The Night Châteauneuf-du-Pape Saved My Ass
I was working estate cleanouts that summer. Real bottom-feeder work – going into dead people’s houses and hauling out everything their families didn’t want to deal with. Most of it was garage sale garbage: broken furniture, moldy books, clothes that smelled like mothballs and regret. But sometimes, if you knew what to look for, you’d find something worth keeping. The house belonged to some old French professor who’d croaked in his sleep. Lucky bastard. His nephew hired our crew to clear the place out before the estate sale. “Just get rid of everything,” he said, like he was talking about taking out the trash. Rich kids, man. They inherit the world and treat it like a burden. That’s where I found the wine. I was cleaning out the basement – damp, spider-infested hell that hadn’t seen sunlight since the Eisenhower administration. Behind a stack of moldy academic journals, there was this wine rack. Most of the bottles were covered in dust and disappointment, labels peeling off like old scabs. But one bottle caught my eye. Châteauneuf-du-Pape. 1998. Heavy as a brick and twice as expensive. Now, I’m not a wine guy. Never pretended to be. Give me bourbon or beer, something honest that doesn’t require a degree in French literature to appreciate. But I knew enough to know this bottle was worth more than I made in a month hauling dead people’s dreams to the dumpster. The smart thing would have been to slip it in my jacket and walk away. Hell, the nephew would never know it existed. But something about that bottle bothered me. Maybe it was the weight of it, solid and serious in my hands. Maybe it was thinking about the old professor, saving this thing for some special occasion that never came. So I bought it. Told the nephew I found it and offered him fifty bucks. He looked at me like I’d just offered to buy his grandmother’s dentures. “Sure, whatever,” he said. “One less thing to deal with.” Fifty bucks for a bottle that probably cost ten times that. Sometimes ignorance pays better than knowledge. I took it home and put it on my kitchen counter, where it sat for two weeks like an expensive paperweight. Every night I’d come home from whatever shit job I was working, look at that bottle, and think about opening it. But something held me back. Maybe it was respect for the dead professor. Maybe it was fear that I’d hate it and realize I’d wasted fifty bucks on fermented grape juice. Then came the night I wished I’d drunk it. I was dead asleep when I heard the front door open. Not the key-in-lock sound of someone who belonged there. The careful, deliberate sound of someone who definitely didn’t. My apartment wasn’t much, but it was mine, and I’d be damned if some junkie was going to rifle through my stuff looking for something to pawn. I grabbed the first thing my hand found in the dark: that bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape. The guy was in my living room, skinny as a coat hanger and twice as nervous. Probably looking for electronics to sell, money for his next fix. He had a knife – nothing fancy, just a kitchen blade with delusions of grandeur. When he saw me standing there in my underwear holding a wine bottle, he actually laughed. “What you gonna do, old man? Get me drunk to death?” That’s when I introduced him to the business end of a 1998 French vintage. That bottle connected with his skull like a Louisville Slugger meeting a fastball. The sound was beautiful – not the sharp crack you’d expect, but a deep, satisfying thunk. Like justice with a French accent. The bottle didn’t break. That’s the thing about good Châteauneuf-du-Pape – they make those bottles thick enough to stop a bullet. Or a burglar. The guy went down like a sack of potatoes, knife skittering across my floor like a scared cat. I called the cops, and while we waited for them to show up, I figured what the hell. Might as well see what all the fuss was about. I opened the bottle – carefully, since it had just done me a solid – and poured myself a glass. First sip, I understood why wine people are so insufferable. This stuff tasted like someone had mixed grape juice with a barnyard. Not in a bad way, exactly, but in a way that made you think about dirt and animals and things that grow in the earth. Earthy, they call it. I called it drinking the French countryside, complete with the smell of cow shit and wet hay. But you know what? After the third sip, it started making sense. All that funk, all that barnyard complexity – it was honest. No pretense, no trying to be something it wasn’t. Just grapes and time and the particular piece of dirt they grew in, all mixed together in a bottle heavy enough to knock a man unconscious. The cops showed up, hauled away my unwelcome visitor, and took my statement. One of them, a sergeant with a wine gut and twenty years on the force, noticed the open bottle. “That’s some good stuff,” he said. “My brother-in-law’s a sommelier. Says Châteauneuf-du-Pape is the real deal.” “Yeah,” I said, “it’s got character.” “What’d you pay for it?” “Fifty bucks.” He whistled low. “Highway robbery. That bottle’s worth a few thousand.” I didn’t tell him about the other kind of highway robbery I’d just prevented. After they left, I sat in my kitchen and finished the bottle. All of it. Not because it was good – though it was, in its own funky, barnyard way – but because it had earned the right to be drunk. It had protected my home, knocked out a burglar, and taught me something about value that had nothing to do with price tags. The old French professor would have approved, I think. He’d
Is Jim Beam Dodgers whiskey collectible?
