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- Subscribe - Contact Us - Rate Card - Place an Ad Valley&State Backpage O&E Sports Archives Classifieds Faith&Beliefs Obituaries Revels April 30, 2004 Downtown The pendulum swings back to collecting Andrew Scot Bolsinger When we were kids, we collected baseball cards and pennies and rocks and bottle caps and bugs and really anything. Everything was neat and interesting and new and exciting. Anything was worth keeping. Then we got older. We never looked at the stuff we kept. In college, we started moving around, which made throwing things in a Dumpster pretty exciting, compared with carrying boxes. The collections stop. They did for me anyway. In my early 20s I had a library collection that could not be contained in fewer than 30 boxes. I had my own card catalog system. Each book belonged in a section of the shelf. A check-out card was taped to each book for those wanting to borrow it. Then I started moving. Not just once. Eight times in five years. The library is a goner. Sold some. Gave most away. Box by box, book by book, until a lone bookcase with a few favorites remained. The collection is gone. Just as is my baseball card collection of more than 2,000 cards from long ago that I built up with a friend. We lost that one, or maybe he ended up with it. Who knows? But the love of collections never really goes away, likely because that innate curiosity and interest in the things around us is one of those wonderful core aspects of being human. The good news for me is this last move, completed on a harried Friday, is hopefully the last one for a long, long time. To celebrate, I have started collecting again. The club To bolster my new-found love of collecting, I joined a couple of clubs. No, not a baseball card club, or a rock club, or a bug club. This time its wine. I tried collecting wine about 10 years ago. Intent on collecting, I'd save up enough money to buy one pricey bottle, only to open it a couple of weeks later. Perhaps its my new feeling of rootedness, and perhaps because I have a little more money than I did back then, but now, I find collecting as much fun as drinking. To help me pick new and interesting wines, I enlisted Jason Doss, co-owner of Chateaulin. Jason is passionate about running his wine shop. Recently he decided to pass that enjoyment along to customers by starting a monthly wine club. I am hooked. Where else would I find a crisp and fruity white wine from South Africa for about $6? Or a definite keeper, a $70 of French wine that Doss says will age perfectly for the next 10 years? Doss' personal touch is geared to customers as much as the wine. "I focus on all the people in the club," Doss says, "and get them great wine they will like." He doesn't use just a single winery, but samples wines every day to find those he'll single out for the wine club each month. The club offers three levels of involvement: $25 a month, $50 a month and $100 a month. Whatever level the customer chooses, Doss' mission is to find a red and white wine for the allotted amount. For the $100 level that's a breeze he says. The real challenge, and the fun, is finding two great wines for $25. "There are some really, truly fantastic wines out there," he says. Just as there is no shortage of wineries who want to pitch their wines. Doss estimates that about 50 wineries contact him each month, "including a couple of folks from France," he says. Of course, wine clubs are nothing new. But by not touting a single winery and taking the time to get to know his customers, Doss works at tailoring the club to their interests. "I wanted to do things a little differently," he says. The collection Just like that, my old obsessive tendencies have returned. I purchased a dramatic new wine cabinet for my dramatic new living room. For the first time in my life, I actually need more than 10 spaces on the wine rack. Several keepers have already been branded as such and have been put into hibernation until the right moment a few years from now. To avoid past mistakes of drinking away my collection, I learned to collect in twos. One for now, one to "put down" as the Tidings wine columnist Lorn Razzano likes to say. I find little jewels from stores everywhere I travel. Like digging through the dirt behind my house as a kid looking for white crystal-like rocks, I love popping into new places to uncover a new collectible. When I am bored, I visit Razzano's wine shop and ask for his latest favorites, in twos of course. And the highlight is the beginning of each month when Doss sends the e-mail that this month's selection has been chosen. Doss tailors my membership for me, just as he claims. Rather than settle on one level, he rotates me each month through the three levels so I get to try out all different types of wines, and different levels of excellence. Next month is the $100 month. Whoopee! It's like Christmas every three months. That's the nature of a collection. It brings joy to something kind of silly. It adds purpose to something relatively mundane. More importantly, it marks where we have been. It says a bit about who we are. It gives a little pleasure to look at, whether its wine, or bugs for that matter. Because life really is that interesting still, just as it was as a kid. DailyTidings.com Home Page Valley&State | Backpage | O&E | Sports | Archives | Weather | Classifieds Columnists | Faith&Beliefs | Obituaries | Revels | Subscribe | Contact Us Copyright 2004 Ashland Daily Tidings and Ottaway Newspapers All Rights Reserved Click Here Site Search: .:Advertisements:. RESOURCES - Mail Tribune News - ODOT Road Cams