a basement discovery

This case was found in a friend of a friend’s unfinished basement. No idea about when and where it was purchased though import labels have been added so in the US. There are 11 bottles of Bouchard sparkling[img]
vintage 1934 and one Vueuve Cliquot yellow label. The fill is at the bottom of the capsule. Any thoughts?
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Have a great freakin party!!!

I can’t find any reference to Geeting & Fromm (retailer? distributor?) or Pickerline Importers, so this must have been brought into the US a very long time ago.

Doubt there would be be much resale or auction value because of the provenance and low fills. I would plan to taste them for fun, picking maybe 3-4 bottles at a time and opening them together. I’m sure others will chime in, but I have had surprisingly random experiences with the exact same wine stored together for decades, so expect variability. try to pick 1-2 higher fills and 1-2 lower fills at a time to maybe help with a balance of success. Keep your expectations low, perhaps have a couple newer bottles on hand in case they all are dead, but also don’t give up on a wine just because it seems off immediately. Plan to play with them over an hour or two at least; I’ve had an older Burgundy with a much worse full have about a 30 minute window of fascinating deliciousness sandwiched by absolutely nothing, so you never know. Stand them up for at least a day if not longer to let all the sediment settle and decant off to keep the grit as minimal as possible. Since these are found wines and you have no $ in them, have fun with them!

Though Champagne has a reputation for being delicate and in need of careful shipping, if these bottles have retained their sparkle, the CO2 would tend to reduce oxidation. I’ve had a few surprising (in a good way) experiences with older sparkling wines that had not been treated well. It should be fun to try them. As Matthew says, there’s probably no secondary market value.

The way to create secondary market value is to claim they came from the basement of a very famous person. Maybe FDR or Douglas MacArthur lived in that house and was rumored to love Champagne? :slight_smile:

I did actually come across a few bottles of the Bouchard recently. Not the '34 but an old NV probably released in the early '50s or so. It was surprisingly good. These won’t be worth a lot but they should be a lot of fun to drink!

And hire a famous wine critic, to generate tasting notes.

Nice find!

Well, if you go to any wine pick ups at your favorite producers take one. People love old wine even when it tastes bad.

There were lots of Fromms in the wine biz,mostly notably Alfred Fromm of Fromm and Sichel.
It’s too bad Rudy is in the big house. You could sell the empties to him and I’m sure he could make’47 Dom Perignon out of potato peels and watermelon rind.

and put them in a 55 degree wine cellar so you can say, “removed from a wine cellar at 55 degrees.”

just etch “Churchill” in the side of them and should be all set.

Thanks for the feedback.

I had searched for the importer and found nothing so I’m not surprised no one else knows anything. The bottles were actually packed in strange with individual draw sleeves. Lost in a corner of an old basement and left undisturbed the storage was probably decent.

I’ll probably take the suggestion of having a party and opening up several, though not too many since if they are drinkable, they will probably fade quickly.

It’s funny how often things these actually occur, but the occurrence now just seems to nefarious.

I had a law partner bring me last year a bottle of 1961 Chateau La Mission Haut Brion that he “re-found” in a closet as he was packing his house for a move. Evidently he and his wife got that bottle as a gift in the 1970s, stuck it in a dark closet, and then forgot about it. He didn’t know what to do with it then or even now, as neither drink wine. I told him to pop it with family or close friends and see whether it still had any magic left. I doubted it, as I know for a fact that the house - it’s in my neighborhood - just since the 1990s, has had multiple weeks in sweltering hot summer with no AC, a hurricane having kicked out power. It’s how some of my wine spoiled, in 2004 we had 3 hurricanes in 4 weeks, knocking out power for about 20 days in high-90s weather. The house was a sauna.

1934 was a good vintage, tasting note will be really interesting.

“[Paul] Fromm first hoped to become a patron of music in Germany; he was planning the establishment of a music foundation in his native land when he was forced to flee the Nazi pogroms in 1938. Settling in Chicago, he went into business as a wine importer, co-founding the Geeting and Fromm Corporation in 1939, founding the Great Lakes Wine Company in 1943.”

Too bad Maureen can’t chime in.

Good sleuthing! [cheers.gif]

Thanks for the find on the importer. Further probing has yielded that the case was purchased 20-25 years ago. Undisturbed from that time and stored in good conditions. Still trying to find where it was purchased. The labels and capsules are generally in good condition and some bottles have a good fill. But, there’s about 60 years of missing history. No idea about that. Probably open one or two at a gathering next week.