|
Story and Photography by Manos Angelakis
An amazing cellar.
It is not often that a food and wine writer encounters a wine aficionado with such an extensive collection of first growth French wines, as well as very long verticals of some of the best wines from other wine producing countries.
The Grand Cascades Lodge, Crystal Springs, near Hardyston, New Jersey, (see Reflections Spa at Grand Cascades Lodge) has an amazing cellar that serves as a depository for the wine collection of the owner and the restaurants in the resort that include the award winning Latour Restaurant, named after the eponymous Bordeaux Château. Approximately 65,000 bottles of assorted sizes up to Jeroboams is the treasure hidden in this huge, underground, climate conditioned and controlled cellar in Northwestern New Jersey.
The Latour Restaurant is located in a tower, at the western end of the complex. The cellar is accessed from the restaurant’s lobby by a beautifully detailed antique cast-iron spiral staircase that looks as if it came from an old bank or perhaps the Bourse in Philadelphia.
 Tasting rooms are arranged in such a way that different sized groups can dine in the cellar, or just do a sit-down tasting. The wine collection is divided into separate climate-controlled rooms. A corridor winds around the periphery of the storage rooms. Each room houses a specific wine producer or producers from the same country, with representative bottles shown through windows and the wines in cases, racks, or boxes stacked in the back of the room. For example, the Latour vertical starts with an 1863 bottle, and continues through 1888, 1893, 1900, 1905, 1906 etc. on to the current vintage. There are also extended verticals of Mouton from the mid 1940s on, Lafite, La Tâche, Petrus, Margaux, Cheval Blanc, Palmer, and many other enviable bottles from both Burgundy and Bordeaux. In other windows, we saw displays of Italian, German, Chilean, Californian etc. collectible bottles, all stored under ideal conditions.
There is also a room with a computerized device developed at UCLA Davis that can do a nondestructive analysis of the contains of a particular bottle, and let you know whether the wine is genuine and of the vintage on the label; whether it was stored under good conditions; whether it is drinkable or over its prime; whether it might be corked, etc. This device is invaluable for collectors purchasing wines at auction, where there is little information and some doubt about a wine’s provenance. The facility offers authentication and verification services at a rate of $25 per bottle, a small amount to be paid for peace-of-mind when one is purchasing valuable, collectible bottles of a certain age.
For the wine aficionado, this collection is a primary attraction to the resort and its restaurants. All the restaurants have access to this collection and the wine list, a thick book of many pages, describes many but not all of the available bottles. Actually, I found the prices on this list quite reasonable, considering the auction cost of these wines. And, if you don’t see a particular wine you would like to have with your meal – especially a first growth French or a top Italian bottle, don’t hesitate to ask the sommelier; they might have a small number of bottles in the cellar, not enough to include in the wine list.
I lift my glass to the health of the person that created and continuously upgrades this amazing cellar. They have created a wine lover’s dream.
The Wine Cellar
The Resort at Crystal Springs
One Wild Turkey Way
Hardyston, NJ 07419
+(973) 827-4357
© July 2009 LuxuryWeb Magazine. All rights reserved.
|
