Reading between the Wines, With a New Preface. Terry Theise
more than a few minutes. The CD is a recital of standards and folk melodies, played very straight, with little embellishment or technical bravura. The result is nearly sublime, tender, deliberate, caressing, essential, and pure. One time I answered the phone while the disc was playing, and as I walked back into the room I realized that if I'd been listening casually, I might have thought it was merely cocktail-lounge piano. Knowing the artist, his history, and the conditions under which the recording had been made gave it resonance and meaning.
What, then, is the value of reducing wine to a thing without context? What game is this we're insisting wine play along with? What's the good of tasting blind? Where's the silver lining of experiencing wine in a vacuum? Yes, it can train us to focus our palates and hone our powers of concentration. Then we can discard it! It has served its purpose. If we persist in tasting blind we run a grave risk—;because it is homicidal to a wine's context, and wine without context is bereft of meaning, and the experience of meaning is too rare to be squandered.
But, you protest, blind tasting makes you objective! Oh, nonsense. Can anyone who has ever tasted blind really assert any pure motivation toward truth and objectivity, or does that person simply need to win the game by making the right guess? Besides, blind tasting will guarantee your “objectivity” only if this objectivity is so fragile it needs such a primitive crutch. If you're too immature (or inexperienced) to be objective when you have to be, blind tasting won't help you. It will, however, confuse you as to the purpose of drinking wine. And I'm not talking about only recreational drinking (remember fun?); the only genuinely professional approach to wine is to know as much about it as possible. Who made it, under what conditions, what are the track records of the site and the vintner—then and only then can a genuinely thoughtful evaluation of a wine take place in the fullness of its being.
I wish I could tell you how to hasten the process of relaxing into wine. But it takes the time it takes. It can't be forced. Here's how it was for me.
One morning I woke up thinking about a high school teacher I hadn't remembered in years. Jane Stepanski taught honors English, which I took as a junior. I had no great love of reading, but I had all the love I could stand for Mrs. Stepanski. Looking back on it now, we were an awfully fatuous bunch, and it's touching how she forgave us.
I needed the pack. I wasn't a nerd; I was what used to be called a “freak” exactly two years early. So I needed shelter, and honors English provided it, ’cause all the misfits were there. Oh, I read a little, but mostly I was earnest and clueless. I recall when my classmates were especially derisive of what they called truth-and-beauty poems. I went along with the prevailing contempt: truth-and-beauty poems—ptui! Only ignorant clods liked those. What kinds of poems did I like? Um, er, ah…well—ahem— um, y'know, all kinds of poems as long as they were not truth-and-beauty poems.
Looking back, what can you do but laugh? I don't disdain how we were, how I was. I was pitiable, I was so needy, we all were; we hungered for any scrap of certainty, any solid bit of floor to stand on, and so we struck our attitudes and Jane somehow didn't spit at us. She let us be, and was respectful, and steered us gently away from our silliness.
When I first got into wine in my mid-twenties, I was like every fledgling wine geek. It consumed my every hour, and sadly, it also consumed anyone in my proximity for a couple years. But I was greedy for knowledge, or rather for information, and I did what every young person does: I sought to subdue the subject by acquiring mastery over it. Ignorance was frustrating and uncertainty was actively painful.
Wine was behaving like the mechanical rabbit that keeps the greyhounds running the track. No matter how much knowledge I hoarded, the ultimate target remained the same distance away. The “truth” of wine, it seemed, was a sliding floor…and even then you had to gain access to the room. It frustrated my craving for certainty, for command and mastery. And for a time I was angry at wine.
Now I think it was wine that was angry at me. But as patiently as my old honors English teacher, wine set about teaching me what it really wanted me to know.
First I needed to accept that in wine, uncertainty was an immutable fact of life. “The farther one travels, the less one knows.” There was no sense struggling against it; all that did was retard my progress toward contentment. But it is a human desire to ask why, to seek to know. Would wine always frustrate that desire as a condition of our relationship?
Far from it. But I was asking the wrong why. I clamored to understand “Why can't I know everything about wine?” But I needed to ask why I couldn't, why none of us ever can. Wine's essential uncertainty existed ineluctably, it seemed, and the most productive questions finally became clear: What purpose does this uncertainty serve? What does it want of me?
The first answer was quite clear: there wouldn't be one. There would, however, be an endless stream of ever more compelling questions. I often think you know you've asked the right question when the answer is an even deeper question. The “answer” is the end of the line. For me, answers were actually frustrating because they quashed the curiosity on which I'd learned to feed. It seemed, after all, to be questioning and wondering that kept my élan vital humming.
The less I insisted on subduing wine, the more of a friend it wanted to be. It let me understand that it was more responsive to love than to “knowledge.” It showed me which came first, that knowledge derived from love and not from will. Wine is an introvert who likes his private life, I learned, and so I no longer had to seduce away its secrets with my desire to penetrate. The very uncertainty kept it interesting, and wine grew to be very fine company. These days I'm inclined to guess that wine's uncertainty wants to remind us always to be curious and alert to the world, grateful that things are so fascinating. And to be thankful for the hunger. Because the hunger is life. Accepting the irreducible mystery of wine has enabled me to immerse myself more deeply than I ever could when I sought to tame it.
Immersion is the key. I am immersed in the world, the world is immersed in me. There are filaments and connections, always buzzing and always alive. The world is not a commodity designed for my use; its cells are my cells, its secrets are my secrets. And every once in a while, usually when I least expect it, wine draws its mouth to my ear and says things to me. Time is not what you think. A universe can live inside a speck of flavor. There are doors everywhere to millions of interlocking worlds. Beauty is always closer than it seems. Passion is all around us always. The brightest secrets play on the darkest threads. When you peer though the doorway, all you see is desire.
You hear these words and maybe it all sounds like gibberish, a stream of sound that doesn't amount to anything and only confuses things more. But if you've ever held a restive infant, there's a little trick you can do. Babies like to be whispered to; it fascinates them. They get a wondering, faraway look on their little faces, as if angels have entered the room. And so I don't need to explicate what wine may be saying to me. It is enough that it speaks at all, enough that it leaves me aware of meanings even if these don't fall neatly into a schema; enough how sweet it feels, the warm breath of beauty and secrets, so soft and so close to my ear.
two
WHAT MATTERS
(AND WHAT DOESN'T)
IN WINE
Have you ever tried to field the question, What kind of wine do you like? Hard to answer, isn't it? At least it's hard to answer briefly, because often the kind of wines you like need a lot of words to describe them. I recently answered, “I like moderate wine,” and I knew what I meant by it, though I'm sure my questioner found me a tough interview.
Part of the business of deepening both your palate and your acquaintance with your palate is to pay heed to what it responds to. Eventually you organize that information as patterns manifest themselves. These patterns are almost never random. They tell you not only what you like and dislike, but also what you believe in, what you cherish, and what you disdain.
I want to suggest a kind of charter of values by which we enjoy wine, understand