Antoine's prized wine collection.
Photo: Collette Guste

For four weeks after Katrina hit, New Orleans had no power except for the electricity that one could generate oneself. Industrial-strength generators were scarce. Blount continued to pay his employees as he scrounged around for contractors to rebuild the wall.

In the third post-Katrina week, Blount was able to manufacture enough power to start cooling the building and--not least--the 17,000 bottles of wine it houses. The wine had survived in Antoine's beautiful 165-foot-long cellar.

This was no ordinary collection. The stocks of the great houses--Haut Brion, Lafite, Latour--were built up by Blount's grandfather in the early 1930s, immediately post-Prohibition. (Although everybody drank during Prohibition, especially heartily in Antoine's "Mystery Room," the 18th Amendment made delivering large shipments difficult--even for New Orleans bootleggers.) The Antoine's collection's 1930s core was built upon throughout the remaining vintages of the 20th century and into the 21st.

But the huge refrigerator Blount rented to bring down the cellar's temperature wasn't enough to combat the damage that the torturous post-Katrina heat had already done. New Orleans had weeks of 90-plus temperatures through that September.

"I didn't taste any of the big guns, you know, like the 1982 Chateau Lafite," says Blount, with a refreshing lack of sentimentality. "But three or four of us did bring up some of the most fragile whites, maybe a half-dozen bottles. We figured that would be where the damage would show first. And it did. The wines were off; we could already taste it."

What it meant was that every bottle in one- to-two million dollar collection (retail value) had the Katrina contagion.

"It didn't mean that the sturdiest reds would lose their vitality immediately," Blount says, "but the problem was you couldn't figure out when they would start to die. Now, that's the killer. We're Antoine's, you know? Our very existence is keyed to the fact that when you order a fine Bordeaux or a Burgundy from us, it has got to be everything we, and you, want it to be. The damage to the collection was never going to let us keep those promises to our guests."

Just because you have a couple million in wine and it got hurt, that doesn't mean that you get a couple million back. Antoine's insurers decided that they would pay the replacement value for the collection at the time it was bought. "That meant they gave us what a bottle of 1982 Chateau Lafite Rothschild cost my grandfather in 1984," explains Blount drily. "So, what was that&$12? For a bottle that, drunk now, we value at $1245? Then they came and took it and auctioned it off--somewhere, they wouldn't tell us where--and we had to start from scratch. Only time--and a bunch of work--will fully heal the damage."

In the last three years, Blount and his wine manager, Matthew Ousset, have built the collection back to 14,000 bottles. They're still on the odyssey of restoring Katrina's damage, buying from trusted brokers in Europe and the States.

"It's about trust," Blount says, every inch the hard-nosed hospitality traditionalist. "How has this bottle been kept? Where was it before it was here? We have to be able to trust the value that we give."