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"\n\nWhen they came to take away his wine, he told me he felt liberated, not mournful, and called the arrival of the trucks \"a little bit of a relief.\" I didn't believe him. In the quarter-century he's been my friend, I've always thought of him as The Collector, in capital letters. And here he was saying, apparently in earnest, \"I drank all the great wines in the world and I'll drink more. I have absolutely no remorse.\"\u00A0\n\nThe crew from Zachys Wine Auctions, a division of a retail store in Scarsdale, New York, came to his home a few months ago and carried off about 9,000 bottles, 90 percent of his collection. The workmen, essentially household movers with the bodies of stevedores and the souls of epicures, lugged them up a flight of steep, unsteady, wooden steps that serve as the only entrance to my friend's faultless natural wine cellar, once a root cellar under a shepherd's cottage, circa 1910. The bottles had aged for decades in pastoral perfection\u2014a cramped, dark, dank, and creepy space, everything fine wines adore. Much about food and drink is labeled artisanal, usually without justification, but if there is such a thing as an artisanal wine cellar, this was it.\n\nWith exceptional wines, how well they are stored is almost as important as how well they are made. I've drunk collection-quality wine from other cellars, most of them high-tech, high-brow, and high-cost, but few bottles emerged with the silken perfection of his. It was unqualified proof, in my opinion, that nature inevitably prevails over science, in this case a triumph of wood, stone, cement, dirt, and cast-iron nails over stainless steel and artificial temperature-control.\n\nNothing about this pharaoh's tomb of a space was beautiful, other than the treasures hidden within: 1971 DRC Roman\u00E9e-Conti, 1953 Ch\u00E2teau Margaux, 1978 E. Guigal C\u00F4te-Rotie La Mouline, 1990 Henri Jayer Vosne-Roman\u00E9e Cros Parantoux, and 1978 Bruno Giacosa Barbaresco Santo Stefano Riserva, to name a few I've drunk. In his 35 years of collecting, he not only bought the best, he shared what he had without hesitation. The cellar reminded me of him\u2014all business, no frills, and no flaws, at least where wine was concerned. When he went out for dinner, he wore a black T-shirt under a designer jacket. When he drank at home, without guests, it was usually a Sauvignon Blanc that barely made it into double figures.\n\nHe happily told the movers tales of his coups as a collector, and they listened raptly, as though he were a scholar or a sage. In a sense he was, not one with an esteemed title such as Master of Wine or Master Sommelier, but one who had achieved a different kind of mastery, his in the competitive world of chasing greatness. He bought cases of 1978 La Mouline, to me the most lustrous C\u00F4te-Rotie ever produced, before almost anyone else had\u00A0 heard of it, and he understood that Henri Jayer was unequalled when most other collectors merely rated him as great.\n\nThe Collector skillfully bid, bargained, and usually outmaneuvered competitors who were after the same auction lots, the same unopened wooden crates, the same rare bottles from 1945 or 1959. He had been a rugby player well into his middle years, and he knew how to compete.\n\nHe told them about the time he pried open a case of 1996 Comte Georges de Vog&amp;amp;#234 Musigny Vieilles Vignes, and what he found within was not 12 bottles of the wine named on the sealed, never-opened crate, but 10 bottles of the Musigny and two of 1989 Jean Gros Richebourg. This was the oenophilic equivalent of a locked-room murder mystery\u2014how did those bottles get there?\u2014and it was never solved. One of the movers, impressed, said with absolute certainty, \"Those Gros wines go for the money.\"\n\nHe and I reminisced about the wines he had brought to my bachelor party, held at the Four Seasons Restaurant in Manhattan in the early 1990's, just before wine-collecting entered one of its periodic phases of price-escalation. He showed up with more bottles that we could possibly drink, including magnums of 1982 Le Pin, 1978 Louis Latour Corton-Charlemagne, and 1966 Rousseau Chambertin Clos de B\u00E8ze.\n\nWhat I remember most about the meal, in addition to the black-truffle risotto, was that Julian Niccolini, then the manager and now a managing partner of the restaurant, attempted to drink more of the wine than the rest of the guests combined. Niccolini always did have a fine palate. And a very large one.\n\nA few days after the bachelor party, my friend pointed out that a case of 1982 Le Pin had just sold at auction for $18,000, which meant we had drunk a $3,000 magnum of Bordeaux, somewhat commonplace now but a staggering indulgence back then. It didn't bother him, above all because he had purchased the six-magnum case en primeur, meaning prior to release from the winery, for $400. Mostly, however, he was happy because I loved it so. The wine was exotically rich, almost succulent, a 100-point Robert Parker beauty from back in the days when Parker hardly ever gave out such perfect scores.\n\nIn recent years he remembered my (obviously false) boast that I was the first man to recognize the greatness of 1992 white Burgundies\u2014so much lushness\u2014and he'd often bring up a bottle from the cellar when I came over for a meal. He always looked after me, where wine was concerned. He was more generous with friends than he was with himself.\n\nEven in recent years, when wine prices had soared and he was spending far greater sums, he would never let cost diminish the pleasure of drinking. Wine-collecting is a satisfying hobby only for those who don't think about the value of what they consume. He came from a time when few collected wine as a means of accumulating a fortune, more commonplace now. I don't think my friend even knows, or would care if he did, that six magnums of 1982 Le Pin, precisely what he purchased for $400 in the 1980's, sold at a London auction earlier this year for more than $131,000.\n\nOn the other hand, I'd rather he didn't know that we downed a $22,000 magnum at my bachelor party. I don't think I ever was that good a friend.\n\nThe only time he considered price was when I tried to buy wine from him. Sometimes I'd root around in his cellar, looking for oddities I knew he didn't care about, beauties from Alsace that turned out to be a little too sweet for his taste. I'd find a couple bottles of Zind-Humbrecht lying in the dirt, seemingly abandoned, and I'd go after them, offering $60-70 for wines rated 99 or 100 points but of no value to him. If I said $60, he wanted $70. If $70, he wanted $80. Not long ago, I asked him if he tried to squeeze an extra ten bucks out of me for the sheer pleasure of haggling. He said that wasn't it at all, that he hated to haggle.