I had a health scare recently. I was concerned enough to call a doctor, out of hours, to my house, late at night. As the doctor worked through my diagnosis, he noticed the wine bottles – beside the coffee machine and beside the fruit bowl and on the kitchen table and in the hallway and in boxes on the stairs and in fact everywhere. If he’d looked, he would also have found wine bottles beside my bed, and under my bed, and stacked in a pile in polystyrene crates in my wardrobe. “I see,” he said, almost hesitating, a stethoscope in his ears, “that you enjoy a drop of wine.“

And then he did hesitate. And then he said, “Wine reminds me of my brother.”

I have a brother myself. He’s not into either wine or alcohol, and it would be fair to say that he’s sceptical of my wine ‘knowledge’. One Christmas Day he even poured a glass of cheap wine, and a glass of blackcurrant cordial, and served them to me blind, in the hope that I wouldn’t be able to pick the difference between the two.

Wine, I said to the doctor, always makes us think of people, or things, or something. “I’ll tell you something about that,” the doctor said.

And then the doctor proceeded to tell me about his brother Edgar, who was crazy about wine, or at least had been in his late twenties. He’d bought loads and loads of it then, all sorts of stuff, as if no amount was too much. Edgar’s house was on a hill, and there was space beneath it to store things. This space was dug into the dirt of the hill, and was cool. Edgar stashed boxes and boxes of wine there; two or three thousand bottles probably. He drank some of it, for a while, but he then “got busy with life and a kid and what have you” and lost the wine bug. He stopped buying. He kept drinking the odd bottle from his stash, but at a slower and slower rate: it was a hassle to get under the house. His wife Pam preferred to drink young, fresh wine anyway. And so eventually most of the wine under the house started to gather dust.

Anyway, the doctor continued – as he tapped my chest – Edgar gets to his early 50s and starts saying how he’s finally going to clean up the area under the house. He would sell the wines that he didn’t want, the plan went, and then make the time to venture beneath the house more regularly, so that he could finally drink what he’d looked forward to drinking all those years ago, as a young man. It would be, in a way, the second coming of his wine fanatic days. “I’m going to catalogue the wine properly, and get it all into racks rather than boxes,” Edgar had said. Part of the problem, since the collection had first started to pile up, was that you had to move a lot of boxes if you wanted something specific.

“You can probably guess where this is going,” the doctor said to me. For the record, my health scare wasn’t the drama I’d imagined it to be, though by this stage of the story, instead of my health I’d started thinking of the pile of wine in my wardrobe, and how it had already become difficult to find the wine that I wanted, courtesy of the hassle of rifling through everything.

Anyway, the doctor then said, it turned out that Edgar never got the chance to do this cataloguing, or this organising, or this drinking, because shortly after this he discovered that he was sick. Edgar was diagnosed in late February and, incredibly, was dead before the end of March. He was dead at 52. Shortly after he died, Pam put their house on the market; she couldn’t stand living among their memories. Pam and Edgar had spent their whole married life in the house. They’d raised their child in it.

Before the house could be sold though, Edgar’s wine needed to be sorted. Pam and my doctor pulled all the boxes up from under the house. Their plan was simple: to load it all onto a trailer and to take it to auction. “We thought they were just boxes full of old bottles of wine,” my doctor said, “but of course, we had to open at least some of the boxes. There could have been bottles of Grange in there for all we knew.

“And this is why I’m telling you all this,” my doctor said. “Because every second box, when we opened it, revealed a label that rushed all these memories up at us.” There were wines they remembered drinking on camping trips. Wines bought to celebrate premierships. Wines Pam suspected were meant to be drunk on their son’s 21st. There was also, somewhat heartbreakingly, a completely unopened box of a wine they’d bought in Coonawarra, from a trip they’d taken from Melbourne to Adelaide. This unopened box was heartbreaking not for the wine itself, but for the fact that it had been bought almost immediately before they’d suffered the first of their three miscarriages.

“The thing is, we thought it was all just wine, but as we opened more boxes, it all started to mean more. These were not just boxes of wine; they were my brother as a young man.”

That and more: they were his dead brother’s hopes and dreams, all boxed up, and dusty.

“I pulled out this bottle, it was old and to be honest, I didn’t know it, I’d not seen this one before. I wondered why he’d bought it, what it was, why he’d wanted to keep it.” My doctor had brushed some of the dust off with his finger, he told me, and looked at the clear window of glass he’d created, at the wine in there, surrounded by dust. “Pam came over and looked at it too. It was a strange feeling, I don’t know, I can’t describe it.”

The doctor then looked about our lounge room, and across to our kitchen, at the boxes of wine all around. It was late at night; the kids were asleep; it was dead quiet. “In the end,” he said, “we drank some, but we didn’t sell any of it.”

Campbell Mattinson writes for The Winefront.