How refreshingly primitive his tastes were when we met. He wanted giant egg creams. No egg, no cream, he explained very patiently, native New Yorker to the aborigine from the Middle West… just a dash of milk in the bottom of the cocktail shaker, a big glop of chocolate syrup and seltzer to the top. He wanted orange juice. Fresh-squeezed, he said, by my very own left hand pressed against a highly efficient electric juicer, shanghaied from his mother's kitchen. Poor dear. That was her first shattering hint that her precious baby boy might actually Marry That Woman… me. Stunning in our penthouse slum, he sipped icy Tuborg beer (he had been until recently engaged to a Danish beauty and an assumed affection for Scandinavian potables had quite naturally developed). When I invited him to dinner he would bring a bottle of whatever the neighborhood liquor store was featuring that week in the $1.19 bin.

        Let me say this for the Kultur Maven, longest-running joy of my life, he was always a class guy. Even in those days of blissful solvent poverty. He never even considered the 99-cent specials. He bought $1.19 Chablis and $1.49 Moselle and even Châteauneuf-du-Pape once for $1.99. Even in the glorious green of his innocence, he had an innate sense of where the line falls between shlock and dreck.
   
        I mean primitive. Refreshingly unmaterialistic. He arrived for the big wedding scene on the lawn in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, with all his gear in a small canvas gym bag… his high school gym bag. What is this wedding twitter? It is a short, predictable story. In the pinch the bride got disgustingly old-fashioned. She put on shoes and got married because she wanted silver that matched and the heirloom Spode. Did I say the groom was primitive? The bride was a simpleton. She'd never heard of the silver auctions at Parke-Bernet.

        Never once did I suspect that I had promised to love, honor and humidify the closet of an incipient oenosnob. They'd never heard of the mythic egg cream in St. Clair, Michigan, where we honeymooned on Lake Huron. But he had hidden a bottle of French champagne in his gym bag. We twirled it in a polyurethane bucket, and, being slightly nervous – living together married after the simple sanity of living together single is fraught with anxiety – we ordered five desserts from room service. The potential for a gourmand future was clear. But I did not suspect he had been bitten by The Grape.

        Thinking back, I can see the first signs of serious exposure to oenophilic contamination. I began to cook with early haute pretention. And he stopped heading automatically for the $1.19 wine specials and began consulting the assorted thieves, knaves and humanitarian wine vendors in our neighborhood liquor shops. We culled some wine lore from the Frenchman next door. Mme. Rochat was an early organic food cultist and the transplanted Rochats never drank anything stronger than papaya tea. But that didn't stifle their natural arrogance on such pitiful American customs as plastic corks and pasteurized wine. (Amazing how the French forget who invented pasteurization.) Then Jules the Ophthalmologist came home from the European fields. It was the peacetime sixties and Jules' war was the Waterloo of his liver in the gastronomic fleshshops in and about the Army hospitals at La Rochelle, France. Jules' budding winesmanship was contagious and appealing. It seemed like a gift, not a disease. When he did his little lecture on the '59 harvest and sang the magic litany of good years and bad years and little fruity vins du pays, crisp but honest whites, humble but charming reds, we sat rapt and envious of such esoteric wisdom.

        When my eager mate brought home a '55 Château Margaux to drink with my Swedish meatballs, I had a feeling we were into something over our heads. Our European odyssey with pilgrimages to varied epicurean shrines fueled the obsession. We discovered little non-transportable oenophilic graces like Epomeo, a pale, dry white of Ischia, and Condrieu, the enchanting white wine of the Rhone valley. And there were many pedantic hours spent in oenophilic discourse with other similarly seized souls.

        I bought the blossoming oenophile a magnum of 1947 Lafite-Rothschild and a vineyard guide for Christmas. I had to cook a dinner glorious enough to complement the Lafite. It took four days and cost $130. He began to talk about calcareous sand and marl, Appellation Contrôlée, premiers grands crus, upper slopes versus lower slopes, racy wines, flabby wines, the mettlesome wines of Lower Burgundy, the fleshy fat Côte de Nuits… what a cast of characters dominated our lives. He began to practice his oenokultur in the neighborhood, terrorizing a teenage waitress at the pizzaria because she had the innocence to serve Chianti from the refrigerator. She offered to put it through a dishwasher cycle to warm is up… his scorn was withering. He had amiable waiters in the nearby home-style delicatessen scurrying back and forth to find out the year of a $3 Médoc.

