I worry that we have forgotten to feel wine.

We live a colorful wine life – in white, red, orange, and pink. Wine has possibly never been so restless, so energetic, so dynamic, so inviting. It is exciting. But I have started to worry that in all the rush, we are failing to find respite. I am equally worried we are missing the point of wine, as indeed we may be missing the point of life, which is to feel it. Literally in its wetness, texture, clinginess, but also figuratively in its ability to remind us we are sentient, at times complex but mostly simple, unique beings. Make it, pour it, share it, write about it, discuss it – of course. But make time to just be with it and allow its chameleon nature to shape shift to our personal shadow, that is something I worry we do not encourage others to do enough.  For fear of what exactly? Redundancy? Is our ego put at too much risk by allowing another’s id to explore wine for itself?

This is not about over-simplifying wine. It is about finding our ease alongside it. I want to make room for it as we should make room for all things that speak to us wordlessly. I continue to study wine and champion the integrity and authority that comes with knowledge. But the challenge with knowledge is knowing when to let it go. The pursuit of knowledge is worthy, essential even. But so is its suspension, temporarily. Overthinking is as overrated, and as damaging, as overdrinking.

There is a sequence in the last movement of Brahm’s Fourth Symphony that reaches deep down into the core of me and stirs whatever it is that lies so deep within, like a spoon. It leaves me no choice. It is like a moment of recognition, or magnified presence. We all have them. You know what I mean. Those moments that are not quite akin to déjà vu but almost. Through the ages we humans have tried to express, capture, pin them like butterflies, press them like flowers, document in prose, poetry and photographs, and bottle them like wine. To share them with others or add them in silence to our personal library of wins and losses, yearnings and learnings. I think of them as my pause, my moments of clarity, my grace. They are my coloured-in memories, the ones that are full-flavored, characterised as light-giving even when they occurred in a dark room, a dance floor, a February skyline walk in the rain, or at dusk with bats on the banks of the Dordogne.

They are as often created in grief and moments of stress as in periods of bliss. Many involve wine because wine demands presence. Mine are mostly found in solitude, sometimes caught in moments of companionship, fleetingly seen in the auras of others, and often connected to the shadows of my children that live and shift always in my mind’s eye, conjuring presence in absence. Recently there has been peace and canned sparkling wine, watching palm trees dance, flat on my back, lying on a beach. There has been a sense of homecoming in a glass of Château Pavie served in the Santa Rita Hills. A raw, shredding, torn feeling while packing a car for the start of a journey I will not be part of, has been softened by a Raymond Napa Chardonnay.

Wine accompanies the moments of awe as well as the moments of plain and simple earth-bound simplicity.  I have captured a delicious early morning moment in a garden with a Windsor Vineyard English sparkling wine before the hummingbirds had even breakfasted, toasting the completion of two little letters after my name, three years ago. It stands shoulder to shoulder with a noisily joyous friend-filled Aperol Prosecco spritz on a New York rooftop, eight years ago. I was there in the moment for both and so was the wine.

The deeply seared moment of sheer terror and elation in the first breaths my boys took, lamb-like trilling, nestling hot against my skin, was a dry one, but the many thousands since with them, most recently salt-licked and shot through with a thousand Moorea Island blues, have involved all sorts of beverages and are captured forever. The ones of my boys are intensely spotlit now as the nest empties fully and we face the acuity of absence. There is relief in knowing the memories will not be replaced but shifted down the stacks as I continue to add more ‘just be’ moments.

I was not there the moment Life let my mother go 17 years ago. There may have been flights of angels, I do not know, but I am sure there were a thousand or more of her haloed moments, the moments of bright eternity she carefully collected during her lifetime, often with a glass of wine in her hand, that made her so luminous in life, crowding in to welcome her back.

That is what I want to ensure we never forget when we pour wine for ourselves and for others. Wine has the power to speak to all, personally, whispered in waves of red velvet or strident at the top of its sparkling splurge, to deliver a message of love and fellowship in the language of the drinker. It can move us without us needing to translate. I want to ensure there is always space for all to pause and be moved by wine’s perpetual flow as it accompanies our own life’s story telling. I urge us in the industry and beyond to let it all go from time to time, to feel it, and let it just be.

Photo by Obaid Awan on Unsplash