\n\n\"Why then?\" I asked.\n\n\"Because I love to bust your balls,\" he replied.\n\nMaybe he isn't without flaws where wine is concerned.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\nThe Collector didn't grow up drinking wine. His parents had no interest in such an indulgence. In college he drank Mateus or Lancers, popular sparkling wines, in order to impress girls. He says it worked. For me, it did not, maybe the reason I never became a collector.\n\nHe learned to appreciate wine when his brother, who lived in France,\u00A0 was coming to New York for a Christmas visit. Months before his arrival, my friend bought a wine encyclopedia as a gift for his brother, and he ended up reading most of it. At the time he was commuting by car from Manhattan to New York's Westchester County, and Zachys was running a special: magnums of 1966 Ch\u00E2teau Latour for $50, one bottle to a customer. \"Every day, on my way to work, I'd stop and buy one,\" he recalled. (Current retail price for a magnum of 1966 Latour, $2000.)\n\nHe and his wife were living in an apartment at 106th and Riverside Drive that incorporated a small maid's quarters with a bathroom. His wife used the maid's quarters as an office. He transformed the maid's bathroom into his first wine cellar. He added air-conditioning to the bathroom for the protection of the wine. He never mentioned anything to me about air-conditioning the office for the comfort of his wife.\n\nEventually, buying (and occasionally selling) wine became more than a hobby. It developed into a passion, an all-encompassing one. \"I bought wine compulsively,\" he admitted. \"If I liked a certain product and I saw it, I bought it, even though I didn't need it.\" Still, it never was the buying, selling, or even the drinking he liked best. It was the people he met through wine and the meals he ate with them throughout the world.\u00A0\n\n\"I was recently looking through all the menus I've collected,\" he said. \"The meals I've eaten and the places where I've eaten them are shocking to me now.\" I asked him to pick the best, and he decided on a dinner at Maison Troisgros, in Roanne, in 2001. The meal incorporated eight friends, nine courses, and 14 wines, including four vintages of Jayer Cros-Parantoux and four different Coche-Dury white Burgundies. The cost of the meal: $6400. Today, those identical 14 wines would sell at auction for at least $30,000.\n\nHe told me almost all the wines from his collection needed 15 more years to mature, and even though he expected to live that long, divorcing himself from collecting was a necessary aspect of a lifestyle change. He was retiring, and he and his wife planned to move from their home to a condominium, perhaps pick up a smaller one in the building to serve as a guest residence, using some of the proceeds from the auction.\n\nThe bottles fetched more than $3 million, including the buyer's premium, at a sale held this past October at New York's Gotham Bar and Grill. He was identified on the auction catalogue, as is the custom at these events, by a flowery and flattering fictitious name. He was called a Passionate American Connoisseur, a true enough description, although I've never in my life called him that. Collectors usually prefer to remain anonymous when they bring wines to auction, although there have been exceptions, people who have become so famous in the field they prefer to be recognized, knowing their names will boost bidding.\n\nThe astonishing outcome of the sale, I learned from the Zachys auction department, was a result of the massive quantity of perfectly stored Burgundy my friend had accumulated, about 5,000 bottles. While Bordeaux might be the Crown Jewels of wine-collecting, Burgundies are the Holy Grail. They are rarer, more ephemeral, more in demand. One employee of Zachys said to me, \"There is always going to be 1982 Mouton-Rothschild at every sale.\" After the auction, my friend made no mention of the windfall that had come his way, other to admit he was startled by the size of check that arrived in the mail.\n\nBy then I had decided that auctioning off his wines had meant little to him, that it had been a business deal like every other one he'd made in his everyday life as a CEO. I figured maybe he hadn't been emotionally involved and had gathered bottles the way kids accumulate baseball cards\u2014arranging them, cataloging them, showing them off, then one day losing interest.\n\nI was surprised, then, to learn that he had gone to the sale, which few collectors do. \"It can be hard for people to watch their wine sell,\" Michael Jessen, Managing Director at Zachys Wine Auctions, told me. \"Even if it's going gangbusters, everything selling, it can be emotional, tough to watch. It's like seeing your daughter drive off to college.\"\n\nHe had a good time with friends who showed up to bid on his wines or just to support him. He shared a very old and rare bottle of Chartreuse, a French liqueur produced by Carthusian Monks, which he also collects. He admitted to me that he occasionally became annoyed when one of his lots didn't sell for the price he thought it deserved, not because he wanted every possible dollar but because, he said, \"It felt like they were stealing.\" He always had been a great defender of his wines on the infrequent occasions when that was required.\n\nHe told me that at times he became a little disconcerted, a little uncomfortable. Jessen said it happens to everyone in his position. My friend eventually confessed that if he had to do it again, he would have stayed home.\n\nI didn't expect that, not after listening to him say how comfortable he was with disposing of his collection, how relad he was when his wines were taken away. I assumed he had prepared himself to move on to some other hobby, like improving his golf game, which has always needed work.\n\nMy analysis was entirely flawed. A few weeks ago The Collector started buying again, extraordinary parcels that included Domaine Joseph Drouhin Musigny and Bruno Giacosa Barolo. \"That's his nature,\" Jessen explained to me. \"At his level, it's hard to resist.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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