Same wine, next year

I don’t have a wine list in hand, but no matter where Lucy and I go to dinner tomorrow night to celebrate our anniversary, I know what we’ll drink: the same wine we drank at our wedding lunch 17 years ago, the day we were married in Italy. Tomorrow night’s bottle, however, will come from my cellar, not from the cellar of Ristorante Aimo e Nadia in Milan.

We’ve drunk that wine -- a 1971 Barolo Monprivato from Giuseppe Mascarello -- at every one of our anniversary dinners. It’s an excellent wine -- and it marks an even better tradition. It evokes in both of us warm memories of all the excitement of that day.

In other words, it does everything a good bottle of wine should do for all of us, serving as a good companion to good food and good times.

I picked the ’71 Barolo for our wedding lunch because Barolo is my favorite Italian wine and 1971 was a great vintage in Piemonte. On our wedding day, the wine cost $100. Ouch. But after all, it was our wedding day.

The next year, when we went to Valentino to celebrate our first anniversary, I paged through the encyclopedic wine list looking for the ’71 Monprivato.

Eureka -- there it was ... for “only” $75. That’s still more than I usually pay for a bottle of wine, but, hey, it was our first anniversary. I ordered it. It was again wonderful -- rich and vibrant, powerful and elegant, a palate-pleasing melange of roses, chocolate, chestnuts and wood smoke.

It immediately transported us back to that glorious day in Milan, where a dozen friends and relatives had traveled to attend our wedding and toast us at lunch.

I asked Piero Selvaggio, the owner of Valentino, how long he thought the wine would remain drinkable.

“At least another 20 years,” he said.

That’s when I announced that we should drink a bottle every year on our anniversary.

I’ve always been both romantic and obsessive, and Lucy immediately recognized in my proclamation the beginning of yet another determined, compulsive Shavian quest.

Now I had to find the bottles. I started calling around. Wine Expo in Santa Monica carries a lot of Italian wine. I tried them first. No luck. How about Wally’s on the Westside? Nope. My Orange County favorites -- the Wine Club and the Wine Exchange? No and No. I kept calling but no wine store I checked -- not here, not in New York, not anywhere else, not even in Italy -- had so much as a single bottle. (An Italian-born friend who lives here, did, however, manage to score a couple of bottles for me when he returned to Italy a few years later on vacation.)

That left me with only one option: I began haunting wine auction houses, which I had a newly developed fascination for anyway. I’d bought a number of other wines -- mostly French and Italian -- at auctions over the previous few years. Now I had a specific objective at every auction: “my” wine.

Soon thereafter, at an auction in Chicago, I had to outbid an Italian restaurateur to get a few bottles. On another occasion, in Los Angeles, after a guy outbid me on several other Italian lots early in the day, I took him aside, explained my romantic-sentimental interest in the upcoming lot of Mascarello and threw myself on his mercy. He backed off with a sympathetic, knowing smile, and I got the wine.

Over time, buying a few bottles here and a few bottles there, at auctions in Chicago, San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles -- sometimes bidding in person, sometimes bidding by telephone -- I managed to acquire a couple dozen of them, paying between $45 and $55 a bottle.

“A bargain,” I told Lucy every time I came home from an auction as a successful bidder.

Barolo goes with almost everything. All those rose and tar and chocolate elements seem to bring out the best in most cuisines -- simple or elaborate -- and after 30-plus years in the bottle, the rough, tannic edges of this old-style Mascarello Barolo have softened into a wine of finesse and elegance, without losing any of its legendary power.

So we don’t let the wine dictate the restaurant, and while we’ve most often celebrated our anniversary at Italian restaurants -- in honor of our Italian wedding and honeymoon -- we’ve also taken Signore Mascarello’s fine bottles to Patina, Spago and Campanile, among other places, and once, when we spent an anniversary weekend in Palm Springs, we took one to a steakhouse.

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A dwindling supply

Now, however, I’m down to my last eight bottles. That makes me very nervous -- all the more so since I no longer frequent wine auctions as I once did. I don’t have the time or the money anymore, especially since auction prices began rising steadily -- astronomically for better, older wines. But I do check the auction catalogs and online sites, and I hadn’t seen our wedding wine offered in any auction for several years.

Then, a few weeks ago, I heard about a big auction of Italian wines coming up in New York in early April. Don Zacharia of Zachys in Scarsdale, N.Y., the sponsor of the auction, and Christian Navarro of Wally’s told me the wines were owned by a Los Angeles man who wished to remain anonymous but who had amassed the best high-end Italian collection in existence.

Both Navarro and Zacharia described his consignment as the finest assortment of Piemontese wines ever offered at auction, anywhere in the world. I asked to see a catalog. And what did I find contained therein, amid thousands of great old Barolos and Barbarescos? One bottle of my beloved ’71 Mascarello Barolo Monprivato!

Wahoo!

Even better, my wife and son and I were going to be in New York the day of the auction, as part of our annual spring break trip to the Big Apple. Wow! Talk about good timing and good luck. I would definitely attend the auction and bid on “my” wine.

I did not, however, expect to bid successfully. The catalog estimate for that single bottle was $280 to $450, well beyond my budget.

In fact, given that estimate, I wondered if Lucy would be more upset with me if I bought the wine or if I didn’t buy it.

In any event, I knew I was in trouble the minute the gavel pounded on the first sale of Italian wine in the auction. It was a five-bottle lot of 1961 Barbaresco Riserva Speciale from Bruno Giacosa. The pre-auction estimate was $1,600 to $2,600. It sold for $8,000.

Prices continued to wildly exceed estimates throughout the auction, so I felt pretty hopeless -- and helpless -- by the time “my” one-bottle lot came up more than an hour later.

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Renewing the vow

The auctioneer opened the bidding at $220, and I instantly stuck my paddle in the air. The bids whizzed by -- “$240,” “$260,” “$280.” At $300, I grit my teeth and stuck my paddle up again. Hah. “$320.” “$350.” “$380.” “$400.” $420.” “$450.” “Sold at $450” -- and not to me.

Damn!

Fortunately, not all was lost. A couple of years ago, when I’d first noticed that my supply of our wedding wine was dwindling and that bottles of it were no longer showing up at auction, I’d asked Lucy if she would leave me when we ran out of it and had to drink something else on our anniversary. When she could muster no more reassuring a response than “I don’t think so,” I’d decided that, even though she was smiling when she said that, I’d better have a fallback position.

So I tracked down at various auctions four bottles of Mascarello’s Barolo Monprivato from 1988 (the year we were married) and 18 bottles from 1989 (the year our son Lucas was born).

The ‘89, in particular, is supposed to be great -- Robert Parker gave it 95 points -- so I figure that with the three vintages nestled comfortably in my cellar, I’m safe for another 30 years.

I should live so long.

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David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com. To read previous “Matters of Taste” columns, please go to latimes.com/shaw-taste.