Getting the Bugs Out

“You’ve got termites.”

Great.

I wasn’t really upset when the inspector told me that my wife, our 3-year-old son and I would have to move into a hotel for three days during the fumigation. But I was worried about my wine.

I’d had a wine cellar built a couple of years ago, and there were about a thousand bottles in it. I didn’t want them ruined.

“No problem,” the inspector assured me. “The bottles have corks and lead capsules; they’ll be fine.”

I was skeptical. I envisioned myself dropping to the floor a few weeks later, clutching my throat, poisoned by Chardonnay.

“How do you know it won’t leave a toxic residue in the wine?” I asked. “Are you sure the gas won’t affect the taste or the smell of the wine? Can you give me the name of anyone else you’ve worked for who had a wine collection so I could ask about the experience?”

He said he couldn’t give me the names of any customers without violating their privacy. Nor would he agree to call any customers and ask if they’d be willing to speak to me. He insisted I had nothing to worry about.

I asked if he would guarantee that in writing. “You’ll have to call my supervisor for that,” he said.

The supervisor said he, too, was sure the wine would be OK, but no, he couldn’t give me a written guarantee. That would have to come from the people who made the fumigation gas: Dow Chemical Co.

I called Dow and explained my situation. “I’m sure everything will be OK,” the Dow lady explained, “but we can’t give you any guarantees. I’d move the wine out if I were you, just to be 100% sure.”

Move the wine out? More than 1,000 bottles?

I needed some expert advice.

First, I called Dan Berger, then the wine writer for The Times.

“I had the same problem myself about five years ago,” he said.

“What did you do?”

“We moved.”

That seemed a bit drastic.

I made a few more calls, starting with two wine merchants I respected, Steve Wallace in Los Angeles and Daryl Corti in Sacramento. Then I called Harvey Steiman at the Wine Spectator and Vern Singleton in the Department of Oenology at UC Davis. I called Bipin Desai, a well-known wine collector in Riverside.

None of them had ever dealt with termites and wine. But Wallace and Singleton said they vaguely recalled having heard about a couple of wine collectors who’d been through fumigation, with--as they recalled--no damage to their wine.

Nevertheless, everyone agreed that to be safe, I should move the wine out, especially after I explained the fumigation process: The house would be tented and gassed the first day, aired out the second day and tested with meters the third day; the door to my wine cellar would have to be open all three days to allow the gas to flow in and out.

But moving the wine meant filling almost 100 cases, carrying them up two flights of stairs, loading my car, driving back and forth 10 or 12 times to a wine storage facility (unless I rented a small U-Haul truck), unloading the wine there, reloading it three days later and then carrying it back downstairs to my wine cellar and unloading it. With my bad back, I figured I’d be in traction before I finished six cases.

I thought about hiring someone else to do the loading and unloading. But I’d still have to supervise--and since my wine is individually racked, it didn’t matter who did the heavy lifting; I’d still have to keep a careful record of what bottles went into which cases so I could put each bottle back in its appropriate slot. That alone would be enormously time-consuming.

One friend suggested that I rent a refrigerated truck and just park it in front of my house for three days. That would eliminate one round of loading and unloading, but my street is too narrow to park it there. I’d have to park it elsewhere. Where? And how could I stop someone from breaking into it?

What if the refrigeration unit in the truck failed or someone plowed into the truck? Or hijacked it? Would my car insurance cover that? For that matter, would my homeowners insurance cover the wine if I took it to a storage facility?

It all sounded like a nightmare.

I began to look into alternative means of termite termination. I heard about a company that microwaves the termites. No tent. No poison gas. No moving out. I called and asked about my wine.

“No problem.”

“But if you microwave the walls, don’t you also inevitably microwave the wine? Won’t that ruin it?”

“I’ll get back to you on that,” he said. That was the last I heard from him.

I called a company that promises to kill termites by “freezing their buns off.” Again, no poison gas. When I asked about my wine, this company, too, promised to call back and never did.

I called three other traditional exterminators, hoping someone would have a better solution to my wine problem--or, better yet, tell me there were no termites in our house after all. No such luck. Everyone found termites. Everyone said the wine would be OK. No one would put that in writing. The only differences in the companies were the prices, which ranged from $1,900 to $3,800.

