It was a Wolfie day. We played Beat Saber, we defeated Bowser on Mario Odyssey, we ate sushi and haw treats, we made songs up about our dogs and imagined centipedes and millipedes arguing over how many legs they each got during creation and who got the venom. Mir and I went driving, and she did great. She has a lot of practice to do, for sure, but it’s a good start. Tilde’s amp is busted. I’m going to see if I can help her find a good replacement, one that will last a little longer. She only needs it to practice with.
I don’t think I wrote about it last night, but I had one of those magical wine experiences. I really didn’t think it was going to happen, and believe it or not, I don’t think this wine makes the top of my list as a favorite…but it was still…special. It was a half bottle of a cote-rotie, which I’ve only had one before and I hadn’t really liked it. But this one was highly recommended, it was small, and I’d already had a glass of it the night before.
The first glass, right after opening, was muted. Not a ton of taste. Very soft and smooth with definitely some pleasant flavors, but—and it’s hard to explain, as I’m finding talking about wine truly is—it just wasn’t alive. There wasn’t anything particularly special about it, which is not good enough for a wine that costs $60 for a half bottle.
BUT…I’d done my research. I read that it was young, only a 2022. Ten years was probably around the right time to pop it open and expect it to be ready. But, I wanted to try it tonight. I don’t have the ability to age wine, really. I don’t have a cellar. I can keep stuff in my wine fridge, and I do, but nothing in there is going to last more than a few years. So, anything I buy, I need to be able to drink. So what to do? The research said: decant it for a good 8 hours. That will open it up. So I did. And as usually happens, I could taste that it had been open to the air for that long. There’s this…exposed feeling to it, like how cheese sweats in the air and tastes cooked. Wine does that with too much air. It wasn’t overdone, that oxidized taste. I could tell it wasn’t actually too far gone. Decanting for 8 hours hadn’t ruined it, it was still just off. Flavors coming to dominate the glass in a way I could tell was overpowering others.
I had a stroke of genius (not really, that’s overselling it, but on we go): I thought it was probably the temperature that was the problem now. It was too warm. Warm wine, obviously, tastes very different than cold wine. It just interacts with the tongue and the nose completely differently, which can throw off the balance. I needed to cool it down, I thought, so I put it into the fridge, which I knew at first would mean the wine would be too cold…but that the wine would then warm in the glass again, and there would be a window where it was perfect.
It worked. The wine was instantly, even cooled a bit too much, more complex, velvety, flavorful, and in perfect balance. I could tell from that first sip it was going to evolve as it warmed exactly how I wanted it to.
What I forgot, was that there’s also something to be said for the second glass of something. There’s magic in the second glass. And it has to do with alcohol, I think. Heightened even more with food, too, by the way. I was eating while I drank it last night, but no special meal. Mostly, I was just trying to stay away from anything that might overpower the wine. But, y’all…that second glass was fucking heaven. I can still taste it. Not a ton of fruit, which is my favorite. It smelled of leather, which is weird thing to say, but it’s apt; it was earthy, musky and spicy in that way that leather is. It didn’t taste like leather, but the earthiness and the spiciness were there, and the tannin, which I know, now, dries out the mouth, was spectacular. It all culminated into a wine, simply, that tasted of many many things, and together they were all delicious, and every sip was a little different, but all of them felt like luxury. And the alcohol made the mind wander a bit, lose track of time a bit, and flavors would pop in and out like bubbles bursting through the haze. Not to say that I was drunk, because I wasn’t. It was a glass and a half of wine. But it was enough of a buzz to let things slip just that little bit, and everything came alive.
So…that’s what I learned last night. The magic is always going to be in the second glass, at least if it’s a wine that’s complex, as all of the great ones are. And that’s because alcohol, and in the case of a meal, the food, are required to get the mind to fully grasp what’s in there. I don’t think we can actually understand it until we get there, it’s the full context, the correct forum for the beverage to express itself, how it’s supposed to be consumed.
It’s heaven. And it’s been a while since I’ve had that experience. I think it was just before christmas two years ago with Josh, and we had a champagne together to celebrate the year that is the best fucking champagne I’ve ever had. That was the same experience. Instantly good wine…but it was on the second glass for each of us, and the conversation that went with it, that the wine skyrocketed into the atmosphere. I’ll never forget it.
I won’t forget this one, either. I should mention, too, that I was finished up watching a very good movie, The Fish Tank, that made me think about growing up (relatively) poor, and how real it depicted being a kid in that environment. Less all the teenagers drinking constantly, though some did that…but the filth. The decrepit-ness, and the understanding that no one was escaping it. This was going to be our lives, too, once we grew up. This was the whole world, so far as we could tell.
Night night.