Chateau Montelena

In that utterly surreal year and a half that followed Hurricane Katrina, I was contacted by the first friend I had made after moving to New Orleans. Georges Cardona, a Columbian immigrant who had moved to the US with his family when he was 15 was a co-worker at the giant oil rig fabricator that employed me as a picture librarian in 1984 and 85. (Years later, his nephew would become an employee of mine at the Historic New Orleans Collection, although I didn't know it when I hired him). He was a talented film maker and photographer and despite looks that weren't awe inspiring, a confident and happy Lothario. He and his wife Sheila were among the few locals in New Orleans that welcomed us into their home in our first years in the city and introduced us to others. He was the only person in the city I dared show my photographs to, and whose reactions I cared about.

In 1989 he and Sheila moved to Singapore and I had only seen him a couple of times since, a period in which he fathered a daughter and was later divorced. He ultimately left the company and started a successful business as a photographer and corporate film maker. He moved to Australia in the 90's and became a vintner, catering to the South East Asian market. Although Sheila had moved back to New Orleans and we had seen her several times, I had not seen Georges in over a decade. In the wake of disaster, he made his reappearance, mysterious as always (he was the kind of person who, while always extraordinarily charming and likable, you could never quite trust, ), and I saw him several times in the course of a 3 month period. Each time, he would arrive from Houston, where he had moved, driving a different expensive car (Porsche, Mercedes, BMW) "loaned" by a "friend". He gave me a book of photographs published by Vogue that he had shot in Asia. He showed me a set of pictures on the web that he had shot of mold patterns on the walls of flooded houses. They were beautiful, abstract, brilliant. I can't find them - I don't know if they're still out there.

On his last visit to our home, in late 2006 or 07, I can't remember which, he brought a bottle of wine that he told us had been given to him by a guy whose wine cellar had flooded. The bottle was covered with muck from the flood and the label was totally unreadable. It was a red, and tasted like Cabernet - the best Cab Iris or I had ever tasted - and we talked of our first meeting, laughed, felt sad about his divorce and parted late in the evening. A few months later, he died of heart failure at the age of 55. We understood when the news came that Georges had been wrapping up loose ends - touching base with all of those he had known over the years. We felt privileged to be important enough to Georges that he would seek us out after more than a decade. I think of all of this tonight after watching Bottle Shock, a pleasant, feel-good movie about the coming-of-age of the California wine industry in which the Chateau Montelena winery plays a major role. It was a bottle of Chateau Montelena Cabernet that Georges brought over that night - we figured it out by comparing the logo on the cork to those for Napa Valley wineries (on the web).

The mold covered bottle - it's label unreadable after 4 weeks in tepid flood waters - was both an ending and a beginning for us. Prior to Katrina, our life had been consumed with work and child-raising and home making. A disaster refines your priorities, both personally and community-wide. In some ways, the post-Katrina years in New Orleans were, ironically, the best. We drew closer to friends and re-initiated old acquaintances. In the crunch, human contact trumped material possession without contest. I miss Georges. I can hardly believe it, but I miss those strange, disorienting days, months, years, following the biggest historical event that I was part of.