Gertrude, Part II
Gertrude was 86 when she died. Six years had passed since that memorable dinner when we celebrated her 80th birthday with a bottle of 1905 Château Latour.
But now she was gone and the question facing her sister who had flown in from California was what to do with everything Gertrude collected. Gertrude's apartment in Paris's 16th arrondisement was a mess. There were papers everywhere for she never threw anything away be it letters from her husband or postcards from her friend Sylvia Beach who was in a German internment camp during WW II. (Sylvia was founder of the famous Paris bookstore Shakespeare and Company and, in 1922, publisher of the classic, Ulysses.) Gertrude's apartment was also cluttered with old newspapers, documents from every American organization she belonged to, as well as official wartime notices from the police ordering her to report to headquarters twice a day. Being an American, she was considered an enemy alien.
With so much to sort through and clear out, a call went out to some of Gertrude's friends to come over and help. My wife Petie was one of them.
Every day, they'd rummage through stuff and then, when lunch time arrived, someone would go out and get a baguette and maybe some cheese while someone else retreated to the cellar for a bottle of wine. It went very well with a package of patés that was found which Gertrude was planning to send to her sister for Christmas.
About that wine, though . . . some days it was a bottle of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti. Other days, a Château Haut Brion or a Chassagne Montrachet. The choices were mind-boggling. They were also sometimes a mystery since many of the bottles were unlabeled and well past their prime. They were collected by Gertrude's husband Marcel during World War II and in the years that followed. He was a lawyer during the war and much of his work involved representing winemakers who had run into trouble with the Germans. Because producers had little money, they paid him with bottles of wine. Before handing Marcel the wine, however, they always removed the labels so the Germans wouldn't know what wines he was carrying. Marcel usually traveled by train and authorities were always on the lookout for something they could put their hands on, especially good wine. The labels were later mailed to Marcel after he returned to Paris.
Wait, back up. Did I say "good wine?" The wines Marcel were given were great, the kind Field Marshal Goering ordered for his cellar like the two Rothschilds, Mouton and Lafite. When the war ended and after Marcel's death, Gertrude continued stockpiling wine, amassing a number of bottles from the 1961 vintage, one of the greatest of all time. Among her purchases were wines from Domaine de la Romanée-Conti.
And that is what Petie and the others had for lunch every day: baguette, cheese and paté washed down with some of the finest wines of France. Okay, once in a while, there were some duds which meant someone had to go back to the cellar and grab another bottle but for the most part the wines were out of this world.
Clearing out Gertrude's apartment took about a week and a half, but here's the good part, where yours truly comes in. Gertrude's sister told Petie, "If there's anything left in the wine cellar, Don can have it." I must have broken all speed records rushing over to see what was there.
The cellar was dark and I needed a flashlight. Most of the wine was gone no thanks to a bunch of thirsty women, but what was left made my heart go pity-pat. There were two dozen bottles from Château Haut-Brion, one of the great Bordeaux estates. All were from the 1920s, '30s and '40s. Labels were faded but the level in nearly every bottle was impeccable, a surprise given how old the wines were. Petie and I have popped the cork on several and all were wonderful, still full of life. Thank you, Gertrude. And you, too Marcel.
