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Impossible Choices, Solvitur AmbulandoDec 28 '00 Write an essay on this topic.Well, hail thee, festival day: it's our turn, and I am honored to be part of the 'us' whose turn it is, to celebrate the 100th vinous posting of wineworms PeterLRuden and sweetpaulie. Were it not for the honor of the thing, though, and how much I like these guys, I'd as soon decline. The reason for that is simple enough: to mark this milestone, they've proposed we all – 'we' being Peter, Paul, and myself, obviously, and Alex39, Ermitano, SydKick and PALWalrus, whose libations to the wine gods may be found via the All Opinions On This Item link at the foot of the page – that we all, as I say, contribute on a single Festschrift topic: the Most Memorable Wine for each of us.* Ask me to settle the Florida recounts and their aftertaste, challenge me to find nice things to say about Lincoln-Grant-and-Sherman whilst addressing an SCV gathering, task me with explaining the barber-shop shave to Chairman Arafat, but don't, I beg of you, set me the impossible task of picking my own most memorable wine. I've known the taste of wine** for well over three decades (and mind you I'm not yet quite forty: work out the mathematics for yourself, quietly, no textbooks may be used, the exam is proctored), and the memories are overwhelming. There's been some rotgut I'd love to forget, and can't. There've been steals and surprises and serendipitous discoveries. There've been occasions made special by wine, and wines made special by the occasion (including some near-rotgut that I'll never drink again, but the memory of which I cherish because of the circumstances and the company). And what circumstances have there been. The night an older friend of mine stopped me in Graham-Lees Quad – the Old Quad – girlfriend on his arm and a Spanish wineskin in his hand, and insisted I drink a middling Rioja. I did, with caution, lips all but touching the nozzle of the wineskin, to his laughing, half-scornful insistence that the only proper, Iberian, Hemingwayesque (hi, Paulie) way to do so was to upend the wineskin at arm's length and squirt the wine into one's open mouth: 'like this,' he said, shouldering me aside as I protested that I'd seen it done and had no use for it. I'm not sure whether I or his date laughed harder when he, of course, managed to spray wine all over his face, his shirt, his blazer, the Quad.... Viva San Fermin.... Or again, what of a cru bourgeois white, drunk on the steps of an old house near Brownsburg, in northwest Rockbridge County, when it looked as if the sale would go through for all eight hundred-plus acres? Or again, what of the homemade kosher wine, in itself nothing to rave about, that was nonetheless a special thing, consumed as it was with Jewish friends upon the Feast of Tabernacles? Or yet again – but soft: that's exactly what I mean: one might easily go on forever, recalling memories suffused by the grape. Shades of the Sisyphean effort to get current in Tristram Shandy. The point really and truly is that a wine may be memorable in itself, or from circumstances. And by being memorable in itself one need not mean that it was one of those ecstatic moments that occurs when the palate meets a supreme year for La Tache, or a Bordeaux from, say, 1961 (Latour, perhaps, or Margaux, or good old Lunch-Bags [Lynch-Bages to the reverent]), or the '78 'Y' ('Y-grec') from Yquem, or a Corton-Charlemagne or Montrachet, or Hermitage, or Pomerol, Tokay Eszencia or the 1945 Dow port.... It's equally a grateful memory when you find an unexpected grace, an uncovenanted benison, in a solid, accessible bottle you'd have never thought to look for, as when I first discovered Chateau Morrisette in the wilds of Southwest Virginia, or tried the '97 Kopke port to see if, indeed, there was promise for the year even down in the middle ranks.*** That, by the way, is one of the chiefest joys of devotion to the miracle of Cana: sneaking previews and matching your wit against time and fate to try and foresee the future greatness (or otherwise) of a still-maturing vintage. But, again, the connotative quality is at least as important as the objective and inherent. I happen to like most madeira. I happen not to care in the least – objectively – for Scuppernong, God save us all. Yet both equally call up in my mind with sweet clarity some quiet Virginian Sunday afternoons (now fifteen and twenty years gone) with other parishioners of St Bob's, in the drawing room – evocative of a more spacious day and way of life, of vanished courtesies and old, cherished ways – of dear Mrs Gravatt, the bishop's widow, who is still with us even now at the age of 105. Wine (and as always in these discussions, I include the fortified wines, sherry, madeira, and port) peculiarly combines the senses of taste and smell, the two most powerful evokers of memory known to man, and any wine can, under the right circumstances, do to any of us what 'that displeasing sopped madeleine' did for Proust. The question, after all, is not, What was the best wine – or the most dramatic, or the worst, or the first, or the one consumed in the most exotic or evocative locale – you've drunk? It is rather, at bottom, Which of the occasions on which you have had wine has been such as to make that glass the most memorable, the most evocative? There are a score at least of possible answers to that, from the vin du pays at a Skyline Drive picnic that, I now realize as I then did not, was the bittersweet closest I came to a love that never caught fire and that might have been The One, to an undemanding, unranked beaujolais consumed amongst much laughter and pasta during a blizzard that shut down half the Commonwealth and at which we, secure, warm, wined, snapped our fingers, laughing, to, yes, some moments on Olympus courtesy of the great vintages of some first growths. Yet in the end there is no answer, if for no other reason than that that underlay the Greek maxim, Count no man happy and fortunate until he is dead. There are countless glasses, God willing, yet to come, in what I hope will be bright days. What I do know is that when I am at the last able to look back upon an ending life – ah, with the grape my failing life provide – whatever Most Memorable Occasion takes that title will have possessed certain necessary qualities: that the glass shall have been drunk amongst friends, live or ranked upon the shelves of my library, on an occasion of peace and wit and laughter, possibly underlined by a storm without whilst all are snug within, in the sure and certain knowledge that this is no anodyne, no mere draft of nepenthe, but a secular sacrament, a food for celebration rather than a drug for a wounded spirit. Until then, Paul, Peter, and all here, the Most Memorable Glass shall always be the next I share with y'all. May they be all but innumerable, and may you two gentlemen whom we honor tonight be here for all of it, until the cellar is empty and all good things are spent – and no heeltaps! Drink up! ______________________________ * And here am I, unfashionably and unconscionably late. Alas, matters professional and familial took precedence. ** And fortified wines, and beer, and ale, and spirits.... *** As the system requires that I nominate a wine to post this, I am in fact going with the 1970 Mouton-Rothschild (it was that or a Lunch-Bags from the '70s [label now partially illegible] or the '79 Haut-Baiily, as far as the top three bottles under the microwave go). But as the tenor hereof suggests, while I can and do recommend it without reservation, I think it misrepresents the position to chose a single wine, however stellar.  |
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