"A Wine Collection
With a Story in Every Bottle"

October 1, 2001

By Christina Kelly
Avalon Staff Writer

Liddy gave up drinking all alcohol about five years ago, even though her 30-year wine collection remains in the basement of her Portland, Oregon home.

I secretly thought I might be the beneficiary of her no-alcohol status, but was rudely awakened from my wine lust when she announced she had no intention of parting with her collection.

"What good is it to you now?" I asked during a recent visit. I knew she had some health issues and thought I could remove the temptation from her home.

"Just because I gave up the privilege of drinking doesn't mean I've lost my cotton-picking mind," she retorted. "I get a great deal of satisfaction in that collection. I can almost tell you where each bottle was purchased and what we were doing. I am not ready to let it go. I may never let it go.

"Hell, I may pack it up and take it to heaven with me."

Liddy makes an impact on first impression. I always thought of her as a shorter, stockier version of actress Sandra Dee. For the last seven years, she operated her own personnel services business, elbowing her way through those who would try to limit her career rise. At 53, she still had fire, although picked her battles more carefully.

It used to be Liddy and Jerry, but he died in 1993 of a rare pneumonia, leaving her emotionally crushed and clueless about her future.

I've known them since I was about 10 years old. I always thought they were related because my mother referred to them as my Aunt Liddy and Uncle Jerry. Turns out, they were like family, only didn't come from the blood kind.

The couple met towards the end of the 1960s. They were married three months before Jerry was sent off to Vietnam in 1968. He returned a year later, but Liddy said some of her husband was missing and lost. As a child, I wondered what part didn't return. I clearly remember searching his feet for missing toes.

They bought 20 acres near Sweet Home, Oregon and settled down. Jerry worked in construction and Liddy ran the farm. I spent several summers on the farm, learning how to buck hay, fix fences and castrate sheep.

When I look back on that time, I realize my learning curve involved so much more than farming.

In the winters, when construction work and farm life slowed, Liddy and Jerry would travel. By the time I arrived in June, after school recessed for summer, I spent the first week hearing about their adventures in France, Italy, Spain and Portugal. They also took long weekend trips to the wine country in California. Those trips sparked their interest in making wine.

From the time I was 10 or 11-years-old, Liddy taught me how to smell. Not just a whiff of a summer breeze or the pungent smell of a skunk hidden under the porch.

Liddy would gather fresh basil from the garden and invite me to stick my face in the pile.

"What do you smell? What does it remind you of?" she would ask.

It was the same with freshly ground coffee, cilantro, lemons and ripe blackberries and raspberries.

We would often hike up in to the hills on the property and plop into tall fields of grass.

"Tell me what you smell, Christina," Liddy would say.

At first, these exercises were confusing. When we sat among the grass and weeds, I would respond, "I smell grass."

But gradually, I learned she wanted me to search for more than the surface. She was teaching me to separate the layers of aromas.

"I smell lemon, and something sour," I said, grabbing the weeds to my face.

"Good," she shouted. "Now tell me what sour smells like."

"Like mildew," I said, happy to win her approval.

The next day, Liddy was digging a hole near the house, transferring a houseplant outdoors. Without prompting, I buried my face deep into the hole. I rose with dirt up my nostrils.

"It smells musty," I said brushing and snorting off dirt, and laughing more dirt into my mouth. "And it tastes gritty."

"That's my girl," Liddy said. "Now, go and collect the eggs and come back with four new adjectives describing what the chicken coop smells like."

Some of her olfactory lessons were less fun.

Each night, after Jerry returned from work and showered, I would help Liddy prepare dinner. The couple took delight selecting the right wine to compliment the meal.

I didn't understand this ritual at first, but I now see that it was their moment to connect in the wine cellar, embracing memories and each other. Sometimes they would take up to an hour, while I waited for the signal to start boiling the corn.

Jerry was a big, burley man with thick auburn hair, bright blue eyes and freckled red skin from years of working outdoors. After a couple glasses of wine, he reminded me of a big red balloon.

At the table, Liddy would pour me a small amount of wine in a cup and ask me to smell it. At first, the smell was nasty - alcohol fumes -- and I couldn't comprehend what layers I was suppose to identify.

With prompting, and my daily smell exercises, I started to understand Liddy's lessons with blackberries, cherries, plums and earth smells.

To this day, my mother curses Liddy, accusing her of creating a "super nose" on me.

"You ought to work for the government with that nose," she said once after I remarked there was something smelly in her kitchen. "I don't smell anything."

I was working in Seattle when I got the call from Liddy that Jerry had died. It was 1993. I didn't even know he was sick, but apparently he caught a rare strain of pneumonia and was gone in less than three days.

Liddy always believed that Jerry had respiratory problems stemming from Agent Orange during his stint in Vietnam. She also believed the chemicals he used as a soldier likely prevented them from having children.

The only time I saw battle scars from Vietnam was when Jerry occasionally drank too much wine. He would sit on the porch as the summer sun dipped below the hills, extinguishing all light before the moon and stars could sparkle, and talk to himself.

Whenever this happened, Liddy would tell me to go to my bedroom and read while she sat next to him. My bedroom was above the porch, so I heard some of the conversations. On those occasions, I learned that Jerry's soul was damaged and Liddy was the saint sent to comfort him.

One time I looked out the window and saw the couple shedding their clothes to skinny dip in their man-made pond. It looked like four big, white, bouncing moons hitting the water. While the memory makes me smile now, I remember being horrified at that sight when I was 12.

Liddy created a nurturing environment for Jerry to heal. Without him, she didn't want to stay on the farm and it was sold in less than six months after his death.

Liddy moved to Portland and funneled her energy helping people get jobs. Eventually, she bought into a company and ran her own business.

I lost track of her for a few years. We sent birthday and Christmas cards, and talked on the phone every four months or so, but she never revealed how much she suffered the first years after Jerry died. It wasn't until recently that she confided in me about her life for the first three years after her husband's death. She said she drank too much in order to ease her pain. About six years ago, she developed diabetes. In 1996, she finally gave up wine, the last alcohol she reluctantly released.

"I abused the privilege," she said frankly. "I forgot everything I taught you - about smell, taste and texture. I just drank it, and before I knew it, two empty wine bottles were sitting on the counter.

"When I lost the ability to tell if I was drinking a Cabernet Sauvignon, Zinfandel or a Syrah, and didn't really care, I knew it was time to give it up."

Liddy sold her business last year when she remarried - ironically to another Vietnam vet. Liddy found him a job. Her new husband, Randy, doesn't drink, which furthered my belief that I would inherit the wine cellar.

Although the wines gather dust in her basement, Liddy is under no time constraint to part with the collection. She and her husband plan a trip soon to Vietnam to ease some old wounds and allow Liddy the opportunity to see where life was altered for the two men she loved.

I suspect there will come a day when she will release her cellar, a bottle or a case at a time, with a story and a memory. When I think of the times she and Jerry spent in their cellar, I can only hope that she spends some of that time, and those stories, with me. For the first time, I knew the wine was secondary.