How a 10-year-old friendship turned into a wine cellar

Russ and I met in fifth grade, on a blacktop, arguing about something so unimportant that neither of us can remember what it was. We have been arguing about unimportant things ever since. The wine cellar is, depending on how you look at it, either a complete left turn from that or the most predictable possible outcome.

Nobody wakes up one morning and decides to build a wine cellar with their best friend of forty years. What actually happens is a lot smaller, a lot dumber, and stretched out over enough time that you don't notice it's happening until there are six carboys in a basement and a shared spreadsheet nobody asked for.

Phase one: we were just two kids

For about ten years we were the kind of friends who lived three blocks apart and treated each other's kitchens as overflow seating. We rode bikes to the same places. We failed the same pre-algebra quiz. We sat through the same school assemblies and made the same faces about them. Nothing about any of that hinted at fermentation.

What it did do, quietly, was bank a decade of low-stakes time together. That bank account turned out to matter later. You can't fake the kind of shorthand where one person says 'do the thing' and the other person knows exactly which thing.

Phase two: the years where we mostly didn't see each other

Then life did what life does. College in different states. Jobs in different cities. Russ went through what he insists was not a beer phase even though we have a whole post about his beer phase. I moved twice for work and once for a person who turned out to be a bad idea. We saw each other at weddings, at the occasional Thanksgiving, and exactly one extremely poorly planned camping trip.

If you had asked either of us in our late twenties whether we'd be making wine together at fifty, we would have laughed and then ordered another round of whatever it was we were drinking that we definitely shouldn't have been drinking that fast.

Phase three: the carboy that started it all

Sometime around 2019, Russ called me on a Tuesday. He had bought a wine kit on a whim. He didn't know what an airlock was. He needed a second pair of hands and, more importantly, a second person to blame if it went badly. I drove over that weekend. The wine was, charitably, drinkable. The evening was excellent. We made a second batch the next month, mostly so we'd have an excuse to do the evening again.

That is the actual origin of the cellar. Not a plan. Not a passion project. An excuse. The wine was the thing we made so that the time together had a shape.

Phase four: somehow, a cellar

Carboys multiplied the way carboys multiply, which is to say one at a time, each one justified by an extremely reasonable-sounding sentence at the hardware store. We built a rack. The rack filled up. We built a second rack. The second rack filled up faster than the first one had, because by then we knew what we were doing, or at least we knew what we were doing wrong.

Now there's a corner of Russ's basement that is, technically, a wine cellar. There are roughly sixty bottles in it at any given time, none of them with a real label, all of them dated in sharpie on a strip of blue painters tape. We started a website about it because our wives, gently and with love, suggested we stop telling the same stories at dinner parties.

What the cellar is actually for

It is not for collecting. We drink almost everything we make, usually within a year, often within a month. It is not for impressing anyone, because nobody who matters to us is impressible by homemade wine. It's for having something to do on a Saturday afternoon that ends with both of us in folding chairs in a basement, glasses in hand, agreeing that the Cab from last spring turned out better than either of us expected.

If you have a friend you've known for thirty or forty years and you don't quite know what to do with each other anymore, I cannot recommend strongly enough that you pick a small, slightly inconvenient project and start doing it together. It doesn't have to be wine. Wine just happens to forgive a lot of mistakes, and so do old friends.