The Journey

Like many activities or hobbies that unfold over extended periods of time, collecting and consuming wine has elements of a journey.

The first progression is how you yourself relate to the wine - to what is in the glass itself.  I think over time ones appreciation for the emotional impact a wine can have broadens. Instead of thinking mostly of technical reasons why the wine is good one becomes more receptive to what the wine has to say in a wider context - how the wine makes you feel. The wine can make you feel privileged or fill you with wonder. It can cause you frustration or simply make you happy. It can hold your attention or fail to do so. And while these emotions can be felt early in the journey that is wine collecting I do think experience helps develop this capacity for a broader emotional response. With time comes a greater facility to listen to the wine in ways in which a newcomer does not normally participate. The relationship to wine changes. But it takes time.

There is also a second and separate set of emotional responses that need time to develop for you to be able to feel them.  These are the responses that derive not from what is intrinsically in the glass but from memories of prior experiences and from your relationship to people you have met along the journey and how these relate to the wine being drunk in the moment.Only after many years have passed and many wine related encounters experienced - with wines, people and places - can one have built up a sort of database that you can draw on when drinking a wine today to generate a response in this category. And as your contact with wine in all its dimensions grows, that database in all its facets grows. But this takes time. 

I remember, for example, drinking my first bottle of Brunello di Montalcino. It was a bottle of Biondi Santi Anata 1985 on some stone steps in the town of Montalcino itself during the beautiful grape harvest of 1990. I don’t appreciate Brunello di Montalcino as much as many but when I drink one day I am infallibly drawn back to this happy memory.  That is an emotional response, drawing on my past. I have a litany of such memories - everything from a long but strangely pleasant wait in Vouvray for a bus back to Tours after tasting at Huet; to going into the church at Morey Saint Denis to get respite from the bitter December cold; to having my Fiat 500 packed with four adults almost fail to make it up the hill of Via Grosso in Castiglione Falletto. The list is almost endless.

In this category of responses not intrinsic to the wine itself I think by far the most important are those related to people - the friends you have made and people you have met along the way. Memorable dinners with friends with whom you have laughed and drunk into the small hours. This category includes everything from recalling a friend who you know is particularly fond of the type of wine in your glass today to drinking the wines made by people you have met. Or it could simply be friends in whose company you last drank this particular wine. If you press me, I would go so far as to say that after a long time of drinking and responding to wine - as one perhaps approaches the end of the long journey - one comes to realize that wine is actually not at all about what is in the glass but almost entirely about people. These experiences take time to accumulate. Most of them - in fact I think almost all - generate happy emotional responses. And having them to draw upon makes drinking the wine so much more emotionally impactful than simply a direct response to what is in the glass.  

Both these journeys have a start but they never actually end.