| Searching, Too | | | | By: Alder Yarrow |  Page 1 of 2 next >> |
Over dinner last night, an old, dear friend asked me when it was that I became a wine lover. He then proceeded to tell me, in not so many words, that when we knew each other in college, I was the last person he would have expected to turn into a wine critic and gourmand. We had a good laugh and kept drinking, but his question got me thinking about how it was that I, or anyone for that matter, could go from a simple drinker to a devoted disciple.
I’m pretty sure I haven’t had one of those moments that some people describe, where I take a sip from a glass, my head snaps up, and I say to myself something along the lines of “Wow, so this is what the fuss is all about.” Of course there have been dozens of small epiphanies over time, like the first time I really smelled and tasted chocolate in a wine, or when I had a sip of my first Sauternes, but the more I try to trace a line back through all those bottles, the more I feel like I’m trying to thread an invisible needle.
The truth is, I have always loved wine. Even before I had my first sip, I had perhaps what you’d call a chemistry set attraction to alcohol — the interests of a scrawny ten year old who saw bartending as something vaguely akin to the workings of mad scientists in their labs. There was something compelling about dozens of bottles with various colored liquids behind a bar. And how cool was champagne — a drink and projectile all wrapped into one? Even though it would be nearly a decade before I figured out how to open a bottle of wine without putting it between my knees, as a kid, I had plenty of adults willing to humor me as I eagerly offered to open and pour the wine at weddings, parties, and even book groups.
Eventually, I even got paid to serve wine, working for a small town caterer who was willing to let a precocious and overly enthusiastic kid serve the wine at parties as long as they were in private homes. By that time, I had, like most teenagers, gotten around to actually tasting the stuff, and my tastes leaned heavily towards pink. The preoccupation with fruit flavors didn’t change much even through college, where in the liquor stores of Europe I discovered the joys of liter bottles of Mateus, a Portuguese rosé that kicked the butt of every White Zinfandel I had ever had.
Those early memories of wine are relatively easy to retrieve, but the transition from the bohemian tastes of a college exchange student to whatever you want to call my sense of wine now (my palate? my preferences? my passion?) is foggy, a maze of fits, starts, and stumbles through a gradually resolving landscape around me.
The process of arriving at a point where we are not only aware of our preferences, but where we have also formed a set of judgments about what is good and what is crap — this process is a journey down a cultural, social, and psychological road. There is a certain amount of understanding to be gained through an analysis of these factors that shape a person’s critical faculties with regard to food or wine. I have an acquaintance, for instance, who maintains with a certain amount of credibility that people have a basic set of tastes that are established early in life — a sort of personal terroir if you will — that is highly geographical in nature and based in one’s culture and regional foodstuffs, soil, and even water chemistry.
While it’s interesting to me to explore these ideas in pursuit of an afternoon’s intellectual stimulation, I believe there is something to our relationship to wine that is both literally and figuratively beyond science.
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