There is a child of a customer of ours who is five. The child cannot, obviously, drink. But the child knows the family wine bottle by sight from across the room, because the family wine has been on the dinner table at every meal she can remember being old enough to register. She points at it sometimes. She calls it 'our wine.' The customer's wife reported this matter-of-factly. We have not, since, been able to forget it.
There is something happening when a household keeps a recognizably-labeled bottle on the table for years on end, and we are reluctant to over-claim about what it is. We will say only: the child registers it. The teenagers, ten years later, will register it. The grandchildren, thirty years later, will inherit not only the cellar but the visual association that 'this is what wine looks like at our family's table.' The bottle becomes a soft anchor for the household's sense of itself.
Inheritance you don't have to mean
Most family inheritance is heavy. The signet ring is heavy. The portrait on the wall is heavy. The grandmother's china is heavy. Heavy things are sometimes left behind by the generation that should have carried them, precisely because they are heavy.
A wine bottle is not heavy. The grandchild does not need to be told to keep the bottles. They are simply, for the grandchild, what wine bottles look like. The visual continuity travels without ceremony. The child has absorbed the family's label, by the time they are old enough to wonder about it, the way they absorbed the family's accent.
We are not selling this. This is, frankly, a byproduct. The customers come for the bottle for the wedding, or the bottle for the holidays, or the bottle for the anniversary, and they continue ordering because the bottle has become part of the household's furniture. The byproduct is the child who points at the bottle from across the room and knows what it is.