Sommelier butler Madame Red looks back on one celebratory night. Told without touching privacy, a record of an evening when a single bottle of wine kept company with the memory of a life.
Sir, my lady. This is Butler Madame Red. Today, let me tell you — within what is proper — of one night that stays with me above all others in my work as a sommelier. Whose it was I shall never say, but it was a certain celebration.
For that celebration, I was entrusted with a single wish: "Please prepare a wine of the same vintage as the year of birth." Aged wines, the finer they are, grow fewer in number, and are lost year by year. To find one of a particular year and a particular condition is like finding a single jewel amid the sand.
Relying on the ties I had built over the years, I put out word in every direction. Time and again it came to nothing, and honestly, there were moments I nearly gave up. But at last it came to light that in an old cellar in France, the very bottle I sought lay quietly sleeping. A bottle that had passed long years in the dark, silent underground. To think it would at last see the light and be carried to a celebration — the thought warmed my chest.
Seeking a wine is not simply a matter of finding some rare bottle. It must be a bottle that quietly keeps company with the years a person has lived. Even wines of the same year tell wholly different stories of the years they have passed, depending on the maker and the vineyard. Picturing the hue of that person's life, I thought through, night after night, which single bottle would best befit it.
On the day, when I quietly drew the cork, and served it having thought through its harmony with the food, that person quietly closed their eyes. Within a single glass of wine, the years they had walked were truly dissolved. A sommelier's work is not guessing the label, nor displaying knowledge. It is seeking out the one bottle that quietly keeps company with a person's memory of their life. That night, I savoured anew the meaning of my duty.
An eternal memory, in a single drop of wine. That night became, for me too, one I shall never forget for the whole of my life. And so, let us meet again in the next entry.
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Learn more →A Glass of Champagne at the Year's End
Another journal entry by Madame Red. Sommelier butler Madame Red writes, with her characteristic elegance, on choosing the champagne no celebration can do without — a story of the feeling poured into a glass raised in toast.
Learn more →Tilting a Glass, Listening Close to Jazz
Another journal entry by Madame Red. Sommelier butler Madame Red writes about the jazz and the single glass she enjoys alone on her days off — a story of an elegant night where a pastime and fine wine dissolve into one.
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