Bought to bottle the good times

Jean-Marie, a family friend, had just that morning sung the praises of the viognier grapes of Condrieu, a village only a short detour on the route back to Paris from his home in the countryside. So my wife, Julie, and I left the highway to follow back roads and drove up and up through the damp-dark August day. Vines were full of fattening grapes but fatter clouds squatted above the fields. Inside the chateau of an otherwise quiet vineyard, a clerk detailed the viognier wines he had for sale. I chose a recent vintage.

"Une bouteille," I said.

Only one bottle, the clerk asked? Yes, only one.

I have been buying single bottles when traveling for more than a decade, hoping to capture in the corked container another kind of moment to carry forward. Like memories of leisurely meals with Jean-Marie and his wife, Helene, the wine would evolve.

A way to remember friends

More often than at vineyards, I buy in shops, such as the cramped convenience store on a side street in an older neighborhood of Barcelona. The store sold everything from tissue to canned beans, but I was drawn toward the back, and shelves of wine, including a bottle of 1997 Priorat.

This was before wines from Priorat, a region of arid fields northwest of Tarragona, became international favorites. The bottle cost, I think, $12, a small price to pay to remember the day before, when 12 friends gathered around a table at a rural restaurant near the town of Valls to share in a calgotada. That annual celebration centers around calgots, a kind of giant scallion charred over an open fire and served with a strong sauce made of almonds, garlic, tomato and olive oil. Then come grilled pork sausages and lamb chops.

Buying the Priorat to carry back to the United States, then, was an attempt to bottle the intimacy of friendship in the hopes that it would last through time.

That time is often not long. An $8 bottle of Chilean merlot, for example, lasted only two seasons. I first tasted the wine soon after a friend and I arrived in Santiago on a red-eye flight from Dallas. By noon, we had made the drive into the Andes to the cottage of another friend. He lit a fire for the day's first asado, and opened the bottle of merlot that -- no doubt aided by the trellis of vines blocking the sun, the scent of grilling meat, and the pace of idle conversation -- was strong and sublime.

I bought a bottle of it at a gas station near the end of the trip. On the shores of Lake Huron in northern Michigan, I shared the merlot with my wife and parents on another sunlit afternoon.

Buying began in Burgundy

This buying of a meaningful bottle began, as best I recall, in the hamlet of Orches in Burgundy. We had turned off the highway after dark and searched the hills for a bed-and-breakfast, finally coming to rest at the home of the family Rocault. They welcomed us despite the late hour, and in the morning we learned their ancestors began farming in the region in 1470, which seemed worthy of a purchase of not one, but two bottles: a simple table chardonnay and a finer Saint-Aubin 1er Cru En Remilly. The first bottle was gone in days; the other lasted years.

One by one, though, I have uncorked these moments. The Torre Muga, at 12 years old, was a spontaneous choice to serve on a summer evening as steak spat above a hot grill, and conversation made a memory of its own. A nine-year-old Chateauneuf-du-Pape was an offering to a friend who welcomed us at his family's home.

Now I have only one bottle left. It is called Cesari, a prized creation made by Saverio Petrilli, winemaker at Tenuta di Valgiano, a vineyard in the hills north of Lucca, Italy. It is already 10 years old, but will improve more over the next decade.

Saverio promised as much when he gave me the bottle as thanks for some weeks of work I did at the winery in 2001. Monday through Friday, from 7 a.m. until noon, I joined others among the sangiovese vines. It was July, so grapes were taut in the hot sun, and we were clearing weeds from the base of the vines.

Many days, Saverio would host lunch on a shaded patio, serving a bowl of fresh mozzarella di bufala one day, plates of tagliatelle al limone another. Always, there was wine.