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The big advantage of driving an Excursion (or any SUV) is that it's big and it’s easy to haul lots of stuff around. The disadvantage is that it’s big and my friends think it’s easy for me to haul all of THEIR stuff around. Like Naomi and Ramon. They're getting divorced and Chet and I are friends (well, we like Naomi but hang out with Ramon because of business) with both of them and last weekend we kind of got ourselves volunteered to help Ramon move his half of the wine cellar to a locker. It's kind of a long story, but I've got a Wine Column to fill out somehow. So let me begin!
Chet used to work with Ramon, back before Ramon got the cushy
dot.com VP job with the reserved SUV hangar and the corner cubicle with a view of the company meditation pool. In fact, Chet knew him back before Ramon was even "Ramon", because at one time he was just plain old Raymond but he realized that Stanford’s MBA University didn't give scholarships to people named Raymond with average GPAs but that he might get in if he was a "Ramon who is 1/8th Gypsy" (and could provide papers proving that his grandmother on his father's side really was a Gypsy)(which was the downtrodden minority de jour for the admission panel in Palo Alto). It also impressed the girls at parties and by his senior year, he'd landed Naomi, former Clam Queen of Pismo Beach. She normally fell for surfer dudes but the idea of a Gypsy (even 1/8th of one was kind of racy) was enough to send her head over heels. And I don’t mind saying that she didn't use her head and fell in love with a heel but if she hadn't, I'd probably be writing about what sort of wine goes with tahini and patchouli oil.
Anyhow, once he hit the big time, all the dot.com money went right to Ramon's head and he started to collect wine because it was a classy thing to do. He collected with a vengeance (just like Bruce Willis), and with same the ravenous, Machiavellian attitude that relentlessly drove him to become the fiercest customer service manager in the entire dot.com industry. Money was no object when it came to his diversion, as long as the wine was reasonably impossibly hard to get and had received a whole lot of points from the critics. Naomi began to see less and less of him as he traveled to wine conventions like ZAP or the IPNC (which has always sounded to me like what someone says after they've been examined by the urologist AND the optometrist the same afternoon). Ramon eventually converted a wing of the house into a huge wine cellar. Okay, so it wasn't exactly an underground cellar but he had glow-in-the dark stalagmites (or were they stalactites? I always get them mixed up...whatever, they were the hangy-down things, not the stand-up-from-the-middle-of-the-floor thingys). He attended all the big Wine Spectator conventions and it seemed like he had a wine dinner at some fancy restaurant just about every night of the week.
We (mistakenly, as it turned out) assumed that when he wasn't wining, he was working, trying to make more money to buy more wine. However, unbeknownst to his friends he met a goldigging bimbo home wrecker (her name was Barbi or Tammi or Debbi or some other “cute” name with a little heart dotting the i at the end) who worked in the wine department at the SF Neiman-Marcus store. It eventually became the talk of the Aesthetorium (that's the name of the salon where we get our aromatherapy and pedicures) that his attention had strayed from the "love, honor and obey" vows that Chet and I hold near and dear to our (ent-wined)(pardon the expression) hearts and he booked passage on the Wine Train to bachelorhood. Maybe it was a mid-life crisis kind of deal (although he's only thirty so maybe he's not planning to live all that long anyway), or maybe he just wanted to change to a younger partner (Naomi is 31, Bambi/Tammi/Debbi is 29) so it came as no great surprise to our crowd when Naomi and Ramon announced that they’d decided to to divorce.
Since they were both broke hippy-dippy students when they got married, there was no pre-nuptual agreement so the California community property law kicked in here. So maybe Naomi doesn't know nearly as much about wine as moi, but she's one smart cookie when it comes to things of a more practical nature. Ramon decided to move his love nest to the Napa Valley and commute each day to his job in Cupertino. Naomi kept the house and of course, Ramon figured that HE'd keep the wine collection and just write her a check for half of the total value. Wrong-O, cabernet breath! That's where Naomi got him!
Over the last month or so, Naomi and I have been hanging out
together and we've been talking a lot about how men are animals and
obsessive collectors and just kind of all-around jerks. She knew that he valued his wine collection more than just about anything else (and obviously more than he did her), so what better way to cut him off at the knees (or maybe a little higher) than to keep half of it for herself? He was kind of dumbfounded when he heard about it from her lawyer but he dutifully sent an inventory off to winebid.com, telling them that he wanted to auction off the whole thing (he really didn't, but that way he got it appraised it for free, the cheap bastard). Meantime, Naomi’s divorce attorney called the manager of the wine department at the local Cost Plus store (they have a tremendous selection of world class wines) and he came over and inventoried and appraised each bottle, according to the prices listed on winecommune.com and catalogs from the Marin Wine Company and 20-20 in Los Angeles (the highest prices were the ones he used). Then he cross-referenced the prices with the point scores in Wine Spectator, Wine Advocate and Wine Enthusiast (whichever was higher) and then divided the collection for Naomi. One bottle for her, one for Ramon. Then the Cost Plus wine guy divvied up the orphan bottles according to the
prices so everything worked out just about even financially.
