Note: A version of this story first appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle in the fall of 2003, which accounts for its languid writing style, for the dearth of tech-bros, and for the age of the wines in the lineup. Despite all that, when we reread it recently, we found elements about the collector life, the passion, the promise, the occasional disappointment, that seemed more or less timeless. So we’ve decided to share it with you here. –P.J.C. (Reprinted by permission of the SF Chronicle)

Greg Spencer and Jon Civello are wine collectors. Both are passionate about wine, naturally, but it's not the sort of passion that can be expressed merely in conversation. You have to have a glass in your hand with something wonderful in it. You have to speak between sips, between deep, swooning whiffs. A passion like theirs has to be coaxed, liberated, given air.

On a beautiful Sunday afternoon, the three of us decided to do just that, gathering at Greg Spencer's Hillsborough home to discuss collecting, collections, and the special appreciation for wine that a deep cellar can assure. Naturally, we made time to pull a few corks.

You’d never know it, but Civello and Spencer own in excess of 800 cases of wine between the two of them. To learn more about what they collect and why was the reason we gathered. Also to uncork some bottles—two Rieslings, two Burgundies, and a few other odds and ends.

For dinner, Spencer has prepared a simple four-course spread. We gather in the kitchen, where the host dons an apron and unwraps the guests of honor, a pair of live Maine lobsters. While the crustaceans await their fates, Spencer serves smoked trout. For this he pours us not one but two German Auslese Rieslings, one from Prum, one from Grünhäuser, both from the great 1990 vintage.

As collectors, each man has a slightly different focus, and Riesling is a particular passion of Spencer’s. Both are wild for Burgundy, but Civello owns quite a bit of Cabernet, mostly Bordeaux, as well as a small amount of California Cab. “I've always had a soft spot for (California Cabernet),” he says. “It's what I was weaned on.”

Civello and the Spencers don't have cellars in their homes with fancy mahogany racks, marble tables, and etched magnum trophies like you see in the Wine Spectator. Most of their wine is stored in a commercial, temperature-controlled storage facility in San Francisco's Sunset District managed by Gary Marcaletti. They'll pull three or four cases at a time from storage as they need them.

Civello and Spencer's collecting is the result of years spent talking with experts, tasting and refining their palates, learning what they like and don't like. And when they see something they like, they buy it. “Any moron with a lot of money and a Parker Guide can collect wine,” Civello says, referring to any of several wine bibles that critic Robert M. Parker Jr. has published. “But you won't get as much satisfaction if you don't find out what you like.”

Early on in their exploration, Civello and Spencer had the good fortune to meet Marcaletti, the owner of a store in San Francisco’s Sunset District called the San Francisco Wine Trading Company. Marcaletti's expertise and guidance have been immensely important to Civello and Spencer. Marcaletti calls it shepherding. “I don't try to influence people too much with my own tastes,” he says. “I try to learn as much as I can about their taste, and massage it, mold it into a progressive experience. If they like Cabernet, I tell them they should try Tempranillo. Pretty soon they're taking classes and going to tastings, learning more about what they like and being introduced to more.”  

For Spencer, collecting started with an anomalous Burgundy in 1985, a red wine from Chassagne-Montrachet (a Beaune appellation known for its white wines). As he drank it and in the days after, the wine's elusive beauty nagged him, and kept taking over his attention. "I kept thinking, ‘What is it that I drank that was so interesting? What am I getting here?’ There was just this ethereal, suggestive presence, and I needed to find out for myself. I hit the books and I thought, ‘Are you guys just making this up or can I come up with the same conclusion?’” The problem, or the joy, is that a collector will never stop asking that question. The collection is in direct pursuit of that question.

“I had a Gevrey-Chambertin recently,” says Spencer, “and it had a smell, and I'm thinking, ‘I know that smell, what the hell is it?’ And I go—bam! Mango! I'm smelling mango in a red wine! I would never have guessed that. And so all of a sudden you're starting to think about the parameters all over again. Mango! You thought you had your arms around Gevrey- Chambertin and then you find out you don't. That's how it becomes an obsession.”

The wines that Civello and Spencer buy aren't the sort that you uncork when you get home from the store. Most need time in the bottle to develop—years, sometimes decades. “My collection is quite young,” says Civello, who started well after Spencer. He expresses a tinge of regret that many of the bottles he has are too youthful to be appreciated, now that he's more than ready to appreciate them.

But Marcaletti and others remind him that patience has its rewards. “It's really a treat to drink wines with bottle age,” Marcaletti says. “Americans tend to drink their wines too young, but it's important to have patience.”

Burgundy is our next stop during dinner, and the next two dishes are designed to match with two great wines. The white, a 1995 Corton-Charlemagne, one of the great Chardonnay vineyards of Burgundy, is produced by the legendary Jean-Louis Coche-Dury. It's a wine with the stately richness and power of gold, while remaining lithe as a rushing stream.

The next course is a simple mushroom risotto, designed to bring out the earthiness of a 1990 La Tache, the legendary Pinot Noir from Domaine de la Romanee-Conti. The wine is an astonishing expression of earth, fruit, rose, forest scents and vibrant, shimmering life. The instant I took my first sip of this extraordinary wine, I learned something important about the nature of a true collector.

This wine was quite possibly the finest thing that I have ever put in my mouth. Entire undiscovered regions of my taste buds were aroused, and as gorgeous layers of flavor and texture overtook me and slowly receded, I realized I would remember this wine for the rest of my life. I may lose the words to describe it, I may not always possess the vivid impression of the sensations that went along with tasting it, but I would remember, forever, the experience.

And that is what collectors have that the rest of us wine mortals do not have, and it's what makes wine collecting completely different from, say, stamp collecting. Wine is a thing you experience with all of your senses. A collection, then, is a stockpile of peak experiences. It's not something to admire, it's something to live. “When you look back on it, you're not going to remember the ones that were just okay,” says Spencer.

Spencer admits to being geeky about his collection, but his wife keeps him honest. “Every Saturday or Sunday night I ask my wife what she wants to drink with dinner," he says, "and she always says the same thing—‘something really good.’ Well, that's the challenge. I'm going to make sure it's really good. I go out of my way.

“And you know what? It's worth it, because everything changes. Everything's better. The light's better, the music sounds better, there's a little better twist to everything. Those are the wines I want to drink. That's the sole reason for my collection,” he says. “I know I can drink a great bottle of wine whenever I want to drink it and not feel like I'm parting with something precious. Hell, if we drink a great bottle of wine every Saturday night, at the end of the year that's four cases. That's nothing. That's not a lot of wine.”

Over the cheese course I ask them about the inevitable, the day when each will have to walk away from the business of collecting. There will be too many bottles, and just enough days to enjoy them. What then? "I fully anticipate that there's going to be a time when for three or four years I won't be buying any wine to speak of,” Spencer says. “And then just two bottles of this and two bottles of that. And after that my collection will go down considerably, to 200 cases, 250 cases, something like that.”

Civello then tells a story about a man with a huge collection who stopped buying bottles at a certain point in his life to enjoy the ones he had. "When he died," he says, “there were what—five bottles left or something.” Civello and Spencer fall silent, clearly impressed with the feat.

Civello peers into his glass. “It's a good way to live, I'd say.”