The Eternal Question

As I sat in my local café, sipping a simple but perfectly satisfactory glass of cabernet, I was not quite troubled but inwardly thinking, wondering what I would like to convey, to express, to bring forth in this my latest venture or was it misadventure? I wrote out a list, mentally of course, as I would never be the type to sit and pick away at a laptop computer in a public place... But to continue, how did I get started with my obsession with the grape? Was it the auspicious event of the release of the ’99 Burgundy at the same time as my nascent and peculiarly engrossing pursuit began to take form? That great vintage inspired and transfixed my imagination, bien sur – I consider myself both blessed and cursed to have fallen sway under its considerable charms.

But did the roots go further back? Many things seemed to conspire to push me along the path towards iniquity and this confession, though of course, I was well along that path since an early age. Could it have been I was simply tired of drinking beer? Or perhaps that I wanted to refine my drinking habits, relegating beer to pubs, preferably good old fashioned pubs in Camden Town or Hampstead, and wine to the dinner table, and preferably in company of interesting and charming women.. But no that couldn’t have been it. Maybe I simply looked forward to a day when I could play the ultimate trick on the unforgiving and seemingly hopelessly iron-clad structure of society, and turn all of my hanging out expenses into a tax deduction? But that’s absurd. Although it can work in some instances…

People do ask me, as wine geeks and normal people are want to do: When did you start getting into wine? Really it seems to have been a confluence of forces bearing down on me, or rather caressing me as there is little that can be deemed unpleasant or stressful about the wine experience, excepting of course the morning after. But when I think back on it, one individual always seems to come to mind, Laurent, a drummer from the South of France who I was playing with in the waning days of the last century. I began to get interested in wine and then bang – there he was, aiding and abetting my early blundering yet highly enjoyable experiences. Later we would drive to the Rhone together one summer day in the most scorching heat I probably and hopefully will ever feel. Almost needless to say we didn’t bring enough water for the drive, and Laurent, chivalrous and macho character that he is, (and devoted, of course) had given (and maybe henpecked) the air-conditioned car to his now lovely wife, Isabel, so anyway we were roasting, roasting! But when we reached Vaqueras, and then Gigondas, with the aid of the air-conditioned tasting rooms and the charm of the lovely tasting hostesses, the red red wine we were so lucky to try (they were tasting the tremendous 2003 vintage – more luck, or was it bedevilment?) was as refreshing as a properly room temperature liquid could be, I’m tempted to say like Coca-Cola but that would be blasphemy..But it would be remiss to mention Laurent’s influence without admitting that at the time I had come under the sway of his people at that time – I was (sweating, stammering) a budding Francophile.

I can trace my wine obsession even further back though, although it hadn’t reached its epic proportion of today. No perhaps my mind is playing tricks on me – is it possible to mix up one trip to Spain with another? Of course it is. I daresay I even cut my teeth on Spanish wines in those days, religiously reading a ten dollar wine calendar given to me by my doting but crazy ex-boss, and tried to keep my wine purchases under $10 a bottle. It’s true though, the wine calendar and the Spanish wines came after, not before my trip to the Loire in the Summer of 2000. At this time I was still overwhelmed by the fact that one vintage didn’t cover the entirety of France ie, a spectacular year in Burgundy might not necessarily translate to the same level of exaltation in Bordeaux, let alone Champagne and the Rhone. I threw up my hands upon learning this, but hardly gave in. It probably deserves to be mentioned that the trip to the Loire was part of an outrageously memorable vacation that I took which encompassed flying in and out of Amsterdam, with a little side trip to France including Rennes, St. Malo and Blois. In Amsterdam I was struck by the elegant and often black-clad and always quite tall ladies on their bicycles. True to my deep sense of irony, when I arrived in St. Malo, I actually met one. She accompanied me to the Loire, maybe the most romantic place in the world, or at least it seemed to me. I didn’t know a stick about Loire wines at this point, and still don’t know much. Quite naturally, upon my return home, I continued my wine exploration, and what I call ‘the first bottle of wine I ever read about, looked for and actually found’ became a bottle of Pouilly-Fume that I managed to track down at Garnet Wines. That Christmas my paramour would materialize and memorialize it forever in my mind by reaching for a glass while wearing only a large Indian shawl…

But please forgive me if I digress. My intention is hardly to chronicle the more essential aspects that make life worth living, to put it mildly, but rather to show how at the time, my life was moving in an upward and somewhat slightly dizzying spiral. I had embarked on a series of international forays, entered into new and stimulating relationships, I had discovered fine wine… It was a good time period, without a doubt.

But enough! You may say – where are the wines? This is Confessions of a Wine Obsessive – I’ve also got wines to talk about, not to worry…