were stacked eye high. A little ‘a’ this and a little ‘a’ that and you’d be all set.

        A small, sharply dressed man greeted me.

        “Good day, monsieur,” he said. “You are looking for wine? Some Champagne perhaps?”

        “Well, what can you tell me about Chateau Yquem? You got any lying around?”

        “Oh, monsieur,” he said breathlessly, like I’d just beaten him to the top of the stairs, “Chateau Yquem is one of the finest Sauternes made. I keep what I have locked up, over here, in this case.”   He opened the case with a red key and started pointing to the bottles. “This is where I keep my most expensive bottles. Sauternes and Barsac produce intense wines. It must age for a long time in the bottle. Look. This one, it is fifteen years old. You can drink it now, if you like. In another ten, it will be ready. It will last fifty.”

        “A life time.”

        “It seems extreme. Nothing is quite like it. In this world, there are not many Sauternes. It’s special quality is the result of botrytis, a fungus that attacks the semillion grape late in the season. We call it the noble rot.”   He paused. I pondered the enormity of the two apposed words noble and rot. “Seasons with just a little of botrytis produce a flabby, sweet wine no one could drink. But when botrytis covers enough of the grapes the skins split and the sugars concentrate. In a good year, the yield is very small. You can imagine how many of these wrinkled jewels it takes to produce even one bottle.

        “In some places, a fortuitous, late season frost will produce similar results. These are called ice wines. Here, in Inania, some vineyards artificially freeze their vines in a typical Inanian attempt to shortcircuit the methods of tradition. But natural conditions, I am sure you will agree, can not be copied in a test tube.

        “The flavor of a classic Sauternes or Barsac is so concentrated, a small glass is sipped at the end of a meal, with your powerful cheeses, Roquefort, or with pate before. A half glass is all you need. With Yquem, each sip blossoms in a multitude of complex perfumes, different on the nose, the tongue and the throat. Coconut, mango, jasmine and pineapple wash over in turn, succeeded by a powerful, caramel depth and custardy finish. It is like, like the intoxication of spring, monsieur. There is nothing like it in this world, nothing.

        “Most people buy a half bottle and reserve it for a great occasion–a fiftieth anniversary, a seventieth birthday, like that.

        “One of the fine ice wines, or lesser Sauternes, while it cannot but suggest the complexity of a great one, can intimate to you what the experience is like, a pale reflection to be sure, but it is better to have seen the shadow than never to have seen it at all.”

        “Well, what’s it go for, a bottle like this?”

        “The half? Or the whole?”

        “Both.”

        “The half, one hundred and ninety dollars. The whole, about twice that. Yquem is the wine of millionaires. But over here, I have half bottles of very fine Sauternes and Barsacs for forty dollars. You get some cheese and some pate, a good bread and a nice lady friend and make yourself a good time.”

        “What if I wanted a case? Do you have that in stock?”

        He got very nervous. “Oh, monsieur,” he said shakily, “I am not a rich man. I could order one for you, but the risk of having such a thing, it makes my heart ache just to think of it.”

        “Does anyone ever order cases of wine like this?” I asked.

        “Big collectors, like that.”

        “But not a private guy.”

        “No no. Well, I have only one customer who orders like that. As a matter of fact, every year he buys a case of Yquem and a case of Latour Paulliac or some other Bordeaux. I select them myself. This year, he canceled his order. It was just in time too. If I had ordered it, what then? I have a small store.”

        “You wouldn’t keep it here?”

        “You are very curious, monsieur. You are becoming an oenophile?”

        “What’s it to you,” I said with some irritation.

        “I did not mean to suggest anything. But one has to be careful.”

        “Let it slide. I’m a detective.”

        “The police have already been here.”

        I felt a jolt and laughed. “This has nothing to do with crime,” I assured him. “I’ve got a client who collects wine. One of them is Yquem. She wants a place for safe keeping. It seemed a little strange to me.”

        He relaxed and smiled. “I keep wines like that in a warehouse, here in the city. My importer, Mr. Barker, is a nice man. We have a deal for storage. I can send my truck down any time.”   He looked around and dropped his voice. “That’s why the police were here. You know about those Slaughterhouse Five murders? It was above his floor. Maybe that place is not as safe as I thought, huh?”   He laughed from his gut. “Well, Detective, your client, she is either very rich, or very passionate about her palette. Yquem is not for everyone. But to the connoisseur, it is like nursing at Eve’s breast.”

        I thanked him and left. Botrytis, a fungus. Noble rot. To think a moldy grape could be worth so much. Rich people are nuts.