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| Marois “La Roche” Cidre de Terroir Brut 2022 Bonhomme “La Tesnière” Vin de France 2023 Texier “Le Clau” Vin de France 2021 Niklas Lagrein Südtirol 2022 Gigou “L’Ancêtre” Coteaux du Loir 2021 Viteadovest “Numero 73” Vino Bianco Sicilia NV |
| When I was a child, my mother and I would sing along with the AM pop radio of the day, together in the car, en route to daycare, or sometimes on extended road trips to visit my aunt and uncle in the south side of Chicago. I don’t believe this was unique: many kids did that (and perhaps still do) with their mothers. I loved these moments, and part of what I loved, as I only understood in retrospect years later, was the duality of a song—that you’re here in the moment with your mother, singing together, but also over there, the places where the song takes you. Songs like Petula Clark’s Downtown, where the neon lights are pretty, and The Monkee’s Last Train to Clarksville, but also tunes such as Tom Jones’s What’s New, Pussycat, which is not a song about a geographical location, but more so an emotional one, especially once my mother patiently explained to me that it wasn’t a literal cat that Jones was singing about. I cannot make any claims about my mom’s musical tastes, to a five-year-old, it didn’t matter much, but what did was experiencing this duality of being here, now, but also somewhere else. And it’s something we experience with wine, too, when we drink it with kindred souls.
When we drink wine with kindred souls, we drink together, at the moment, but also drink in the long durée of wine, a project that we’ve been working on for about ten thousand years. And the places that wine takes you are not merely ethanol-fueled. How is it that a wine that you drink here and now, in the moment, is here, but also over there? Tonight, for example, we’re tasting a menu pineau-based wine from Pierre-Olivier Bonhomme, a wine that I find evocative…of what, I am not entirely sure yet. It’s not my Proustian madeleine, but simply an old Loire Valley variety that growers once widely planted, a sort of fellow traveler with chenin blanc. Today, only a few hundred acres of it remain. This phenomenon is something that the analytical tradition of systematic wine-tasting methodology is happy to paper over, pretending that it never happens, whereas it happens quite a lot. It’s as if we’re embarrassed to talk about it, preferring to vector in on the structural components of a wine, cataloging adjectives such as elderflower and boiled sweets, and never discussing what’s right in front of us, or if we do, only as a reminiscence of another place where we once had the same sort of wine. Admittedly, not every wine does this—indeed, most do not, if you account for the oceans of industrial wine that make up the wine diet of most wine drinkers. Or perhaps more accurately, industrial wine takes us someplace, but it’s an airless, never-changing place, a white room with black curtains where the sun never shines. Ok, that may be a bit of an arrogant asshole assertion, and I don’t mean it that way, as quite often I find that simple, reasonably priced, foursquare bottles can resonate in unexpected ways. I do not know why certain wines resonate with me and do not know if they will resonate with you. |