Is it the thought of a wine yet to be tasted that gets you going? A world of cellars exists in tribute to the unopened bottle’s allure. Billions of dollars and un-poured memories-in-making sit waiting. There is an ocean-worth of raucous dinner tables, hilarity, loud singing and unbridled dancing, love making and grief consoling, silently biding its time, trapped in glass, in racks, down spiraling stone staircases. Anticipatory bacchanalia. I witness the sunrise every morning from my home on a high hill. The horizon is so wide it sits a long way behind a cityscape, lapped by wetlands, a mountain, and a windfarm to the far east where the sun rises over the snow-capped Sierras. The moment just before the sun rises is the most beautiful by far. A line appears, cutting the darkness with a purpling that turns to magenta, then to crimson and a Veuve Cliquot yellow that seems to pulsate with heat, as if the sun had leaked molten lava before breaching its horizon. The anticipation of glory is in fact the glory itself. A showstopper. When the golden ball finally appears and the day begins, it is almost mundane.
Perhaps you’re the Realist who gives the wine your attention only when it hits nose and palate. You live for the tactile cork-pulling, bottle-gripping, hand-twisting pouring action that releases the liquid in all its pent-up energy. Wet, splashing, staining. Then the search, the swirl and sniff, filling the nose and mouth, tugging at the tongue, coating the throat, engaging the whorls of the brain. This, in and of itself, satiating. You move to the next without clinging to whimsical elegy, no musings nor reveries, no wine nonsense, just sensible, if temporary appreciation. A few weeks ago, I caught the elemental green flash as the Mexican sun dropped like a copper coin into the Pacific. I had not anticipated it, nor will the memory ever recreate the physical heart-thud of surprise, the flash spot on my retina that blinded for a few seconds. The moment was all it was, complete, miraculous, more than enough.
Or maybe you’re the Dreamer, preferring the moment when the memory of a certain glass outdoes all that came before. You allow Time to do what it does best: embellish, blur, and expand even the smallest details of the wine. That one glass, remembered, now also contains the sounds, colours, textures of the moment in which it was poured. It conjures the lover’s eyes, the mother’s smile, the friend’s laughter. The wine’s perfume, long gone, now augments in the mind enough to fill a ballroom. The acidity is heightened by the spark that lit the moment. The tannins become laced through with the threads of the conversation. Years ago, there was a circular table, banquet-linened, in a vast hall in the city of Bordeaux. There were chattering conversations, brokers thronging like blackbirds, sharp, besuited, chic, French. The wine was tucked in an anonymous bag at my host’s feet, under the table….
