Book

Das Haus der Flaschen

A novel by Dr. Raphael Nagel

“For my father, and for every name that someone had to carry forward.”

Prologue · The Father at the Table

He never drank cognac like a man who was thirsty. He drank it like a man listening to an old friend.

That was my first observation. So precise I could not put it into words as a child, so exact I could never unlearn it as a man.

My father sat at the lower end of the long table after dinner. Always the same place. Always the same posture. Before him: the glass — old, heavy, of a form that claimed nothing. Beside the glass: an unlit cigar, a struck match unused. Nobody spoke in those minutes. That was the most important rule of the table, the one never spoken aloud.

In six parts

Das Haus der Flaschen

  1. IThe Name
  2. IIThe Forest
  3. IIIThe Light
  4. IVThe Time
  5. VThe Father
  6. VIThe House

The story of the J. Ferd. Nagel Réserve Privée is not, at its core, a story about cognac. It is a story about a son watching his father hold a glass. About the inheritance of a standard that was never explained, only demonstrated. About what it means to try to be worthy of someone’s way of paying attention.

And it is a story about a house — founded in Hamburg in 1852 by a man who won the Emperor’s gold and then walked into the Black Forest and disappeared — that carries, in its most private bottle, the memory of a man who understood quality the way his ancestor understood distillation: as a discipline, not a product.

The novel is in preparation. It begins with a table after dinner, a glass of amber, and a man who is quiet.

In preparation

A novel by Dr. Raphael Nagel (LL.M.). Available at raphaelnagel.com when complete.

raphaelnagel.com →
Das Haus der Flaschen