The Wine Collector

Two adult sisters with strawberry blonde hair once lived with their parents on a small vineyard in France. The elder sister was twenty-six and known for her temper. The younger was nineteen and by far the prettier and more playful of the two.

One day, while the younger sister was staying with friends in nearby town, an unusual man came to visit the family’s vineyard in search of rare wines to add to his private collection. Charming and handsome, the collector enthralled the family with tales of his travels and flattered them with praise of their products. As he explained, he wished to acquire two bottles of every great vintage known in the world and store them safely in his cellar for generations to come.

More than happy to receive a person of such connoisseurship, the parents welcomed the wine collector into their home so he may spend a few days sampling their range. But little did they know, their eldest daughter soon began a secret affair with the collector and would sneak into his bed each night. Seduced by his stories about wines so rare and unique they were said to possess special powers, she began to fall madly in love with him.

The day before the collector was due to depart, having chosen his two favourite vintages from their winery’s stock, the younger sister returned to the family home and spent the evening enchanting their guest with the playful conversation she was so known for. Engrossed with her youth and beauty, and with too much wine in his belly, the collector asked if she would like to join him for a moonlight stroll in the vineyard that night while the others were busy in the kitchen. Once alone amidst the rows of grape trees, he kissed her, and she kissed back.

Having wandered out in search of her lover, the elder sister suddenly found herself witnessing this moment of infidelity and turned pale with a jealous rage. Without disturbing the pair, she returned to the collector’s room intent on throwing his things down a well. But as she rummaged through his luggage, she uncovered a strange bottle of wine hidden in a protected part of his trunk. The bottle was clearly very old and featured the emblem of a marigold flower sealed in wax above its faded label. While she didn’t recognise the seal, she remembered that the wine collector had whispered strange secrets about such a vintage while they lay in bed together only nights before. He had told her that this wine was said to be so delicious, that if you could bear to share it with another, it was possible to steal the youth and beauty of the last person they had kissed. Vowing revenge, she took the bottle of bewitched wine and packed it in a bag of her own. Then, leaving no more than a short note for her parents and a single word scribbled on her sister’s pillow, she disappeared into the night.

Fifty years later in London, a happy young couple named Marie and Daniel had just celebrated their wedding day. While their ceremony was full of joy, Marie had experienced a melancholy moment when she saw that her grandmother, a lady named Annette, had sent them a present despite being unable to attend the wedding in person. She had passed away only weeks before. Upon opening the gift, Marie was surprised to find it was an ancient looking bottle of red wine with a wax seal above the label. The wine also came with a note explaining that the bottle had once been given to Annette by a wine collector in France and was supposedly one of the rarest and most unique vintages in the world. Some even said it was bewitched. Marie smiled as she thought of the many stories her grandmother used to tell her about her time in France and other tales about princesses and potions. She understood that this gift represented those stories and the special connection they had always shared.

Another unexpected gift was a very generous cheque from lady named Cécile. A card accompanying the cheque explained that she was a French relative of Marie’s grandmother who wanted to contribute some funds to the European honeymoon the newlyweds were known to be taking. Cécile expressed her wish to reconnect with more members of her extended family and invited Daniel and Marie to visit her home by the seaside in the south of France on their up-and-coming trip. Despite not fully understanding how Cécile fit into her family tree, Marie wrote back thanking her for the cheque and accepting the kind invitation. Aside from the extension to their holiday, Marie also hoped that meeting Cécile might offer more insight into her grandmother’s youth in France and perhaps even shed more light on the old bottle of wine she had received.

Two weeks later, after spending a few nights in Paris and another in Marseille, Daniel and Marie found themselves pulling into the pebbled driveway of a stone cottage that overlooked the sea. This was Cécile’s little home and she was expecting them. As Daniel switched off the trusty GPS of their rental car and hopped out, he saw an elderly lady slowly emerge from her herb garden. As the lady turned to face the couple, Marie could not help but gasp in shock. For there, standing in front of them, was a lady who looked so similar to Marie’s late grandmother that she could have been mistaken for Annette’s ghost. Cécile went forth to embrace Marie with a large hug before doing the same with Daniel. She then led them through her house into her back garden where she laid out some refreshments.

