Part I. Ceremony.
In the wake of Charleston, it took me a full week before I could swallow even a mouthful of my old boxed wine while anchored in one harbor or another, and I held that against Chef Drage; he'd been incrementally ruining my bad taste in wine for years, but Charleston was the finale. I would never go back, and that box of Malbec ended its life in the sauce pan.
It would be a couple of weeks until I heard from the chef. It was a text message, and all it said was, “That white Burgundy we had at Maison was pretty good. I’m still thinking about it.”
I was in North Carolina by then, cruising along the Intracoastal Waterway, somewhere deep in either Pamlico Sound or the
Albemarle, headed for Elizabeth City and the Dismal Swamp, but just the mention of that wine shot me back to Charleston, and it wasn’t a specific recollection, or even nostalgia, it was like a wave came over me, a distillation of the food and wine and friends and place; I was back there. Like the sound of a tent zipper that always arcs me back to childhood camping trips in Maine, the Charleston trip occupied me again, if only for a flash.
Somehow, good food and good wine have the ability to trigger memory, and powerfully so. The food-is-fuel crowd tends to miss this beautiful little part of being alive. No, the wine doesn't need to cost $100, but if it is good, your body will remember it, as well as the other sensations of the moment--so once triggered, you're back there, in that time and place. Call it reverse PTSD. It's biological; an ancient link between place and sustinance; those old hunters wouldn't forget where and how they'd feasted. It was survival.
We've gone beyond simple survival these days, for better or worse. Sure, you can slug some grocery store wine and have a fine time of things, just like you can eat a frozen pizza and be done with it, but that's only if you want to be done with it.
Chef Drage had touched on this idea back at Maison in Charleston: how it is that we interact with food and place; how what we eat, and where we eat it, and whom it is we eat it with, affects us. It's far more, and deeper, than pretentious folks simply wanting to eat some fancy stuff; the experience of a good meal in the right setting reaches deep into our primal selves and stirs something down there that makes us feel not only good, but right in an instinctual sense.
Now listen, I've had and enjoyed my share of cheap wine, cheap food, and cheap beer, and I've taken very little of value from any of those individual experiences; but I certainly recall and value the first sip I ever had of Vieux Télégraphe on the North Fork of a river, and that bottle of Papillon from Orin Swift, or the Memoire that Chef Drage and I shared beside a fire on a gravel bar while our friend George lay sleeping at our feet, or that way-too-cold Barolo that Professor Kuntz and I drank in the Wallawas... and not only do I remember the wines, but I feel how I felt--the culmination of those times, places, and people. The rush of water over rock, the smell of Douglas-fir, the snap of burning ridge pine. The laughter, the comfort, the moments of faith that not all is wrong with the world. It's a bodily memory, forged in place, flagged by those wines.
See, when something is that good, be it wine or food or whatever, you'd have to be a fool to not slow down just a touch and appreciate it. Pay attention. Care. That's what we're after here. I'm no super taster, not like Chef Drage or Ned or Professor Kuntz, but good wines are about so much more than just the liquid that's in one's mouth or the alcohol that's in one's bloodstream; they're capable of defining a moment, perhaps even articulating it.
All of which reminds me of a great professor I had in college in Missoula. He defined ceremony as an event which took the past to the present in order to affect the future. A good meal, and good wine, is precisely that. Ceremony.
Part II. Quality.
Don't get me wrong--by no means am I advocating for fancy wines each time one yearns for some of the ruddy. I don't know if I'm advocating for anything--I'm only trying to sketch a map of the branchlike power that certain wines and meals are capable of; it's a transcendence. Maybe it's chemistry. Maybe it's more mysterious than that. This bottle of saké does, Ikkyu said. I don't know. Skip a few bottles of grocery store stuff and save up and buy a good bottle and sit down and take a moment with it and with yourself and a loved one (or not) and with whatever surrounds you. Then you tell me.
And I'll say this: Those bottles I mentioned above, I had no clue that they were expensive when I took my first gulp. But I did know, immediately, that something was different, special; there was a shift within me.
In day to day wines, I will advocate for quality, which can be bought for the same price as its counterpoint. Yet for some reason, so many people I know tend to be far more concerned with the quality of their beer or salad than their wine, and I don't understand why. There is a big difference between a true wine--one made from healthy grapes that are fermented in a traditional manner--and the mega-mass produced stuff.
