For more than 20 years, William Stephen Osburn ran Osburn’s Groceries and Delicatessen, an historic general store and meat market in Cannon Beach, Oregon. Steve, as everyone called him, and his wife, Emily, took it over in 1980, and it became a must-stop for tourists on their way to the shore.

The store sold wine, and Steve became more and more interested in it. “It was a seasonal business, so there wasn't a big market for the wine. I think he was the real market,” Emily recalls with a laugh.

Steve started selling and collecting bottles from the nascent wine scene in Oregon. Emily remembers exploring vineyards in Willamette Valley with her husband in the early years of their marriage—young newlyweds, not much cash, driving their truck around and going to tastings. They were there at a special time, when benchmark producers like Eyrie Vineyards (a favorite of Steve’s) were just getting established.

In 2003, they sold the Cannon Beach store and moved with their daughters, Alison and Claire, to Texas, where Steve became the wine manager for the grocery chain H-E-B at its location in The Woodlands, outside of Houston. Throughout, he continued buying wine for his own collection. Over the course of 30 years, he quietly amassed an enviable cellar that was a mix of landmark producers from critically-acclaimed vintages and bottles that marked his time in Oregon. 

“He started buying more, the way you do when you're a collector. You just always think you have to have some more. So he acquired much more than he could ever drink in his lifetime, or me, or the family,” says Emily. 

“But that was his passion. It was his treasure.”

In the early 2010s, Steve was diagnosed with Lewy body dementia, Parkinsonism, and ALS. After a difficult struggle, he passed away on June 18, 2016. The day before Father’s Day.

He left behind more than 600 bottles of wine, and no instructions on what to do with them. Which left his heartbroken family with a simple question:

Now what?

Steve Osburn—a quiet, direct, but joyful man—was a mentor and a polymath. He taught himself how to run a business, with no formal training. Before taking over the store, he worked full-time as a reading teacher for seventh graders at a school outside of Portland. He was a key figure in the Cannon Beach community, regularly performing in local theater productions (he once performed with Alison in a production of Annie). He was an avid outdoorsman who enjoyed hiking and fly fishing for salmon as they ran upstream from the ocean in the spring. He also embarked on intense personal studies of music (he was a gifted guitar player), poetry, literature (cherishing Thoreau, in particular), and the natural sciences. 

More than any of his other interests, his curiosity and fascination with wine shaped his life. “Wine is very multifaceted. It involves farming and biology and a lot of things that he was interested in,” says Emily. “He was a very curious person, and there's always something to learn about wine.”

“I saw the joy that it brought him,” his daughter, Alison, remembers. “He would always bust out a bottle at dinner, once we were all old enough. And I could really see how into it he was.”

Even as his dementia worsened, Steve didn’t forget about his collection. “I can remember him asking me, ‘Do you know where my wine is? This is very important to me, and I can't figure out where it is,’" Emily says. “It was dear to him. Because he knew what he had.” 

After his death, his family tried to process their grief. Emily retired from her career as a librarian and moved from their home in The Woodlands to San Antonio. Alison graduated from law school and passed the bar exam. Claire started a family. 

After trying to adjust to a life without Steve, they were finally able to step back and consider what to do with his many bottles of wine.

“It's called ‘Beyond Life Expectancy’ in certain hobbies,” Emily explains, a term that wine collectors and their families will immediately understand. “Like people who collect yarn: half the fun of being a knitter is going to yarn stores and buying yarn. It's just a thing.”

Before his death, Steve set aside what he considered the best of his collection in special off-site wine storage. These wines, in particular, were a source of worry and angst for Emily, who, along with her children, enjoys wine but is not an expert. Wanting to honor her husband’s collection, she turned responsibility for those wines over to her daughter, Alison.

After a couple of years, Alison, now an attorney in Dallas, was finally ready to assess the inventory. 

A 1985 Domaine de la Romanée-Conti Richebourg to mark the year she was born. Bottles of Eyrie Vineyards Pinot Noir from the late ‘70s and early ‘80s (including one from 1975, the same vintage that the winery’s South Block Reserve bottling became the first American Pinot Noir to compete successfully with Burgundy). Cases of First Growth Bordeaux from the ‘80s, ‘90s, and the lauded 2000 vintage. Scores of early California Cabs from Heitz Cellar, Beringer, Robert Mondavi, Opus One. 

In the process of cataloging the wines over the past few years, Alison has embraced her role as steward of the collection. It laid the foundation for her own burgeoning interest in wine, and, she found, is a way to remember and feel close to her father. 

“Like having this little piece of him,” she says. “I like seeing what's there.”

It also led her to reflect on what other collectors should consider, given that, in most cases, the best of our wines will outlive us.

“Just like you need to plan for your life and after your life, that should be part of it,” says Alison. “Have a little conversation here and there with family and friends about your hopes for a number of bottles of wine, and the cost of storing those,” she says. “Seeing the amount of emotion and anxiety and stress that it brought to my family at the time of his passing—it might have been helpful for my mom to have some instructions, at least, so she didn’t have to think about it.”

Jason Lett—second-generation winemaker at Eyrie Vineyards and son of its founder, Willamette Valley pioneer David Lett—knows the emotions that come with inheriting such a cellar. 

“Speaking as someone whose father left them many, many, many bottles of Eyrie after they passed,” Lett says, “it's almost overwhelming, what you're supposed to do with these. Because every bottle has such a sentimental impact.” 

“Time and wine are inseparable. There's a reason there's a vintage date on the label,” he continues. "And opening an old bottle of wine is like opening a family scrapbook.”

Lett’s advice? The Osburn family should gather together, order a pizza, and open one of their father’s bottles of Eyrie Vineyards Pinot Noir. “The reason that we pass away and leave behind our best bottles is because we're waiting for the perfect occasion,” he says. But, he adds, "the bottle itself should be the occasion.” 

“We need to do that more,” Emily muses. “You have a period in your life where you have a big family, you have lots of gatherings. And then things change, and you lose people, and you don't have these big gatherings anymore. I have bottles here in the house that I should open, but it's hard to drink a whole bottle [by yourself].”

She paused for a moment. “I’ll probably open one—maybe tonight. I’ve really been missing Steve a lot lately. He died eight years ago, but that’s a long process that you go through.”

Now that the family has been able to catalog the collection, begin to think about what to do with it, and open a prized bottle occasionally, the Osburns find that enjoying one of the wines from his collection is bittersweet. 

“Oh, we think of Steve,” Emily says. “We like the wine. But for us, it's all about him.”

“We definitely toast my dad. I think of him when I drink it,” says Allison. “It's like enjoying it with him a little bit.”