        Technique perfected, he took on the pompous sommeliers of our town's haughtier French restaurants: sniffing corks, swirling, sniffing, sipping, nibbling, sloshing, chewing, sneering, raising an arrogant eyebrow…and, when appropriate, offering a restrained smile of benediction.

        He does not speak a word of French. But overnight he graduated from an uncertain "very nice" to a confident "charming," "roguish," "a tannin-wracked little wench," "bien meublé," "puissant," "un peu anémique, non?"
   
        An oenophile's companion must have an unfailing sense of humor.
        Wit. Tolerance. A nervous laugh. Odd lots of money.
   
        The wit may save a few friendships when he starts chewing, spitting and making bilingual critiques of the prized wine offerings in the homes of competitive grape nuts. And the money can build your oeno-annuity for the decade ahead.
   
        You need glasses. Nothing in the cupboards will do, especially not the handsome Val St. Lambert crystal a loving aunt and uncle sank $200 into as a wedding gift. Well, the water goblet will do for clarets. But for your great Burgundies you want a big balloon from Baccarat, very thin, very fragile, with the curved-in rim that throws the smell -- strike that, I mean bouquet -- up at your discriminating nose. Banish the saucer champagne glasses to the charity thrift shop. Only a tulip shape will do for the ultimate in bubbles.

        And an oenophile's companion will improvise a cellar. Since we were disadvantaged canyon-dwellers, for beginners I bought him a handsome walnut wine rack with space for a dozen bottles. He smiled indulgently, having just ordered a $600 refrigerated wine cabinet from Hammacher Schlemmer. As his collection grew, we were forced to refrigerate his clothes closet. There was a draft, tough on the plants -- we killed three ferns and totally demoralized four adolescent palms. I had a cold through most of 1965. Jules and two similarly afflicted sybarites talked about forming a cooperative to rent a basement apartment and fit it out as a wine cave with humidity and temperature controls. I never say no. Fortunately their wives did.

        Then we bought what had once been a Dutch Reformed church in upstate New York. To me it was a country retreat. To him, it was a wine cellar. We didn't bother to check the water pressure or the hot air heating system or flush a toilet… all we did was check the temperature in the basement. An old-fashioned bluestone cave, it passed the test… never falling below 50 in winter, never rising above 60 in the summer.
   
        The companion of an apartment-bound oenophile will never have the flexibility of choice we have in our bluestone cellar. But given a dark, coolish spot, free from vibration and stacked with a prudent selection of wines, you can indulge an urban grape nut with considerable style. Without proper temperature control, storing white wines is hopeless. White wines might survive a few months of winter in a cool closet…but a July hot spell will quickly do them in. Red wines are hardier, and even a thoroughbred can suffer a summer in less-than-ideal surroundings without trauma. Forget about stashing a wine you won't be able to drink for a decade. Put away something you can drink in the next twelve months. The 1962s are still sensibly priced, beautiful to drink now, gaining finesse with the passing of time. The '55s and '59s are a splendid indulgence if you feel like cashing in a few hundred shares of IBM. More modest bottles of the 1966 vintage are drinkable now…loftier labels need four or five more years. The vintage of the decade is 1961. It was a small crop and the prices are already hysterical. Winemen give it a long life of balance and character. It is delicious to drink now if infanticide doesn't throw you.
   
        A really devoted oenophile's wife would gladly sacrifice her dressing room, the dining room, even the laundry ell, to permit her cellarless grape hound to store wall-to-wall wine in a compatible temperature. With ideal cool and humidity, you can put away a '66 now and watch it triple in value until it becomes so costly you get hives just drinking it. We are only now halfway through the '59s we bought for $7, $8, $9…selling now for as high as $35. I couldn’t feel much richer if I were munching emeralds.
   
        I must warn, however, that there is more depth to the wine game than is instantly apparent. Recently we put away a case of 1966 Hermitage at the urging of Jules the Ophthalmologist. Hermitage is especially long-lived and we have sworn not to drink this manliest Rhone red before 1976. 1976! In a decade of togetherness, we have managed to avoid acquiring children, pets, mortgages and that furiously chic gold bracelet from Cartier that locks on with a vermeil screwdriver…all artificial bonds of unity. And now we are bound by a case of Hermitage.

        Commitment. I don't really feel restless, but I must admit it's scary.

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