Then I got to thinking. All the termite inspectors said that we wouldn’t have to remove unopened food or medicine from the house during the fumigation if we sealed it in the special plastic bags they would give us. Why couldn’t I do the same thing with my wine? Why couldn’t I put each bottle in an individual plastic bag and slide it right back into its appropriate slot in the cellar? That would take time time and work, too, but it would eliminate record-keeping, loading, climbing, carrying, unloading--and any insurance problems.

I called the four exterminators. Yes, they said; that would work. But they all said that they had only very large bags, about 18 inches by 36 inches, and that they would provide only a dozen or so of them; I needed more than 1,000 bags--much smaller bags, bags small enough to keep the wrapped bottles from being too bulky to fit in the racks.

I scheduled the extermination for the next week and went to grocery stores, then hardware stores, looking for plastic bags. No luck. All the plastic bags they had were much thinner than the 4 millimeters required by law for protection from fumigation. I called vineyard suppliers in the Napa and Sonoma valleys, looking for thicker bags--or for some other solution. After a dozen or so calls, someone finally recommended a butcher supply store in Los Angeles, five minutes from my office.

Bingo. The store had 3-millimeter thick bags, and a man who worked there insisted that they would be sufficient.

“Our bags are polyurethane and nylon,” he told me. “They form a perfect oxygen barrier. Buy one of our vacuum sealers to close ‘em up, and you got no problem.” I figured I could do the whole thing for about $200.

But the exterminators insisted that, poly/nylon or not, I needed 4 millimeters of protection.

The extermination was scheduled for the next Monday; I was getting desperate. Then, while shopping for dinner at my local fish store one night, I noticed that their plastic bags seemed just the right size for a bottle of wine. I asked how thick they were.

“A millimeter and a half.”

Great. Combined with the butcher bag, that would give me 4 1/2 millimeters, more than enough.

“Can I buy a thousand of them directly from you?”

The fishmonger looked at me as if I were nuts but he said, “Sure.”

“How much?”

He took out his pencil and paper, checked with his boss and came up with a figure: $23.

Deal.

Now all I had to do was take each bottle out of its rack, put it in a fish bag, tape it shut, put that in the butcher bag, press the lever on the vacuum-sealer and put the bottle back in the rack.

I took a vacation day from work that Friday, put on a sweatsuit to withstand several hours in my 55-degree cellar and started stuffing bags at 10 o’clock in the morning. It wasn’t easy. The butcher bags were a little larger than a wine bottle, and it was difficult to force all the air out of them before vacuum-sealing them; too much air inside meant the bag would be too big to fit in the wine rack. I finally figured out how to avoid that and, except for dinner, worked straight through until 3:30 the next morning--at which point I was almost half through: 500 bottles down, 530 to go.

By then, I was freezing, my back was stiff and my fingers and wrists were sore. I imagined returning to work the next week with carpal tunnel syndrome or one of the other repetitive stress injuries that increasingly cripple people who type on computers or do other work that involves the same small hand movements over and over.

At 10 the next morning, I returned to the cellar. I worked until 7 that evening, then resumed work the same time Sunday morning. I finally finished late Sunday afternoon--just in time to help my wife bag the last of the food.

I gave the exterminators my office, car and hotel telephone numbers and left the house. Following my lifelong practice of trying to turn predicaments into pleasures, I checked the family into the elegant, charming Checkers Hotel in downtown Los Angeles for two nights.

When we moved back into our house, everything looked fine. My thermometer showed that the cellar temperature had not risen above 57 degrees in our absence. I unwrapped my favorite bottles first: the ’69 La Ta^che, the ’63 Ports, the ’64 and ’71 Barolos from Guiseppe Mascarello, the ’61 Brunello di Montalcino Riserva from Bondi Santi, the ’55 Suduiraut, the 15 bottles of Chateau d’Yquem, the 65 or 70 other Bordeaux First Growths, a few white Burgundies. With help from our Saturday night baby-sitter, the job was done five hours later.

My wife and I drank a bottle of red Burgundy that night and a bottle of white Burgundy the next night. Both seemed fine--untainted by the Vikane gas. Two nights later, I took two bottles of ’81 Trotanoy to a friend’s house. One had been in the cellar during the fumigation; the other I had removed for comparative purposes.

We blind-tasted them, and three of the four people at the table thought the fumigated bottle tasted slightly better. Hmmm, I thought. Maybe I’m on to something here. . . .