Be the Wine
...thoughts on the ongoing opportunity of living more fully
To people like me who are uninitiated in the art of wine tastings, the language of that world can sound a bit strange at times. Reading wine reviews, we will encounter expressions like “long,” “juicy,” and “supple”. How much agreement is there among wine connoisseurs in the meanings of such words? I suspect at least some.
Then again, I just looked up “Far Niente 2021 Cabernet Sauvignon, Oakville,” a wine that online reviewers seem to agree is a great cabernet. The way they describe it, however, varies more than a little. A list of reviews on wine.com linked here has reviewer James Suckling giving the wine a 96/100 rating. It also includes the description, “…green bell pepper, black ink and gravel.” Next on the list is Jeb Dunnuck, who gives it a 94 rating and whose description includes language like, “…both red and black fruits, some spicy, chocolaty, herbal, and tobacco nuances.” Then on the same webpage comes Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate, which rates the wine at 92/100 and describes “..hints of cedar, vanilla, dried herbs and some darker berries”.
Now granted, I’ve intentionally picked some of the more contrasting language from these reviews. Yet all these people agree it’s a phenomenally good wine. And don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying these people don’t know what they’re talking about. I’m reasonably confident it’s a fantastic wine, and personally I’m not even into such things. I’m also pretty confident that these people wouldn’t have gained prominence in their field if their highly ranked, well-recommended wines turned out to be yucky when the stoppers got pulled.
My personal experience with quality wines is very limited. I recall once while I was working at a recording studio back in the early 1980’s, about five or six of us teamed up to remove an extremely heavy roll of waterlogged carpeting from a previously flooded basement. Step by step up the cellar stairway it came, with the help of coordinated tugs from a rope tied to the hitch of the studio van outside.
When we finally succeeded and the carpet lay like a giant burrito in the driveway, the owner thanked us for our efforts by opening a $100 bottle of French champagne to celebrate. I’d had champagne before, but never tasted such a high quality wine. At today’s prices such a bottle would probably cost over $300. I took a sip. It was like drinking air wrapped around a soft clear memory that vanished instantly after each and every tip of the glass. Zero aftertaste. See how I’m waxing poetic as I try to describe it? I was amazed. I didn’t know such things existed. So how can I fault professional wine reviewers as they struggle to put words on such a thing? I certainly couldn’t afford such a wine myself, but at that moment I realized why people paid for it. In some ways it belonged in another category of beverage altogether.
Funny thing about all this, as I said, I personally don’t care much about wine. Sure, given the chance I’d love to sample some of that expensive cabernet, although probably not a whole glass. But what I’m more interested in is our capacity to dive deep into a human experience — any experience. Bonus points if we come up with a thoughtful and enlightening response.
Believe it or not, the beginnings of this essay were planted in 2018 when I was sitting alone having a light supper in El Harissa Tunisian restaurant in Ann Arbor before going off to lead a writer’s meetup downtown that evening. The food was great, and when I went there I sometimes enjoyed coffee after the meal. Over the years I had met and spoken with the owners, Khaled and Susan, husband and wife, and learned a bit about their stories, and at different times I’d also met their son Yusif and daughter Yasmin— all of them charming, beautiful people.
But this was the first time I’d seen the couple’s children, both probably in their 20s back then, working together as brother and sister. A steady stream of customers had arrived after me and the two managed the dinner rush together. I saw how they spoke to one another, how they coordinated and shared space behind the counter with evident tenderness and respect. I believe I detected notes of genial good humor on a base of easy familiarity in their interactions. And it’s not like I was staring or anything, it was all just happening, transparent, right there in front of me. I merely had to be present and sort of bask in the energy of it. It was a kind of sweetness. Let’s just say it paired well with the coffee.
And as I sat there I couldn’t help but wonder: Is anyone else here seeing and appreciating this for the beautiful thing it is, these young people working together and getting everyone fed with this wonderful food this way? Am I the only witness?
And honestly, I really don’t know. It’s impossible to know what the others, mostly carryout customers, were able to take in from their brief interactions. And I don’t blame people for just handing over money and walking out with food. That’s me, too, sometimes. That’s what people do in this culture. But that night I happened to be lucky. I was dining in. And I was not jotting down last-minute notes for an activity I was about to introduce to my fellow writers that night, as I often did at those tables when I came into town for the meetup. My timing and everything else perfectly positioned me to pick up and appreciate the subtleties of the scene in front of me, to take it in with soft eyes and measured glances and feel the inner glow of it.
And just to be clear: we’re talking about a restaurant in a strip mall near the outskirts of town on a weeknight. These things happened, and then they passed. But I guess likewise with wine: it’s just wine, right? Grape juice that’s gone a bit off, one could say. It takes time to develop the capacity to pick up on the depths of flavor that connoisseurs experience in a sip of really good cabernet. It also takes practice to pick up on the emotional nuances of people’s communications in word and gesture, and the inner life reflected in these things. But that’s one way of looking at what I have spent a lot of my life learning to do, as well as I can.
What occurs to me now is, in any tasting, the wine changes a person, if only a bit. We open to the experience, and it registers. In the end, not only the flavor but the wine itself is in the taster. Likewise, any experience of living. For a short time, the young people behind the counter were the wine, the transport, the experience, the thing worth noticing. Life: by turns bold, complex and subtle. And then, well, it was time to go. But I took that with me as I went on to my next interactions.
Personally I think it’s worth paying attention to things wine tasters talk about — we can notice the body, the fingers, the nose. Wine has these things, and we do, too. We can notice how we’re aging and if we’re mellowing, if our time on earth is bringing out our subtlety, our character, our depth, our specialness, and how our spirits suffuse and elevate our experience of life.
A few minutes later as I headed downtown in my car, these words popped unbidden to my mind: Be the wine.
Be the exquisite vintage worth sharing. We can value ourselves as such. Because, see, it’s not just about “stopping to smell the roses,” trite and cliché as that may sound, it’s about noticing how doing so changes us, and how we carry that with us, especially if we find ourselves opening to the rose as deeply as the rose is opening to us.
And that’s literally happening all the time, that opening. That’s the opportunity. We become to some extent what we partake of, become the exquisite opening rose as we breathe it in. We are the rare wines.
We…
… are the indescribable experience…