DP Wine Cellar: Both Sides of the Cellar Door
This time of year always comes with a solid dose of melancholy for me. That said, it also delivers a mountain of wonderful memories. When you add in the early days of summer it becomes a terrific time of year! Recently this combination started me to thinking about many of the varied arcs of my life.
While this is the location for the D’Aquila-Phillips Wine Cellar, I started ruminating about how I enjoy writing about our wine cellars along with the backgrounds, stories, and more of their wines. After my vomit-inducing introduction to wines such as Ripple and Boone’s Farm I thought I’d remain a beer fan forever. Then I found out nothing turns turning an interest into a sideline, walking the storied vineyards of your favorite wineries, meeting vintners, and discovering your favorite varietal is Petit Verdot!
Then, after reviewing several recent posts, I realized I’ve been taking equal enjoyment writing about my life on the other side of the cellar door. Believing this was a good thing indeed, I realized most of these stories, people, and forces were linked right at my cellar door!
There were many significant forces that went into the formation of our logo before it was ever nailed to our first cellar door.
Brief Backstory:
I’ll spare you my story of growing up. It was pretty typical, privileged ‘50s and ‘60s, suburban stuff until the middle of my junior year in high school. That’s when my family uprooted and made a significant, multistate move and after which my dad’s alcoholism gained even more of its destructive traction. For the next four and a half years I was rarely more than a hot mess until I was lucky to make the decision to participate in the Semester at Sea program. Circling the globe for 111 days as a student traveler thankfully opened my eyes, mind, and heart, which transformed the core of my life in continued incalculable ways.
While asea love first revealed itself to me. Then not long after, on a summer day in 1973, as the result of an accident, the critical elements needed for our cellar met, for the first time, tucked into a corner booth at a Minneapolis bar named Busters.
A Cellar’s Magic Potion:
The majority component of our cellar was an intensely gorgeous woman, who was way out of my league. She brought with her a deep Italian family heritage, which included winemaking grandparents with a multigenerational relationship with a family named Mondavi along with a pipeline to their marvelous grapes. She also brought an intensity and strength to our lives previously unknown to me! She mixed in solid amounts of daredevil, mischievous norm breaker, visionary, and task master. She also immediately added food, wine, and entertaining to the mix.
Just past our 27th anniversary brain cancer shattered her world and for the next 5,100+ days it would brutally ravage her life. The majority of our lives were lost to the dark pit of cancer, which never cared how much of us it demanded. Then one horrific day it took the last remaining bits of my wife’s life and created a hole in my soul never to be repaired.
Our children helped me regain my footing and I began to contemplate the idea of a wine cellar in honor of my wife. I began following her decades old admiration for the Merlot grape, added my own new found appreciation for Petit Verdot, and began traveling to the Napa Valley with plans to meet my commitment to my wife to connect our next generation to know the Mondavi family.
More than myself, our wine cellar exists due to the strength of my wife. Hand-in-hand she brought me to the door of our cellar, taught me my first lessons about what to put behind it, and guided me every step of my way! So in her honor I happily continue to write stories from both sides of our cellar door.
Cheers!