Tales From The Crib

The right time for fine wine

When I was eight months pregnant with my first child, my husband and I traveled to Paris. “They won’t let you on the plane,” my mother-in-law fretted. I waddled down the aisle in a red sundress and plopped all of myself into a seat. Although three different French stewardesses examined my seatbelt in a scolding manner (one even insisted I put a pillow between the seat belt and my abdomen), the flight overseas passed without incident.

Jennifer Margulis

A second honeymoon of sorts, we were ostensibly in Europe to attend François’s graduation from one of France’s finest business schools. Tall, lean, and fair, François had visited the states some years before. He and I met when an acute attack of appendicitis sent him to Cambridge City Hospital. Alone in a hospital room in a city whose language he could barely understand, François bore his illness stoically. I visited him every day and my concern for this stranger — the son of the brother of a colleague of my mother’s — transformed into a deep friendship that has continued for more than 10 years, despite language, culture, and religious differences.

The after-graduation celebration took place in Sézanne, a small walled town in Champagne, at François’s family’s ancestral home, which was built in 1610. Stocky, dark, and insouciant, François’s father ushered us in, arms wide in welcome.

“Entrez, entrez,” he cried, embracing me French style with kisses on each cheek and slapping James heartily on the back. Mr. G was clean-shaven and dressed in a suit but no matter how hard he scrubbed, he could not get the black diesel fuel off his fingers. He was an auto-parts manufacturer. François had gone to business school in part to escape his working class roots. He looked embarrassed.

“There’s something I want to show you,” Mr. G said conspiratorily.

“Papa,” François rolled his eyes. Arms crossed, he remained on the couch while his little brother, James, and I followed Mr. G outside.

Mr. G led us out to the courtyard and opened an enormous slightly decayed wooden hatch. He ducked down the steep stairs and beckoned us to follow. The boys hurried after him. When I hesitated, the baby kicked me, as if to say, “hurry up, Mom, let’s not get left behind.”

We stumbled hunch-backed into a dank cellar. “This,” Mr. G explained loudly in French (he always spoke loudly around us as if our feeble grasp of French was just due to being hard of hearing), “was part of a labyrinthine underground network of tunnels that connected almost every house in Sézanne. The connections have been boarded up but during World War II these wine cellar tunnels were used to hide Jews from the Nazis. Sézanne was a seat of resistance.”

“Watch out for skeletons,” Mr. G shouted over his shoulder, brushing away cobwebs as he went through the twists and turns of the cellar. He led us to a dark corner where there were two shelves each containing not more than half a dozen bottles of fine wines: one shelf for François and one for his younger brother.

“Et voilà!” Mr. G found what he was looking for: a bottle of expensive champagne that he had bought 25 years before with the intention of opening when his infant son did something especially worth celebrating.

We toasted Francois’s graduation with that 25-year-old bottle of fine wine. I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand. François’s family urged that I drink — insisting that a really good wine would be good for the baby, and offering to refill my still-full glass.

Two weeks later I gave birth to a healthy baby.

On our next trip to France, my husband and I bought wine bottled in our daughter’s birth year. When she graduates from college we plan to open a bottle. We’ll offer the first glass to François.

Before becoming the mother of three, Jennifer Margulis spent a summer making goat cheese, working with troubled youth, and living in a teepee in a small village in southern France. Fluent in French, she has also lived, traveled, and worked in Niger, Benin, Togo, Burkina Faso, the Ivory Coast, Quebec, and elsewhere in the Francophone world.