Michael Affatato, the mind behind Love Lane’s beloved Village Cheese Shop, has another hobby filling an entire wall of built-in shelves at his Mattituck home.
Antique bottles captured Affatato’s attention over two decades ago when his daughter pulled a glass medicine container from his Margaux, France garden. Now he holds the largest documented collection of antique English wine bottles.
“It was so striking,” says Affatato of the medicine container. “I cleaned it up and said, ‘I’m going to put it in the window.’ Stupid me; it was early spring or late autumn, so the ground was cold and I was using hot water and of course it broke. I learned very quickly.”
Unaware of the bottle’s value and attracted to it visually, Affatato researched the vintage glass scene, sparking his awareness of the bottle collection world, full of associations, clubs and plenty of shows.
His interest strayed from perfume, whiskey, and medicine flasks that he’d find in his garden — where garbage was disposed of and burned decades back at a low enough temperature that some glass items survived the flames — toward one of his favorite domains: wine.
“As I was educating myself, reading more books and getting more and more involved in different clubs and shows, I started getting into the English [wine] bottles,” says Affatato. “There are a couple of reasons why I only collect English bottles. In the pecking order — the market establishes what the value is — English bottles are by far the highest value and the most attractive collectability, categorically speaking, of all the bottles.”
Now, Michael’s collection, valued at over $500,000, includes several dozen English onion-style, dark green, brown and blackish bottles with broad round bases and short necks. Some bottles feature damaged lips since they predate the modern corkscrew, and instead had wooden stoppers with gauze, wax and something to tie it closed, plus unique seals specific to the owner or bar the bottles represented.
Michael Affatato has been collecting bottles since 1998. (Photo credit: Parker Schug)
“Only those who had power, money, status or ego would personalize their bottles [with seals],” says Affatato. “They’d order this from the blower, usually a gross at a time which is 144; through breakage, if you’re lucky, fast forward 200 years later [and] only one remains. You rarely see dupes.”
What makes these bottles so highly coveted in Affatato’s community is their rarity. Seals were only common from 1640 to 1770. The oldest in his collection dates to 1677, being the oldest remaining sealed English wine bottles in recorded history.
“I knew of its existence from another collector in England about five, six, seven years ago, and I said to myself, ‘Someday I’ll have to get my hands on it,’ but people were very secretive as to who had it and how much it would be worth,” says Affatato.
When he received a message last fall that the owner was looking to sell his collection including this bottle, Affatato hopped on a flight to go pick it up, not willing to risk the bottle being lost or damaged in shipping.
It wasn’t Affatato’s first trip to retrieve bottles after building rapport with other collectors, ultimately resulting in his collection being the largest in the antique English bottle world.
His collection, however, is not limited to sealed onion-style English wine bottles but also includes antique tobacco containers, non-sealed selections and other unique flasks — all insured and many documented in antique bottle books.
Here on Long Island, bottle lovers are in luck, Affatato says, due to the remnants of generations before us and former military encampments. Many collectors take advantage of that, digging in swamps, locations of old outhouses and even diving for valuable remains, like old flasks and other receptacles.
On March 29, Affatato will join other bottle buffs at the 45th Annual Baltimore Antique Bottle Show and Sale — the largest in the United States — in West Friendship, Maryland, selling, seeing and talking shop about other collectors’ acquisitions. The biggest global event for bottle collectors is in Barnsley, South Yorkshire, with others in Australia and Canada.
