Saturday, February 4, 2012

veni, vidi, drinky...

So last week I was listening to some lectures that Jorge Luis Borges delivered at Harvard in the late 1960s, and he said something that was telling in its ostensible simplicity -- "Books are only great if you read them."
I think (you probably know where we're going with this already) the same can be said of wine. Of course, collecting wines (like collecting books) is a great thing. I think most of us know the reassuring comfort of having a stockade of bottles, whether it's just a few on hand in the refrigerator, a near-full rack (be it from IKEA, West Elm, or the Flea Market) on the counter, or a separate room in your house that you've converted into a cellar (...ahem, Delton). I always feel a certain headiness when I catch a glimpse of my own nascent 'cellar' as I walk through the kitchen, some sense of accomplishment or attainment or contentedness. It's kind of the same way I feel about my library, or my burgeoning single-malt collection; it just feels good.

Lest we forget Schopenhauer's caveat about purchasing books, we must now find the time to drink the wine. Which brings us to our first of the evening...Well, first to blog about, anyway, since we sampled a disjointed white Burgundy and had a bit of a Barbera (not to mention the wines I sampled earlier at Saglimbeni's -- Christine had a nice Chianti and Jeff had a Shiraz-Viognier that was very drinkable) before we opened the Garnacha pictured above. We actually had this wine at Thai Dee a few weeks ago and it was incredible; it was like Smuckers Strawberry Jam in a glass. We thought it was good enough (and a great price at that) to warrant a blog. That being said, we actually finished it two sentences ago, which you should interpret as a good thing. The wine was just as good as the last time, though the element of surprise was lost this time around; but it's still a solid wine. We bought it at Saglimbeni's for $13.99. So...a few notes...

Mark called it fun, whimsical, and complex, making the distinction between that and wines that are just fun and whimsical. It has great fruits, but there is enough minerality to balance it out. "It's like sniffing Old World Kool-Aid" was my favorite remark Mark made about it. Indeed, there is a dustiness, but the strawberry jam shines through. Tucker said "serious fruit tannins." Overall, it got a thumbs-up from all three of us. Four, if you include Tiff's vote from the previous bottle at Thai Dee.



So Tucker came home from Max's Wine Dive and we opened a 2000 Spanish Tempranillo next. Balsion Reserva from Ribera del Duero. This was a first for us, since we've never had such an old Tempranillo. At first it reminded me of an old Italian that I would be drinking with Delton. It was big and fruity, but with a condensed feel to it...almost like a Amarone or something raisinated. While I liked it, Mark hijacked the blog and said "pruny and small raisins.....that is an aged Spanish wine in my opinion....just there....enough said...."
I'd recommend it, but you probably can't find it anywhere in town, so I guess the observation is moot. Worth mentioning (and completely changing gears), though, is the Black Maple Hill bourbon I picked up earlier today. Jolly from Joe's told me to keep an eye out for it when I went to Tennessee over the Christmas break, but they just got some in stock, so I bought a bottle from Sag's. I don't know enough about bourbons to talk about them, but I can say it's incredibly delicious and I would recommend it in a heartbeat. I definitely plan on drinking it while watching this week's episode of Justified.



So while we only talked about two wines tonight, I definitely learned a lot in the process. One of the coolest things about wine is that it's like pouring history into a glass. Drinking it is great, but doing all the discovery -- where it came from and how it was made -- is what ties it all together, in addition to bringing up more questions than we started with. I've learned more about geography since studying wine than I ever did in school. If not for tonight, we wouldn't have talked about The Merchant of Venice (the fact that the Garnacha was produced in the region of Aragon sparked Mark's memory of reading the play in 10th grade), Venetian glass from Murano, or Huey P. Long (our discussion of 'castillo' not only made me realize my friend Steve's last name is 'castle', but also reminded us of Long's "Every Man a King", which got us into a discussion about this garnacha making one feel like the king of his castle). Anyway... I'm still thinking about Borges, and in another part of one of his lectures he talks about "drinking poems." While he was referring to literature, I'd like to think of each glass of wine as a little poem, which makes me wonder if I can start seeing other things in my life as little poems...and not just the sweet moments like picking greens from the back of the bistro or sipping a sapid Morgon in the garden. Perhaps even seemingly banal chores like doing the dishes or taking out the trash can be transformed into little moments of transcendence. So while "Ode on a Trash Bag" might not rattle any cages, maybe we can at least see the poetry of our lives in the little moments, be it getting stuck in traffic, taking a trip to the curb, or getting lost in a glass of wine. At this moment, we're tilting our glasses...

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