Oliver's wine collection

Oliver's wine collection begins as a prized reserve protected in a dedicated vault, but during the Roses' separation it becomes one of the most vivid measures of how domestic possessions acquire emotional and strategic force. Its celebrated vintages embody Oliver Rose's sense of value and ownership; as the vault is compromised and the bottles are damaged, exposed, or consumed, the collection registers the marriage's movement from shared home to contested territory.

The Collection and Its Value

The collection is defined in the surviving scenes by its distinguished labels and vintages. Oliver Rose identifies a 1966 Chateau Latour, a 1973 Chassagne Montrachet, and Chateau Beycheville from 1964 and 1966 among the bottles he fears Barbara has spoiled. He also singles out the Rothschild wines, especially a 1959 Lafite-Rothschild, as a possession whose loss he treats as intolerable. His reaction makes clear that these are not interchangeable bottles: he sorts them by name, year, and perceived quality, and regards the threatened Rothschild as a special limit.

That hierarchy becomes explicit when Oliver Rose and Ann try wine together. After tasting from one bottle, Oliver Rose discovers vinegar in the wine and checks another bottle by smell. He suspects that Barbara has reached the vault and may have ruined the rest of his collection. When Ann minimizes the loss as merely wine, he rejects that description, emphasizing the 1959 Lafite-Rothschild. His anger does not remain about the liquid alone: he tells Ann that if she loved him, she would understand why it matters. The collection therefore becomes a test of intimacy, with Oliver Rose treating recognition of its value as evidence of love and Ann left frightened and unsure what the outburst has to do with it.

Barbara's Dinner and the Separate Wine Choice

The collection also marks a boundary Barbara tries to maintain. Preparing a formal dinner party as a professional advertisement for herself, she plans a menu of vichyssoise, crab imperial, beef Wellington, salad, and chocolate eclairs. She considers entering Oliver Rose's wine vault, but resists because she wants to avoid a confrontation and insists that the dinner is her undertaking. Instead, she chooses a Chablis Grand Cru for the opening course, a 1966 Saint-Emilion afterward, and brut champagne for dessert.

Her choice matters because it separates her work from Oliver Rose's private reserve. Barbara checks the china, silver, and crystal, lists ingredients, and inspects both food and wines for tampering before preparing the meal. The planned dinner is an assertion of competence and independence; taking wine from the vault would have drawn the event back into the couple's struggle over possessions. Oliver Rose nevertheless retaliates against the party by secretly adding Ex-Lax to the chocolate sauce. The wine selection is not identified as part of that sabotage, but the broader sequence shows how even a carefully bounded professional project takes place under the threat of interference and reprisal.

Exposure, Damage, and Consumption

A later power failure makes the vault's dependence on household infrastructure unmistakable. Returning to a dark, increasingly humid house, Oliver Rose realizes that the stopped air conditioning threatens his red wines and perhaps his whites as well. He intends to empty the vault the next day, but the wines are already described as innocent victims of the outage. A collection carefully separated from everyday life cannot escape the failing systems of the house around it.

The vault soon becomes unusable, and Oliver Rose rescues a row of bottles. In the candlelit room, he drinks a Grand Vin de Chateau Latour from 1966 with Camembert, then opens a 1964 of the same wine, judges it inferior, and swallows large drafts. Stripped to his jockey shorts and sticky with perspiration, he laughs hysterically while thinking of the disorder he has caused elsewhere in the house. The scene sets the collection's refinement against the conditions in which he now consumes it: the Latour is still carefully distinguished by vintage, but its tasting has become part of a night of heat, isolation, and drunkenness.

His handling of the wine grows more destructive as the domestic standoff continues. After laying a slick of silicone and oil on the stairs and blocking a door with a wedge, Oliver Rose opens a 1959 Lafite-Rothschild, drinks it quickly, and then finishes another bottle. Later, in the overheated house, he pours wine over his head and gargles with it before drinking. The bottles remain objects of special value in his talk, yet his actions increasingly treat them as immediate relief rather than as a collection to preserve. That contrast gives the reserve a double role: it is both the prized property he guards and a resource consumed amid the collapse of ordinary comfort.

The Last Bottles and the Marriage

At the couple's dining-room meeting, wine returns as the medium through which the final confrontation is staged. Barbara Rose waits at the head of the table with a cleaver close at hand. Oliver Rose arrives carrying both a crowbar and an armful of wine bottles, lines them up, and slides an opened bottle toward her. They pour at the same time into silver goblets. He describes the remaining 1959s as approaching imperfection, while Barbara assesses the wine's body and balance. Their exchange is controlled and almost ceremonious, but it takes place under the threat of violence: she keeps her hand on the cleaver as he drinks and speaks.

The collection's course thus echoes the changing terms of the relationship without resolving into a simple symbol. At first, the bottles are protected possessions whose quality Oliver Rose expects Ann to understand; then they are vulnerable to Barbara's vinegar, endangered by the loss of refrigeration, rescued from the useless vault, and consumed during the couple's increasingly hazardous cohabitation. At the table, the last 1959s are shared in the narrow sense that both spouses pour and taste, even as the meeting remains adversarial. The vintage's approaching imperfection gives their ritual a pointed edge: the wine has endured as an object of value, but its preservation cannot restore the marriage or make the house safe.