LESSON ONE
Ever wonder what really great wine tastes like? Not the wines you enjoy whenever the spirit moves you. I mean those bottles that wine merchants will unabashedly allow you to drop fifty or a hundred bucks for - the wines that are sold at auction for thousands of dollars a bottle. Great wines.
Most of us began our wine experience by drinking the wrong wines. Sure, there's a kind of progression from cheap, commercial jug wines (plonk) that leads ever higher to those wondrous marvels of the winemaker's art, especially for those who never really outgrew the notion of Plato's Ladder of Being and Value. The fact is: Poor wine is poor. Great wine is great. One does not necessarily provide an avenue of approach to the other. How many of us have been diverted from the enjoyment of fine wine because we quickly learned to dislike Ripple or Thunderbird? Or because the stuff in the large bottles was either undrinkable or tasted like a soft drink with a kick?
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First in a series of articles for WINE LOVERS! |
Now think of this: Would you introduce a friend to the art of Rembrandt by starting out with children's scribbles, progressing gradually through finger painting to urban graffiti? Would you introduce Mozart by way of Country Western music? Truffles by way of canned button mushrooms? Some things are better experienced directly.
Plato did get some things right. He suggested to us that life does possess qualitative differences. There is bad, good. And there is better! Bad architecture. Good architecture. Bad and good design. Good and better roses (there are no bad roses). Yes, there are qualitative differences in music, food preparation, literature, theater, art, hotel accommodations,
...and wine!
Now, the hard part. If we are completely happy with the inexpensive wines we customarily drink, why should we cultivate a taste for better? Here's the answer (given as a question in the Platonic fashion): Why not prefer a Big Mac to Riz de Veau à la Regence? Shopping mall music to Mozart? Cool Whip® to real whipped cream (health aside)? Canned gravy to a homemade red wine reduction sauce with black truffles? Why not? Because to do so deprives us of some of life's richer experiences. Don't butterflies live better than slugs? (Before you debate that notion, try to imagine yourself checking the box next to "slug" on the Reincarnation Form.)
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