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Some
people can’t wait to get rid of cases of stuff from their cellars;
Neil and Karen Aldoroty are just the opposite; they love to collect
it. Especially from other people’s cellars.
Neil and his wife Karen own Napa Valley’s most successful wine
storage business, 55 DEGREES, which is the temperature at which fine
wine should be stored (and which is what the thermometer is set at Neil
and Karen’s St. Helena storage facility).
With 2,800 happy clients, Neil and Karen have more cages than a chicken
farmer; each client’s wine is stored in a cage that holds up to
12 cases.
Say you live in a non-reciprocal state and buy wine from us –
ilovenapa.com – on line and need someone to store the wines for
you until you come to Napa Valley to pick them up, or until you decide
what you want to do with them; call Neil or Karen, sign up for a locker
and Presto! You can direct any wine merchant, or online wine seller,
to send goods to 55 DEGREES, where they will be held like gold bars
at Fort Knox – with utmost security. Only you and Neil/Karen have
keys to your locker; you can call them, ask them to rotate your goods,
send them to friends, prepare them for your arrival, etc.
Few people in Napa Valley know that Neil was formerly a Doctor. In fact,
to call this blue jean-clad, countrified wine guy a Dr. is preposterous;
in fact, it’s hard to picture Neil with the tubes of a stethoscope
straddling his neck. He looks much more at home with opened wine bottles
littering his several office desks, (samples that friends drop off for
him to try) – one of the perks of running the most professional
wine storage service in the valley.
“We store all the wines for the Napa Valley and Sonoma County
charity wine auctions,” says Neil. “It’s our way of
saying thanks to the community.”
Neil and Karen moved to Napa Valley from Wichita, KS at the close of
the 90s. “We met on a blind date in San Francisco in 1972. We
came north to Napa Valley on our first date – I’ll never
forget the day in August – and attended an afternoon lawn party
at Krug. We fell in love with each other… and with Napa Valley…
and knew that one day we would return to live here,” says Neil.
Having made the transition to Napa Valley in 1999, the couple celebrated
their 30th anniversary in 2002 by organizing a huge party for friends
at Krug. “The wheel had come full circle,” says Karen.
If you want security, peace of mind, or want to make a new, good friend
(which is what life in Napa Valley is all about), then you can’t
do better than to store your wines at 55 DEGREES .
How passionate is Neil about that number, 55? “I hand-picked our
phone number – 963-5513 – precisely because 13 is the Celsius
equivalent of 55.” A trivial pursuit, perhaps, valuable only to
Neil’s European clients, but to the rest of us, 55 will do just
fine.
55 DEGREES. 1210 Church St., St. Helena. 707-963-5513 Or check out www.fiftyfivedegrees.com |
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