A Meditation on Desperation and False Promises So there I was, standing in the liquor store on Sunset, staring at this Jim Beam Dodgers 750ml bottle (click that link to see what i’m talking about). Big blue letters screaming “COLLECTIBLE” right there on the label. And I thought to myself, Christ, when did we get so goddamn obvious about it? See, here’s the thing about collectibles that most people don’t understand because they’re too busy getting excited about owning something “special.” Real collectibles don’t announce themselves. They don’t need to. A 1952 Mickey Mantle rookie card doesn’t have “COLLECTIBLE!” printed across the top. A first edition Hemingway doesn’t come with a sticker that says “SAVE THIS FOR YOUR GRANDKIDS!” The good stuff, the stuff that actually matters twenty years down the line, it just sits there quietly, accumulating value like dust on a windowsill. Unnoticed until someone with half a brain realizes what they’re looking at. But this Jim Beam bottle? This beautiful bastard with its Dodger blue and white, commemorating another season of overpriced beer and broken dreams? It’s screaming its collectible status like a drunk at 2 AM screaming about how much money he makes. Which is to say: the louder you have to say it, the less likely it is to be true. And yet… And yet there’s something different about booze, isn’t there? See, most collectibles just sit there. Baseball cards stay in plastic sleeves. Coins live in little folders. Stamps get locked away in albums. But whiskey? Whiskey has this beautiful, tragic flaw: it’s made to be consumed. You can tell yourself you’re saving that Jim Beam Dodgers bottle for when it’s worth something. You can put it on a shelf, maybe even buy two – one to keep, one to drink, like some kind of alcoholic hedge fund manager. But life has a way of wearing you down. Bad day at work. Relationship falls apart. Dog dies. Rent’s due and the bank account’s looking thin. And there you are at 11 PM on a Tuesday, staring at your “investment” and thinking, well, it’s still Jim Beam, isn’t it? That’s when the desperation kicks in. Not the screaming, dramatic kind of desperation. The quiet kind. The kind that whispers, “Nobody’s going to pay $200 for this thing anyway. Might as well drink it.” And maybe that’s the real genius of putting “COLLECTIBLE” on a bottle of booze. The company knows exactly what they’re doing. They know that unlike a coin or a stamp, this collectible has a built-in self-destruct mechanism. It’s not just an investment – it’s an escape hatch. A way out when things get tough. So while the baseball cards and comic books pile up in storage units across America, slowly losing value as the generation that cared about them dies off, these bottles get consumed. One moment of weakness, one bad night, one “fuck it” moment, and boom – the supply gets a little smaller. Maybe that bottle really will be worth something someday. Not because it’s inherently valuable, but because most people couldn’t resist drinking their way through their retirement fund. The Dodgers will win some games, lose some games, break some hearts, give some hope. Same as always. And that bottle will sit on shelves across America, waiting. Waiting for that moment when collectible becomes consumable, when investment becomes medication, when hope becomes just another thing you swallow. In the meantime, I bought a regular bottle of Jim Beam. No team logo, no special label, no promises about the future. Just bourbon and the certainty that I’ll drink it before the week’s out. Sometimes the most honest thing in the store is the one that doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what it is. Carlos Bukowski writes about collecting, drinking, and the intersection of both from his apartment in Hollywood. His collection consists mainly of empty bottles and full ashtrays.