Starting Over
After cracking the second maderized bottle from my wine closet, I knew I was in big trouble.
We had moved into our house in November of 2024 when everything was cool and temperate, so the closets felt like a safe space to store some cases. The following summer had been warm, but I hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary when getting a bottle out of storage. Yet, when the fuse to our A/C burnt out in the middle of last week’s heat wave, I should have been more vigilant. The entire house was warm, but it didn’t dawn on me that certain closets in the house might be extremely warm compared to the larger open spaces with the central cooling now kaput.
Like the fable of a frog in boiling water, the gradual heating of my environment lulled me into a false sense of security. By the time I finished opening the first case of bottles, I had already Facetimed a few of my industry colleagues to examine the color and talk about the potential for greater damage. My friend Jeff Garneau reminded me about a customer from our retail days who had infamously driven over to Redwood City on a hot summer day and picked up $10,000 worth of wine, but carried it back north in his trunk rather than the air-conditioned interior of his car. He called the store yelling and screaming about leakage and damage, as if we had anything to do with it. In his frustration, he wanted someone else to blame for his loss.
If you didn’t already know, transporting wine in the 100+ degree heat of a hot trunk for a few hours is more than enough time to maderize your entire collection. As it turned out, two days in an overly warm closet was enough to do the same to mine. Having worked in the wine industry for almost twenty years, I’m well aware of how cellar temperatures affect wine over the course of long term aging. That being said, wine is often a lot tougher than we give it credit for and, unless you’re planning to put it down for decades, you don’t necessarily have to handle it with kid gloves. As someone who doesn’t age wine for more than a few years in most cases, I’ve never had an issue with any of my bottles up until now.
But there’s a first time for everything and my lesson was unfortunately quite an expensive one. I store wine in various spots throughout the house, but that particular closet held the majority of my bottles and—by far—the most expensive ones. Out of sheer embarrassment, I won’t share the financial loss here, but it’s a rough number. My wine club allocations alone are enough to bring a tear to my eye, let alone all the Bordeaux I’ve compiled over the years, but as someone who rolls with the punches fairly well these days, there’s a somewhat prophetic element interwoven here.
A few weeks ago, I decided to reach out to some of the natural/low-intervention winemakers in Burgundy, whose wines I’ve been enjoying tremendously all summer. To my surprise, one of them invited me out to Beaune for the 2026 harvest, asking if I’d like to help out and maybe create some media for their wine label while I’m there. Given how excited I’ve recently been about low-intervention Burgundy, and the future of sustainable wines in general, I accepted without even thinking about it. A few days later, I bought my ticket and booked my hotel.
Since that moment, I’ve almost completely forgotten about the ten cases of wine stored in my makeshift cellar (clearly to a fault). The only bottles I’ve wanted to open lately have been new wave Burgundy or Burgundy-adjacent wines, using minimal sulfur in production, from younger, forward-thinking producers. How could I even think about opening an old Bordeaux when there’s so much incredible natural pinot noir and chardonnay to explore and enjoy?!
Over the past few weeks, I’ve used music analogies to express how I feel to colleagues and friends. “It’s like going back and listening to Bon Jovi after you’ve just heard Straight Outta Compton for the first time,” I told one person. How are we supposed to be excited for the past when what’s coming out of the present is so much more vivid and vibrant? So much more raw and real!
Hence, when I look at the cost of the investment that recently perished in my closet. I cringe. But when I think about the psychological effect, I’m far less bothered. It’s almost as if the summer sun came to my house, crashed my A/C, and said: “Move on, David.”
And so I will. Burgundy 2026 starts next week.
-David Driscoll