Now, I'm no expert; just a guy who's been fortunate enough to have had some good wine slide past his gums and be around a handful of people who know far more about wine than most of us. So I'll share, briefly or otherwise, what I've learned about quality.
The mass produced wine that is available by the case in every grocery store in the country, and which tastes the same, year in and year out--never mind the environmental conditions in which the grapes were born and raised--may lack in not only quality, but soul. It's most likely large-scale agriculture, complete with all of the pesticides, fungicides, herbicides, fertilizers, etc that Monsanto and those folks want to feed us. The grapes tend to be either outsourced or bought at auction. No, they're not grown on the old family estate.
Then, this stuff is hyper-filtered and chemically sterilized. After that, sugar or water is added, and coloring, and the ferment is chemically dictated, and boom, countless cases of the same exact thing, year after year, in a grocery store near everybody.
Now, wine is a touchy subject, tends to spark emotion, good or bad, and we're a reactionary lot. While on a sailing trip, I was once the guest in a fancy home and the resident wine guru poured the good stuff for one side of the table, the cheap stuff for the other. I, of course, was on the other, either oblivious to the difference or too scant to be of consequence.
To us folks who live life on the other side of the table and prefer it that way, the wine world appears to be one of drudgery and snobbery and arrogant sniffers like that dude, and I for one want to separate myself from him, call bullshit on the entire culture.
I used to pride myself on drinking the cheap shit--it's an upraised middle finger pointed across the table.
Then I began to learn, just a small bit, and I still am learning. In Charleston, I was out of my element, and out of my food-and-wine league with Chef Drage and Ned. I absorbed all I could. Food, wine, knowledge (mostly just oysters, though). In doing so, I learned about myself, about what goes on around me, about what I consume, and about the interplay therein that I spoke of up above.
So now let's talk flavor for a second, then I'll get to prices, which is the key factor here for us folks sitting on the far side of the table.
See, I love a hearty IPA as much as anyone (have one right here). They have that flavor hit, that huge, bold, hoppy taste. Unlike wine, with beer there's oftentimes a direct correlation between the price and the sheer amount of flavor; the more we spend, the danker the IPA gets.
Cool, great--I love it. But is the sheer amount of flavor the only thing we're after? Sure, we're Americans; we want to taste something--anything--for crying out loud. Witness the Asian-Tex fusion burrito, with its guac and kimchi and cheese mixture. But perhaps we've been bombarded with so many big tastes that our mouths have more callouses than our feet. In Scotland, they splash some water in with their Scotch so as not to numb their tastebuds. It allows them to continue to appreciate the liquor. In America, no water, no way. And oftentimes, not a ton of appreciation.
With wine, one can get a powerful, bold taste from a dark red found at the grocery store, so if one doesn't care about toxic agricultural practices or industrial wine making, why seek out anything else?
That's the rub, right there. What to do if one doesn't care.
Probably the single most vital lesson that Chef Drage taught me--albeit largely unspoken--was that tasting and appreciating wine or food isn't something that we're either born with or without; it's something we can learn. Any one of us. And this doesn't have to be fancy or expensive wine. Just quality.
Learning about what we consume is easy. And fun. And rewarding. We don't need to spend a ton, or read about it and sniff it and swirl it. Just be cognizant--present--as we drink it. All anyone has to do is SLOW DOWN. Pay a small amount of attention to what we put in our mouths.
Drinking wine is a chill meditation that leads to so much more than a singular, massive flavor hit. And yes, sometimes a more expensive bottle won't pack so much of that coveted horse hoof-in-the-mouth flavor punch--but there might exist some other, equally (or even more) powerful forces at work that we just need to be quiet long enough to experience (i.e. oysters and rosé). Perhaps even take the time to learn to experience.
Or save up for a bottle of that Papillon. That'll flat kick you in the jaw and get your synapses thumping like bongo drums.
I'll shut up and leave it at this: For very nearly the same as you pay at the grocery store, you can go to a wine shop--or mail order from a place like Kermit Lynch--a real wine from a small-scale wine maker. Call them micro-vineyards, if need be. It's an easy way to support sustainable agriculture, a family operation, traditional non-toxic wine making, and be able to drink something that might have a touch of soul. One good bottle that's not full of glyphosate for less than a 4 pack of trendy microbrew (that probably is full of glyphosate) ain't bad.
But whatever; I'm just charting my personal trajectory from box to bottle. And watching the rain fall. Be good and you will be lonesome, Eminem said. Or maybe Mark Twain.
Back to boats and adventure and shark teeth soon.