Thousands of bottles of rare and expensive wines – including a stash of 1982 Petrus worth as much as $90,000 – are now waiting to return to their rightful owners after spending the past two years locked in the bowels of a suburban office park, The Post has learned.
Iconic New York City wine shop Sherry-Lehmann – which was shuttered in March 2023 after 89 years as it ignored customers’ frantic emails and phone calls about missing wine – has been storing the pricey booze in a basement filled with IT servers in Rockland County.
That’s about to change, as the landlord of Sherry-Lehmann’s now-defunct Park Avenue shop – once a mecca for Manhattan’s elite – is notifying collectors that their cases of Bordeaux, Burgundy and other fine wines will soon be available for pickup.
“I’m going to open a bottle for my 101 year-old father,” said one Wine Caves customer who has relentlessly tracked two cases of 1982 Petrus Bordeaux he bought 40 years ago that are now worth between $70,000 and $90,000.
“It’s time to drink the wine.”
The customer lost access to his rare vintages after Sherry-Lehmann’s storage service, Wine Caves, was evicted from its Queens warehouse in 2022 after failing to pay the rent, according to sources. The booze was then quietly moved to the basement of a nondescript office tower at Blue Hill Plaza in Pearl River, NY, according to court documents.
Sherry-Lehmann’s landlord — the Hong Kong-based real estate firm Glorious Sun — recently began reconnecting as many as 2,500 Wine Caves customers with millions of dollars of high-end vino after it gained legal access to the premises late last year during an eviction lawsuit.
Glorious Sun, which owns Blue Hill Plaza as well as the Park Avenue tower that housed Sherry-Lehmann’s swanky shop — is relying mainly on labels on the cases that show customers’ names and addresses, said Edmund O’Brien, an attorney for the landlord.
One problem: some clients have moved or passed away. Equally problematic, “a lot of the people don’t have their own record keeping” proving their relationship with Wine Caves and what they stored there, O’Brien said.
“It’s a very slow, cumbersome, difficult process and my client is undertaking this on their own because they are trying to do the right thing,” he added.
Some of the cases are Sherry-Lehmann’s signature, wine-colored boxes, or are in wooden boxes from the vineyard. Most appear to have prominent white labels identifying their owners and the contents.
In addition to recovering their prized property, a key worry for clients has been climate control: To avert spoilage, wine should be stored in cellar-like temperatures in the mid-to-upper 50s Fahrenheit – and at a high level of humidity to keep the corks from drying out.
Indeed, some clients have fretted that the Queens landlord had shut off the power over the rent dispute – and that this was what had prompted the stealthy switch to Pearl River. One source with ties to Sherry-Lehmann, however, said the electricity was never shut off.
Customers learned about the move to Rockland County after the FBI raided the Blue Hill Plaza space and the store in July 2023, with some 200 agents scouring the premises and creating spreadsheets to track the inventory, according to court documents and sources.
One FBI agent spoke with the customer frantically searching for his Petrus, confirming he had ID’d one of the cases – and reassuring him that the facility was kept at a “cooler temperature in the 60s,” said the customer, who asked not to be named.
“As long as it wasn’t an oven in there, I’m expecting that my wine will be OK,” the collector told The Post.
Whether the electricity had been turned off at Sherry-Lehmann’s former warehouse in the city “is a concern” to Glorious Sun, O’Brien admitted – but they can rest assured that they’ve been well cared for in Rockland County, he said.
“We don’t want people who are picking up their wines to find that they are ruined, because it’s not anything that happened on our watch.”
The basement at Blue Hill Plaza “was cold enough to need a jacket in there,” O’Brien added.
Law enforcement agencies, including the FBI and the US Postal Inspection Service have been investigating Sherry-Lehmann over the missing wine allegations.
Last month, Sherry-Lehmann filed a lawsuit on behalf of its owners, Kris Green and Shyda Gilmer, alleging that its former owners along with a prominent New York Times journalist conspired to malign the company in the media — including The Post.
A USPIS spokesperson told The Post last week that its investigation of Sherry-Lehmann is “active and ongoing.” The FBI declined to comment.
Balestriere said in an email to The Post, “Wine Caves has been responsive to customers and has done all it can to ensure that customers’ wine has been well maintained. Wine Caves wants any customers to have access to their wine and the only reason Wine Caves has not done more in the past in this regard is because of Glorious Sun.”
Balestriere did not elaborate on how Glorious Sun allegedly impeded Wine Caves’ efforts — and Glorious Sun’s lawyer O’Brien firmly denied the allegations.
“There are wine caves customers who have directly told us that they never got responses from Wine Caves,” O’Brien told The Post. “And to say ‘they did all they could’ is silly. Glorious Sun did not interfere with anything. It is 100% clear that it’s Sherry-Lehmann and Wine Caves that defaulted under their agreements.”
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
