As I sometimes was poetic about meals and restaurants, I am sure that some people may find some of my writings questionable.   I am not implying that I am weaving the Emperor’s New Clothes, but I am a collector or a hoarder of mementos.   I saved wooden wine crates and eventually took them apart to be paneling in my wine cellar.  I saved menus from restaurants when I could, because some meals were so outstanding that I did not want to forget.  I have taken postcards and flyers as well from some restaurants.  I also saved wine labels, boy have I saved wine labels.  That is why some of the labels I show are not pristine, because they did not want to leave the bottle.  Some of the labels are mounted in scrap books, and some are mounted on walls of my wine cellar as a type of wallpaper.   Some of the labels I may never be able to show or to write about, because they are behind long and high wooden wine racks.

This brings me to another visual aid that I have used and will probably use again in the future – Match Books.  I lament that most restaurants no longer advertise on a match book.  In this day and age of political correctness and whether smoking a cigar on a golf course is harmful to someone else’s health; match books and the era that they came from are gone.   My Bride and I collected these curios as keepsakes, the same way we have kept them from weddings that we have attended.   Some restaurants have tried to maintain the tradition by furnishing a “matchbook” or “match box” of toothpicks.  Of course I have collected some of these as well.  We have a display case in our downstairs powder room filled with some match books of places that we loved, that are no longer around, as well as some places that we frequent, as well as some places that are still going concerns that we may have only visited once.  In our dining room are two large mouth one gallon bottles that are filled with other match books from our dining and holiday experiences.

The venue “The Wine Raconteur” allows me to relive some of these moments, and have given me some validation for keeping all of the ephemera that I have.   Sometimes I look and I think to myself “I forget that we went there.”  This has really nothing to do about wine, but I wanted to explain how some of the items are used, and how some of the items evoke a story, which is what a raconteur loves to do.  I do thank you for reading my ramblings and I hope this gives some insight of what may spark a story.