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Guns in the Wine Cellar
I’m a gun guy. I’ve carried a gun most of my adult life. All of my children grew up shooting; one of them is a pretty good competitive shooter. A few of them hunt — I never did, just not an outdoorsy sort. I taught self-defense shooting classes a long time ago when I lived in Tucson, back in the early days of the women-with-guns thing; most of my students were women who had never handled a gun. I enjoyed it.
I’m a fairly self-controlled fellow. To the extent that I fly off the handle… well, you’ve seen about the worst of it here. I’m pretty mild-mannered, don’t have a temper to speak of, drink modestly and am never drunk, and usually — not always — think before I speak. I’m a pretty responsible guy, the kind of person who handles guns safely and competently.
Back in 1991, I was in Nancy, France, doing some work for a customer. I was with a couple of engineers, installing industrial equipment in a factory there. I’d written the software that made the machines work. The plant was owned by an elderly Frenchman named Roger. It was a prosperous business, one he’d inherited from his father. Roger drove a Porsche 928, which was, coincidentally, the first car make and model I ever found captivating as a young man when I saw one on a two-page spread in a Playboy magazine in 1979. He was a charming, rakish fellow who spoke only French. He was a wonderful host, treating me and my engineer companions to long, expensive lunches at a small French restaurant owned by a woman with whom he seemed to be quite close. (I don’t speak French, so I really don’t know what they said, but they obviously knew each other well.) The lunches were extraordinary, prolonged affairs of many courses and too much wine. We were less productive for the first couple of hours back at the plant, but we put in late nights to make up for it.
On the evening of our last full day, after we’d finished work on the machines and were readying to return to our hotel, Roger invited us down into the wine cellar beneath his factory.
Maybe all French factories of a certain age have wine cellars. I don’t know. The one under his business was like the catacombs I’ve seen in Rome, dark twisting stony places full of nooks and arches. The nooks were filled with bottles of wine on old wooden racks. But there were a couple of long stone hallways that contained, not bottles of wine, but shelves of guns.
Roger collected World War II military weapons. He had Lugers and broom-handle Mausers, Walthers, American 1911A1s, Russian Mossin-Nagants — even an old Webley revolver. They weren’t particularly well maintained, certainly not museum pieces. Just old guns he’d acquired over a long life.
I lived in Colorado at the time and was involved in competitive pistol shooting. That made me, the nerdy Yankee computer guy, a temporary celebrity, a budget John Wayne who could draw and fire with reasonable speed and accuracy. Add wine — a lot of wine, too much wine — and five or six of us enjoyed a long evening of shooting vintage guns at old wine bottles in the musty catacombs beneath a darkened factory.
We made it through the night unscathed. Not once, before or after, have I combined alcohol and firearms. I certainly don’t recommend it. I wouldn’t do it again.
When I got back to Colorado I shipped Roger a little bronze reproduction of a statue of a western gunslinger. I thought it was by RC Gorman, but I haven’t been able to find it, so I may be wrong. I’ve been back to France several times since then, but never re-visited Nancy. I still do business, every decade or so, with the company. Roger passed away some years ago.
Published in General
I’ve recently watched a number of YouTube channels featuring European shooters. It’s nice to see people in the rest of the world who appreciate shooting as much as we Yanks do.
I met a gun collector in England once. Extremely interesting fellow with some very cool items…
No wine was injured in the making of this story, right?
Yeah, firearms and alcohol don’t go well together. But it is a lot like free climbing too high in trees–survive it and your brain recalculates the risk the next time.
Old joke about the ATF:
In DC, Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms is a federal agency.
In Tennessee, it’s Friday night.
Quite a lot, actually… but only in the conventional way.
My son thinks it should be a convenience store (even though he doesn’t participate in the tobacco part).
Wine improves with age and/or with the drinking of it. That’s not injury. Bullet holes in the casks or bottles are injury.
When you tell this story I keep thinking, Just how loud was it??
Think it was at the end of the seventies I worked with an otherwise fine fellow that drove a Porsche 928. He loved that car. More than once he corrected my pronunciation of “porch”. And once when, filling up, I got a droplet of gasoline on the car he was much distressed, washed it away and dried it off.
I lost track of him, but would not be surprised to find him on Ricochet.
Do Porsches tend to have substandard paint jobs? Well, you said 70s, so maybe that was a reasonable reaction.
I keep some of the whisky in the back of the gun safe. Now I feel less guilty about that.
Certainly nothing wrong with that. I’ve got a bottle of bourbon 3 feet away from the 12 gauge tactical shotgun I keep in the bedroom.
Ah, to get a chance to fire an old Luger, or C96 “broom-handle” Mauser. I’m jealous!
Michael, I didn’t shoot the Luger, but I did shoot the broom-handle. It’s amazing how modern it felt, considering how old the design is. (For those who neither know nor care, Hans Solo’s blaster pistol in Star Wars was a tricked out C96 Mauser.)
Roger also had a Thompson submachine gun. I don’t think it worked, but by the time I found it neither Roger nor I were clearheaded enough to discuss it in our incompatible combination of French and English, so I never tried to shoot it. I’ve never fired any fully automatic weapon.
I think he was just a fanatic.
I haven’t ever fired a C96, but I have fired fully automatic weapons during a few trips to Las Vegas. I still envy you getting the chance to shoot the Mauser.
Ian with the YouTube channel Forgotten Weapons did an episode about the C96 and other historical weapons in Star Wars:
Ian’s Forgotten Weapons channel is terrific. I’ve been watching his stuff for years.