It took Ramon a couple of weeks to track down storage space for his wine. His Napa Valley lovenest is actually more like a fancy condo than an estate home and it doesn't have a cellar. Most of the wine storage places in Silicon Valley realized that they could make okay money renting wine storage lockers to new dot/com gazillionaires who wanted to collect wine but didn’t have anyplace to live but then the storage places figured (and rightly so) that dot.com startups would pay a whole lot more for the same space and they didn't need to blow big bucks on silly things like air conditioning. So Ramon would drop by the house every day or two to fondle the bottles and move them around and dream about what they'll taste like when they are mature. His wine had been moved to one side of the cellar and Naomi's to the other, to make the division easier (when he finally got a wine locker).
So, up until last weekend (when Chet and I helped him move his wine out of the cellar) Naomi and I spent a number of evenings enjoying a bottle (or seven) of HER wines every night. It's been fun drinking expensive, nearly impossible to find wines on a regular basis but it's been more fun leaving corks and empty (or half-empty) bottles around where he can see them. We opened bottles that Ramon told us weren't ready to drink and bottles that he'd told us that nobody anywhere (especially Naomi) was worthy of drinking. But you know, he was wrong. 1945 Mouton was kind of sweet, in a moist foresty sort
of way. 1966 La Tache was a different kind of Pinot Noir than I usually drink...it was real delicate and didn't have much oak flavor at all. In fact, we thought that it might be a bad bottle so we popped another but it was just the same. And you should have seen the look on Ramon's face when he saw them there on the kitchen table! It was priceless. It was similar to the look he had the day after Naomi invited a bunch of us over from the pilates class to a blind tasting of the 1990 Guigal La Landonne, La Mouline and La Turque alongside the 1990 Chave Hermitage, 1990 Chave Cuvee Cathelin, 1990 Jaboulet La Chapelle, 1990 Latour, 1990 Grange and 1990 Caymus Special Select. We put them in brown paper bags but realized that some of the bottle sizes and shapes would give their identity away so we poured them all into water jugs, vases, milk cartons and whatever else was handy around the house. The only problem was that we forgot to write down which wine was in which container so we couldn't figure out much more than they were all red wines and they all tasted really, really good and we had a lot of fun. And Naomi had to call the paramedics the next day when Ramon came over the next day and saw what we'd had to drink. We should have done one of those credit card commercials. You know the ones: "1997 Bryant Family Cabernet....$1100. 1994 Screaming Eagle Cabernet...$1400. 1997 Duck Muck Shiraz...$1200... the sight of your soon-to-be-ex husband fainting when he realizes that you used all three bottles to marinate pork chops for the Cub Scout potluck..PRICELESS!!!!"
It had to come to an end sometime, and that time was last Saturday when Ramon got all of his friends (there were about five) to help him move his wine into storage (he found a place in Oakland). So the guys brought their SUV's over to Naomi's place and it looked kind of like funeral procession. What's up with black SUV's anyway? They look cool but the way they were lined up for loading the wine, it looked like some sort of mass funeral, like those people in San Diego a couple of years ago who thought they were going to get beamed up into the comet. Only there was no beaming up last weekend, just putting wine in boxes and putting it in the back of the Explorer (or Excursion or Navigator or Grand Cherokee). One guy drove his mini-van over but the guys all laughed at him so he drove home in shame but returned in his Porsche Boxter so they loaded him up with half-bottles. Overall, the move itself went okay, the only casualties being a couple of half-bottles of 1975 d'Yquem that got overheated in the trunk (which is actually in the front) when the Boxster got struck in traffic on the Bayshore Freeway. The corks got all pushed out and the wine sploshed out all over the inside of the car, soaking the owner's manual and the roadside repair kit (which in a Boxter consists of a cel phone and a Auto Club tow number)(like any of those guys are going to repair their own car)(right).
In conclusion, I think it did the men good to see the folly of
Ramon's restlessness and his wine obsession (not to mention his long
commute from Napa every day). Pride goeth before the fall as they say (in this case it was the Pride Reserve that wenteth before the Grace and Le Pin) and he sure did fall good and hard. I think that maybe they realize now that they should appreciate what they have and avail themselves of it now (be it a wife or wine), and not save everything for a rainy day. Or next week's bimbette.That's all from this (wine) Garden of Eden.
Eden
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