Thousands of rare wine bottles still sit in a Rockland County basement years after one of New York’s most storied liquor retailers collapsed.
Edmund O’Brien, an attorney for Hong Kong-based landlord Glorious Sun, said only about one third of the roughly 20,000-bottle collection has made it back to its owners. The remaining stash, valued in the millions, has languished at Blue Hill Plaza since Sherry-Lehmann’s storage arm defaulted on rent and the FBI raided the facility as part of a fraud probe.
Glorious Sun took control of the estimated $16 million inventory after the default. The landlord has since run advertisements in trade publications to track down owners who may not know their wine is sitting in a nondescript office tower roughly an hour north of Manhattan.
“Attention,” the Wine Spectator ad blared in bright red all caps lettering this summer. “We may have your wine. If you stored wine with Sherry-Lehmann (or Wine Caves) please contact Blue Hill Plaza.”
The outreach has yielded limited results. Sources tied to the defunct retailer suggested many clients have died, moved away, or simply lost track of purchases made years ago.
“The people who really wanted their wine back have been taken care of,” O’Brien of law firm Kucker Marino Winiarsky & Bittens said. “Now it’s time to find the people who haven’t been paying attention.”
He attributed the holdup to “ignorance, wealth or relocations.”
The Park Avenue fixture closed for good in March 2023 after 89 years in business, unable to renew its liquor license or keep up with rent payments. Early on, some storage customers had scrambled to retrieve their property from the Wine Caves facility as news of the retailer’s financial distress spread.
Federal attention followed a 2023 the outlet report alleging Sherry-Lehmann had sold some storage clients’ wine to collectors. The company denied the claim and sued Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter James Stewart, accusing him of orchestrating a smear campaign against the business and its owners, Shyda Gilmer and Kris Green. A federal judge tossed that lawsuit on Tuesday.
Sherry-Lehmann’s 2025 complaint had noted that despite “as many as 200 [law enforcement] agents at the Blue Hill facility for five days…and as the US Attorney’s Office made a multi-day exhaustive search for information to substantiate” the article, “there have been no arrests nor any indictments as a result of these raids.”
The case remains active, however. O’Brien said he received a call over the summer from the FBI agent he had previously dealt with, joined by a new investigator on the matter.
“I asked this person if the case was dead,” O’Brien said, adding that the answer was “No.”
The investigators sought an update on the Blue Hill Plaza situation and on litigation Wine Caves filed against Glorious Sun last year accusing the landlord of withholding wine that belonged to the storage company.
According to that Rockland County state court complaint, Wine Caves’ new majority owner is James Galtieri, a former Sherry-Lehmann supplier who spent two decades as the exclusive US importer for Château Lafite Rothschild, among the world’s most sought-after wines with new bottles commanding upwards of $700 each. Gilmer, the former Sherry-Lehmann CEO, had brought Galtieri into the Wine Caves operation. His current ownership status is unclear, and he did not respond to outreach.
The legal entanglements have shifted repeatedly. John Balestriere, the lawyer who had been representing Wine Caves, asked the court in August to be released from the case, citing unpaid fees. The court granted his request. John JD McFerrin-Clancy has since taken over representing Wine Caves in the litigation.