Exclusive | Pricey wines including 2 cases worth $90K to finally return to Sherry-Lehmann clients after 2-year wait: Its time to drink

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.E...