In this entry to our 2024 wine writing competition, wine exporter Tom Fox writes about a fortuitous wine donation. See the guide to our competition for more.
Tom Fox writes I’ve worked in the wine business since 2004, first in a London fine wine merchant, then at a UK importer and brand creator, and in 2015 I moved to Italy to head up exports at the Allegrini Group, before founding my own export office in 2021. I currently look after the export markets for 10 premium wineries: 9 Italian and one Austria. I live in Verona with my wife, dog and two children.
A Chance Inheritance
This year marks a personal milestone: twenty years in the wine business, and twenty years in which wine has given me an extraordinary wealth of experiences, relationships and unforgettable moments, and has taken me to some extraordinary places: the Andes, the Spanish meseta, the Cape winelands, not to mention Italy, where it brought me to live and raise my family. Building brands around the world has led me from a vertiginous vertical tasting of Riserva Amarone on the 140th floor of the Burj al-Khalifa, a swaying that had nothing to do with high alcohol content, to floating in the South China Sea with glasses of Brunello handed down from a Junk, to a wind-buffeted landing on a wartime airstrip on the Faroes in February. But it could have been so different.
In 2004 I was doing work experience for a minor publishing house in preparation for a great editorial career. Or even a mediocre one. And for a little ready money, I got Saturday job in a wine merchant in the smart West London area of Parson’s Green.
By early 2005, I had already ditched the editorial dreams: not because the world of publishing had lost its allure, but because I was starting to enjoy myself: great Bordeaux and Burgundies constantly on tasting, a well-off clientele who loved to come in and chat about wine and didn’t mind being upsold, and my horizons and knowledge were developing rapidly.
And then, when my mind and sensibilities were at their ripest, it happened. The moment. A customer appeared in the door one evening. He didn’t even come in, as I recall, but called to us from the doorstep.
‘Would you be interested in some old wines?’
It was the kind of request we received often. We’d look at the list, make a valuation, and see if they wanted to sell. We’d then sell it on.
‘Uh, yes sure. Do you have a list of the wines? Then we can make you a proposal.’
‘No, I don’t want any money,’ he said. ‘I mean, do you want the wines? You see, my father’s run off with another woman and I’m clearing out his stuff. I’ve got a cellar full of wine already, but I want these bottles to go to a good home.’
Scepticism crept into our response. Good wines don’t tend to fall into laps without some sort of exchange. Besides, the story seemed a bit thin. The man in the doorway was well into his fifties. Not the kind of age where one’s father runs off with other women, it seemed to me.
‘If you’ve got a list of the wines,’ said Dickie, recovering better than me, ‘we can have a look and come to some kind of arrangement.’
The man, who was clearly in a bit of hurry, looked around and started doing up his Barbour jacket.
‘Look, I’ll bring you a list next week.’ And off he went, into the night.
When he did come back, and it was several weeks later, it wasn’t with a list, but with four overfilled wooden wine boxes. Dusty half-bottles and worse-for-wear magnums stuck out all over the place, haphazardly stuffed in together.
‘Here you go,’ he said. ‘Should be something half decent in there. And really, don’t bother about payment. See what you like the look of and enjoy. You won’t be able to sell them, I don’t suppose, half the labels are missing.’
Our hearts sunk at this. Unlabelled old bottles. It could be anything.
Our benefactor had been exaggerating. Most of the labels were either intact or easily discernible. Those that weren’t still gave us something to go on, and Dickie and I spent many a happy hour engaged on the most enjoyable sort of detective work imaginable, piecing together from the remnants, the Chateau (for it was mostly Bordeaux) and the vintage, based sometimes on the tiniest scraps.
The oldest was a bottle of Perrier-Jouet Champagne from the 1920s, the most recent a Mouton Rothschild 1978. The man was right about two things, both of which made us very happy: there was indeed something decent in here. And, no, we couldn’t in good conscience sell these wines. For one thing, what value could we ascribe to them? There was no provenance, and sometimes the merest scrap of a label. It would have needed a lot of trust. And lots of the bottles were half-bottles: not as good for ageing as their larger siblings. In the end we did the only sensible thing. We divided the entire lot into three separate piles. And we planned three dinner parties, just us two and our sommelier colleague Max, each taking a turn to host and cook a meal fit for this astonishing inheritance that we had so suddenly come into.
It was perhaps the ancient Champagne that lingers longest in the memory: a richness and creaminess hardly anticipated, briefly, wonderfully perfect, before flittering off into the acid afterlife of an over-aged wine. It really was a mere moment, and we learned from that: if the wine is still good, drink it fast. Enjoy, but don’t tarry. Don’t decant. Several bottles hadn’t made it: a ‘50s Latour, a Lafite from an unfashionable ‘60s vintage; but plenty had: a Cheval Blanc 1950 in half-bottle, the Mouton, a Gruaud Larose 1970… The first evening passed in a haze of otherworldly pleasure, and the second and the third…and lesser stars delighted too: an Eiswein from a now defunct Mosel trader, a Calon-Segur of uncertain (but great) age, an ambrosial Meursault.
Wine, I realised on those evenings, is a gift. To understand it a little, and to work with it, likewise. Twenty years later, at a crossroads in my career, I look back at those evenings, at the strange appearance of the man in the doorway, the extraordinary story he told and his even more extraordinary generosity. And I wonder, what has wine in store for me next?
Image by Constantine Johnny via Getty Images.