this be?” It's like meeting a new person, before you know anything about him; you respond instinctually, chemically. There is something remarkably alive about us in that moment. Our receptors are buzzing, and we are alight with interest.
Some wines announce themselves. They really push at you. They work the handshake, they're riffing right away, full of schtick, one-liners, they want you to like them, and they work to amuse you. But sometimes you feel a melancholy suspicion it isn't at all about you; they do it with everyone—they need to be liked and approved of. It's their act. And often it's fun to encounter such people. And sometimes there's even a genuine and substantive person, underneath the bluster.
In wine terms that's “tasting the noise.”
Other times you meet someone who seems oddly composed and at peace. She doesn't seem to care what impression she makes on you, because she has nothing she's driven to demonstrate. Yet often she directs a lovely beam of attention on you, as if you are a surprising delight, and you spend minutes talking with this compelling new person, and you come away feeling roused, glad, as if you'd been seen in some keenly approving way. Ye t she is still a blank. She didn't talk about herself. She seemed to be demure.
You become extremely curious about such a person. What is the source of her composure? How does she seem so sure and so stable? How graceful she is, and how effortless she makes it appear! While the high-affect fellow seems to spring into action when he feels the spotlight hit him, this lady seems to be lit from within.
In wine terms, that's “tasting the silence.” These introverted wines seem to draw some sheer curtain, and suddenly the world falls away. They banish preoccupation. They deliver repose.
They embody a calmness, they channel the daydreams. And they do it with no perceptible effort. They combine a serene diffidence with a strangely numinous beauty in a poignant and haunting way. And such wines are full of flavor, often the most searching and complex wines we'll ever know. But they hold you in their theta-dance, and some crust starts to dissolve in you, and you liquefy to your core, a place hardly anyone ever sees, and the wine seems to know you, like some strange angel.
Such wines are never noisy. They don't know how to be. They won't reward superficial attention. But the deeper you go, the greater the prize, for these aren't merely great wines, they are great moments of life. They show that a certain thing is possible, something you never saw and doubted existed—a mysterious miracle you didn't know you carried with you. You realize that hedonism washes away—it won't adhere; it's why we chase it so desperately. This, though, this stays. This actually changes your life. It might not be a huge change. It's not like getting your first degree or losing thirty pounds or having your first child. It's just a small glimpse of a possibility you can't fathom, tiny, delicate, impossible to forget.
If it moves you, and if you try to talk about it, you feel like a fool. You don't have the language you need, and so you fumble, and people think you've been hitting the bong pipe. For you it is entirely definite as feeling and spiritual sense, but in language it's nebulous. How do we delineate between wines that enact and wines that reveal?
Enacting wines can be brilliant and scintillating, but I sometimes feel them straining to ravish me, busy being amazing. Revealing wines just sit there being themselves, as if they were born knowing repose. Think of the way a person's face is most revealing when it isn't busy with gestures and expressions; while reading perhaps, or even sleeping. You look at the face and see the person behind the personality. That is what revealing wines reveal.
You can call it spiritual, but that poor word's been debased. It's easy to distrust spirituality or the life of the soul, because the words are wielded with what sounds like a rebuke, that we should live in spirit or that our souls should live our lives for us. Well, phooey. Yet very often we make the opposite mistake; we insist on banishing soul from our lives. Quite an effort, that is, to push away soul, to reassure ourselves and others that we're matter-of-fact, as if soul were a kind of spiritual elitism. Personally I think it's useless to pull soul in or to shove it away. Better to ignore it and go about your life, as long as you are alive, by which I mean attentive and available. Soul is pretty smart and will show up when it's warranted. And these aren't always the moments we think are exalted. Baseball season just started, and I can't wait for that first night game. I'll buy my soul some chicken fingers. My soul likes the fried stuff.
When you taste silence in a wine, you sense a peace that lives on the far shores of all the urging and pushing. It's like making up after a fight: I love her; why are we fighting? It's a strange and stirring peace that seems to come only this way, to take us to this place where everything belongs and everything's all right. These wines that seem so quiet only whisper to you so that you will quiet down and listen, and listening, be finally able to hear not only their own psalms of flavor but the tenderness and serenity around us always.
I happily confess I was touched and amazed at the way people responded when this book came out in September 2010. I knew that the people who'd like it would like it a lot. I figured there'd be a few of them, and what the hell, I stuck my neck out and risked seeming mawkish. But I started to get the impression that the book talked to some forbidden place in some of us, somewhere we felt ashamed, as if wine were too ephemeral to cause such emotion, or as though there were no greater values in play.
But as this paperback edition of Reading between the Wines appears, I want to reassure you that none of what follows is a command. It is merely a proposal. It's all right to think of wine like this, and it's all right not to. A range of possible experiences exist, and we take the ones we like. Wine is a tactful invitation, not a summons. But let us be available, when it asks, to go quietly soaring, because the earthbound life is finally too small.
INTRODUCTION
Some people will never learn anything, for this reason, because they understand everything too soon. —Alexander Pope
Iowe my life in wine to two people: Hugh Johnson and Rod Stewart.
Rod came first. It was a Faces concert at the late, lamented Fillmore East on Second Avenue in New York City. Somehow I'd scored a front-row seat. Faces concerts in those days were like big drunken ramshackle rehearsals, with lots of boozy bonhomie. Rod would swig from a bottle of Mateus Rosé, and on one occasion he passed it down to some twitching rocker in the front row, who took a greasy hit and passed it along. Then it got to me. First sip of wine. I hated it. Passed the bottle to the next guy. Finally the last hippie handed the bottle back to Rod, who pantomimed being seriously pissed off to find it empty.
Metamessage for me: wine is cool, rock stars drink it. I want to be a rock star. This was crucial information. I had to at least pretend to like wine.
Looking back all these years later, I see that this was the very moment wine, or the idea of wine, came to reside in my life. Not because I liked the stuff, but because I'd absorbed the idea that wine was crucial as a social-sexual marker.
As I grew older, I (and my girlfriend du jour) would often score a bottle of wine—most of which I hated—for a Saturday night. The first wine I ever drank and actually wanted to drink again was…(here go my credentials) Blue Nun. It was a novel feeling to enjoy drinking wine. It was a relief to drink something with low alcohol and fruitiness.
I'd lived in Munich, Germany, as a middle schooler; my father was head of the Voice of America's European division from 1965 through 1968. Those middle-school years are when you form your persona and self-image; the bands and clothes you like, what pack you prefer to run with (or which pack will have you). For me, this seminal time was forever connected to being in Germany,
