did, just this morning), “It's like the ball is invisible.” Another batter on a tear says, “I'm seein’ the ball real good.” Well, just what is happening here? It isn't mechanics; hitters and their coaches are seasoned professionals who know the basics. How does one describe these states of being in or out of “the zone”? I think we start by trying to describe what “the zone” itself is. And you can't do that without recourse to the mystic.
Musicians will sometimes reach zones of their own, often saying something like “I felt like a vessel through which the music was playing, as if I weren't generating it at all.” And since that state exists but we don't know how to access it, what is its nature, and how do we find our ways to it?
My central argument is that wine can be a bringer of mystical experience—but not all wine. There are prerequisites, and I'll discuss them. In addition, there are collateral benefits to allowing oneself to be prepared for wine's mystical capacity. We also become sensitized to wine's fun capacity. But what is the process of cultivating this preparedness? That has been the subject of millions of words on Eastern thought, but when has it ever been applied to wine?
It begins with understanding what a “palate” actually is, and how to truly know one's own. It continues with cultivating a particular approach to wine, whereby one prefers the finer over the coarser virtues, the quiet over the noisy.
The ethereal can be forbidding when it isn't grounded in counterpoint to the ordinary. I wish this book to be ethereal, since it is defending the mystic, but I don't want it to be slack or nebulous. Neither do I want it to be too linear, though, because I don't hold that all experience is reducible to logic. I understand the difficulty of using language to describe evanescent or ineffable states. But instead of surrendering vaporously (“such things are beyond words…”), I'll confront the very limitations of language itself by asking what purpose it serves.
If you want to experience wine with your whole self—not only your mind and senses—the wine has to be authentic. And what confers authenticity is a rootedness in family, soil, and culture as well as the connections among them. These are aided by intimacy of scale. And they form the core of a value system by which real wine can be appreciated and understood.
Part of advancing this point of view is to identify what opposes it. It cannot suffice only to find the good and praise it, because the good is under ceaseless threat from the bogus and ostentatious. This tension forms the basis for a large quarrel between two sorts of wine drinkers, and they don't always play nice. I'll try to help us steer a decent person's way through.
I was fortunate to learn about wine in the best possible way, in the Old World among the vines and in the company of the families who grew them. One could call this a “classical” education, to learn the benchmarks of the subject firsthand, to place in the center what belonged in the center, and to appreciate the borders between the central and the peripheral.
In the end I'll share a few wine experiences with you, which will put these principles inside an actual life with wine.
If the text seems to meander or to sometimes repeat itself, I don't mind; in fact, I hope it does. It is less a strict cerebral argument and more a piece of a lifelong incantation. At times I might frustrate you by defining terms you already know, or failing to define terms you don't know. The actual you won't always be congruent with the many hypothetical yous I've had looking over my shoulder. I beg your pardon in advance.
Although this is not a wine primer, if I were an educator, the first thing I'd tell you is this: anyone learning about wines should begin in the Old World, where wine itself began. It's more grounded there. All things being equal, it is more artisanal, more intimately scaled, humbler, and less likely to be blown about by the ephemeral breezes of fashion. Its wines are made by vintners who descend from other vintners, often for a dozen or more generations. They are not parvenus, arrivistes, or refugees from careers in architecture, dermatology, software design, or municipal garbage disposal systems. They don't know about the wine “lifestyle,” and if you tried to tell them, you'd likely draw a blank stare. You won't see a huge white stretch limo pulling out of their courtyards like the one I saw emerging ostentatiously from Opus One in the Napa Valley last year (I doubt it would fit in Ürzig or Séguret or Riquewihr or Vetroz). You'll never find Bon Appétit taking pictures in these growers” kitchens or at garden parties on the grounds.
Starting with Old World wines is also useful because they don't do all the work for you. Non-wine people will wonder what I mean. Climate change notwithstanding, Old World wines (especially north of the Alps) have about them a certain reserve. They're not aloof, but neither are they extravagant, gregarious, life-of-the-party wines. They don't play at top volume, and they can seem inscrutable to people with short attention spans. They are, however, kinetic; they draw you in, they make you a participant in the dance. They engage you. They won't let you be passive, unless you choose to ignore them—in which case, why buy them? Yes, of course, I'm painting in broad strokes, but I won't clutter the prose with qualifiers; this is what I believe. Old World wines ask you to dance with them; New World wines push you prone onto a chair and give you a lap dance, no touching.
Other writers have clarified the disparate paradigms of Old and New World wines, and the rule of generalities applies; they are never more than generally true. Yet they exist for a reason. Notwithstanding the various honorable exceptions, New World wines are marked by a kind of effusiveness that turns the drinker from a participant into an onlooker. These big, emphatic wines put on quite a show: explosions and car chases in every glass. If you're new to wine, this can be reassuring. You get it. You needn't worry there are subtleties you don't grasp. But eventually such wines begin to pall.
Most New World wines cue off an Old World benchmark. The original is the great novel; the newbie is the made-for-TV movie based on the great novel. Not only is the complexity of the story squandered, but the entire experience of receiving it shrinks to a passive “entertainment” and obliterates the vital, breathing, imaginative life we bring to the act of reading.
Go on, call me opinionated! I accept it. But also call me a man who stands for something. The alternative seems to be to stand for nothing, and that won't do.
I'm sitting at my dining room table with a glass of wine. On the walls around me are all the pieces of art I've collected. Laughably, these are mostly prints from calendars, but in my own defense they're Old World calendars with superior print quality! The scenes are all peaceful; they show cows, ponds, cows grazing near ponds, ponds reflecting the faces of cows, all these theta-wave-inducing scenes for which a city boy hungers. I have a stray thought: what will my son make of these? How will he remember them? Will they grow nostalgic for him; will he love them in retrospect? (I'm sure he finds them seriously boring right now.) My folks had a reproduction of a van Gogh that showed sailboats on a shoreline. It's probably famous. I saw it constantly when I was a kid. If I see it now, some kind of membrane grows permeable inside me. I don't even like the painting. But I'm plunged back into old, familiar waters. It's not associated with any discrete memory: I don't link it to my father burning the lamb chops or my mother cracking us all up. It is the sum of all the ethereal memory of being little, all the mystery of what I didn't know then and will never know, all the mystery of what becomes of the time, all the longing for what might have been said, said better, done better, how we might all have been better, starting with me. Sad, wondering, uneasy, oddly sweet.
Wine can talk to this thing in us. Some call it soul. Wine is not apart from this being within us. It doesn't have to be. It fits in tidily, and takes its place. All it needs is a soul of its own. It can't be manufactured; it can't have been formed by marketers seeking to identify its target audience. It needs to be connected to families who are connected to their land and to working their land and who are content to let the land speak in its own voice. Wines like this are valid because they don't insist you leave 90 percent of yourself at the rim of the glass. This trait stands apart from how
