WINE & SPIRITS

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The challenge was figuring out which bottles to serve to which guests. I advised him to set up a Kistler tasting bar. Everyone got the thrill of a vertical tasting of great wines."

But how, I wondered, could de Baubigny's system, ingenuous as it is, manage to keep track of what had been drunk? "The bar code," the Californian explained, with apparent delight. "You scan the bar code"—you can purchase scanners through Vintrust—"as you remove a bottle from the cellar and it's automatically removed from the account."

Vintrust is not merely for major collectors. "We have clients storing as little as a few cases of Screaming Eagle or Harlan Estate," de Baubigny says. "Of course, we also have some pretty massive collections, like the Oklahoma collector who brought his entire Bordeaux collection to California—80,000 bottles valued at some $70 million." Now that's what I call a pile of boxes.