Over the course of the next hour, in slow broken English, Cécile explained that she was in fact Marie’s great aunt: the only sister of Annette. Marie apologised for her ignorance, for she had always thought that her grandmother’s immediate French family had died long ago. To this, Cécile spent a moment in quiet reflection, before revealing that she and Annette had once had a terrible fight that had never been resolved. As they had ceased to be each other’s lives, Cécile could understand why Marie may have grown up not even knowing she existed at all. This was the reason Cécile had wanted to invite Marie and her new husband to her home and reconnect in person. Especially now that Annette had passed away.

That night, after showing Daniel and Marie to their rooms, Cécile cooked up a delicious seafood dinner with fresh herbs from the garden. Unfortunately, Marie seemed to have a bad reaction to something that she’d eaten. Cécile claimed it must have been the shellfish and gave Marie a pill that she thought might help. As Daniel took his wife to bed, Marie pleaded with him not to leave Cécile to clean up the kitchen alone. Obliging to this request, he kissed Marie goodnight and returned to the living room expecting that the elderly lady would usher him straight back to bed to take care of his wife instead. But contrary to this expectation, Cécile invited Daniel to relax on her sofa and laid out some soft cheeses on the coffee table. Then, after disappearing into a small cellar, she brought over what looked like a very old and unusual bottle of red wine. While it was covered with dust, Daniel could make out a wax seal with an imprint of a flower that reminded him of the bottle Marie had received. Before he had a chance to take a closer look, Cécile tugged out its cork and poured two large glasses of the rich burgundy coloured wine for them to enjoy.

The taste was unlike anything Daniel had ever experienced before. Peppery yet sweet, it had obviously mellowed with great age to become a complex melody of flavours that Daniel felt he was hardly qualified to appreciate. After Cécile explained that she’d been saving it a long time for a special occasion, Daniel felt too guilty to refuse the continuous top-ups she gave both of their glasses and thanked her greatly for sharing it. But not only was the wine full of flavour, it seemed give Cécile more vibrancy and vigour with each glass that she drank. Daniel, on the other hand, began to feel a wave of extreme relaxation start to take over his body and by the time he had finished the last glass Cécile had poured him, he was unable to resist closing his eyes.

Daniel awoke on the couch to the smell of fresh coffee and squinted through the morning sun to make out the figure of Marie in the kitchen. Noticing him stirring, she sung out the word “Bonjour” with a large smile. Daniel chuckled at her French impression and started to apologise for falling asleep on the couch. But Marie simply smiled again and approached him with a cup of coffee.

Suddenly Cécile entered the living room looking frail and confused as if she had had a terrible night’s sleep. Much to Daniel’s embarrassment, instead of attending to her great aunt, Marie wrapped her arms around him and began kissing his lips sensually as if wanting to exhibit a strange display of public affection. The old lady looked horrified at what she was witnessing and then let out a scream as she caught a glimpse of herself in the hallway mirror and fell to the floor. But rather than going to the poor woman’s aid, Marie did something Daniel did not expect at all. She started laughing. She laughed wickedly at the old lady.

Then the young girl, who Daniel knew to be his wife, stopped laughing and walked over to where the old woman lay, and in slow broken English, began to tell them both a story. It was a story about two French sisters named Annette and Cécile. How the younger sister Annette had betrayed the elder sister Cécile by seducing the man she loved. It was a story about a bewitched bottle of wine with the seal of a marigold flower, and how Cécile had stolen this bottle from a wine collector knowing that one day she would use it to take revenge against someone whom her sister had loved, someone like Marie, by stealing her youth and beauty. It was a story about patience and scheming and the madness of jealousy that had consumed the better half of Cécile’s bitter lifetime. But most of all, it was a story about Cécile breaking the heart of someone who had looked just like her younger sister, someone who in her mind was her younger sister, by making her watch as she kissed the man she loved right in front of her.

It was a story that should have terrified the old lady lying on the floor who Daniel now struggled to comprehend was in fact his wife Marie. But it hadn’t. For despite relying on joints that were fifty years older than they had been the day before, Marie rose to her feet and glared at woman who had stolen her youth, kissed her husband and even spiked her dinner.

“But there is one part of this story you seem to have forgotten aunty Cécile.” Said Marie in a playful tone.

“He always collected two bottles of every vintage.”

At this, Cécile’s young face began to turn pale; just as her strawberry blonde hair would soon begin to turn grey again. For after packing their car and taking two wine glasses from Cécile’s kitchen, Daniel and Marie were soon sitting by the seaside in the south of France enjoying their honeymoon over a bottle of very old red wine they had brought with them from England, a bottle with a marigold flower seal. And Marie looked more like herself with every sip.