Fire in the Hole
It's easy to romanticize the life of a winery owner. We often imagine a flush wine baron kicking back in the villa as the bank account overflows.
And maybe that's true some of the time, but more often the owners have poured their hearts and life savings into their business and their bottles. These wines are their livelihood, the investment that puts food on the table.
Which is what makes the fire that destroyed a wine storage facility in Vallejo so devastating and heartbreaking. The supposedly indestructible vault held current releases as well as decades-spanning libraries for a number of large and small wineries. For many of the wineries that used the facility, their whole inventory is now gone and the coming year's budget looks bleak. There's nothing anyone can do about it: You can't rebuild wine.
I know some of the affected people personally, and I know of all the others. I wish them all the best in moving forward after this painful loss.
UPDATE: Carolyn says in the comments (thanks!) that there's an as-yet-disorganized effort among collectors to contribute some wines back to the affected wineries. While the current releases in the warehouse represented a huge financial loss, the library wines represented the history of the wineries, and for the producers had a value far greater than the market price. See her comment, and if you have any older wines from any of the wineries who used that storage facility, please consider offering some back to them. These are producers you obviously care about, and it would mean a lot to them.
Technorati tags: food & drink | wine | vallejo fire
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