In every wine lover’s life there are the wines that you never forget and that make you remember what you loved about wine in the first place. There was the bottle of Sean Thackery’s Pleiades that I drank in my college apartment, that made me want to move to California. Later, while living in San Francisco, there was a bottle of Avignonesi Vin Santo that made me want to move to Italy. I have had the privilege to taste many beautiful wines, but I can count on one hand the bottles that were true epiphanies.
Last week at a dinner at Tru in Chicago, I had the opportunity to taste a bottle of 2005 Meo Camuzet from Vosne Romanee that was just such an epiphany. While it did not make me want to pick up and move to Burgundy, it did make me realize just how ethereal, versatile and lovely Pinot Noir could truly be. Through numerous courses of complex foods, it managed to complement each course and hold it’s own. Chad Ellegood, wine director of Tru, describes it as “An expression of place. Extremely ripe with flavors of smoky bacon, as well as fresh and dried rose petals. Exactly what a Vosne Romanee should be” This was also exactly what a Pinot Noir should be and so rarely is. Voluptuous yet elegant. Complex yet balanced. A wine that engaged all of the senses.
It is difficult to say why one work of art moves you and another leaves you cold or why certain wines, meals and flavors linger in your mind. Apart from wine descriptions, what make a wine transcend being simply pleasant into something that is pure pleasure? (more…)
On our mats we learn to embrace the idea of going with the flow. We transition seamlessly from one posture to the next, enjoying the fact that we are in a constant state of movement and change. The breath, the body and our practices are never static. When we step off the mats and back to our everyday lives, the idea of transition is not always so easy to embrace. Change can be scary. Instead of going with the flow, we often hold on tight to that which is familiar. If you are like me, during periods of change, you ask yourself questions about where you are headed or what it all means, even though the answers are unknowable. Perhaps the best that we can do is learn to love the fact that life, just like our practice, is constantly fluid. When we “live everything” as the quote below suggests, we learn that change itself is the only constant.
Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
Rainer Maria Rilke, 1903
in Letters to a Young Poet
There has been a lot of discussion in the wine world about a book called “The Wine Trials” by Robin Goldstein. The main premise of the book is that in blind trials the average person prefers less expensive, mass produced wines to the expensive wines that are favored by wine critics and such. I am never a fan of snobbery or pretention when it comes to wine and I firmly believe that there are many lovely wines out there that can be had for less than $10. Having said that, I do find the main premise of this book, that the average person can not detect differences in quality of wine, to be off base. I think that Eric Asimov puts in best in his column on the subject from “The Pour” on April, 11, 2008 (more…)
