This isn't about "and", "but", or "however." It is about the perfect conjunction of time, place, mood and wine.
When I read Laurence Osborne's The Accidental Connoisseur I was struck by his final chapter, in which he found himself in some faraway beach town in Puglia or someplace. After all the bullshit and hype he'd encountered about wine in all his travels, he took a bottle of the local white to the shore, sat on the sand as the waves lapped at his feet and the sun sank low -- and had the best bottle of his odyssey.
Whether the story as told was literally true or not, it made a pointed contrast to everything else he'd encountered in the wine world. According to him, this was the perfect conjunction of time, place, mood and wine. That particular wine was, at that particular moment and in that specific place, the unmatchable companion to his mood.
I've been thinking about such moments in my life. I'm not sure I've experienced the "perfect conjunction," or maybe it's just that I haven't sorted it out from all the dinners and parties and conversations. I'm still thinking.
What about you? Have you had this sort of "peak wine experience"? What was the setting, how were you feeling, what was the wine that baptized the whole thing? Let me know. It'll be fun, and revelatory, to share this. If it's really personal and you don't feel like sharing it with everybody, email me. I'm interested and, as I've said before, at heart I'm just a nosey small-town New Englander.
If I have to piont one I must say I have to go back in time when I was 18 years old, went out in a date with a very hot girl. It was summer and we were in a beautiful place called Monte Argentario in the south coast of Tuscany.
I had a table in this little (5 tables) restaurant in Porto Ercole called Bacco in Toscana, famous for lobster and fish (at that time I was a DJ resident in a famous club in that area and made a lot of cash). We had a lobster based dinner and I choose a bottle of a Gewurztraminer from Trentino with it. The small and cosy restaurant, the young age of both of us, the perfect pair between food and wine, the treatment received by the owner of the restaurant and the fact that I actually end up home with the girl made that bottle unforgettable to this days...
Posted by: Gabrio Tosti | January 21, 2007 at 01:05 PM
Yes, sounds perfect. That's what I'm talking about...
Posted by: Terry Hughes | January 21, 2007 at 04:19 PM
Dec. 7, 1999. My birthday. I'm standing in the damp, cold cellar at the domaine Jean Grivot in Vosne-Romanee, the chill creeping up my ankles, with winemaker Etienne Grivot and a couple of other people. We're tasting his burgundies from 1998 from the barrel, trying to take notes with shivering fingers. He twists the bung from a barrel, dips in the glass thief, pulls up a dark liquid and dribbles an inch into each glass. Echezeaux Grand Cru '98. The wine is savagely opaque, the bouquet, well, there is no bouquet except for a sort of smoldering, slumbering brutality. I take a sip. As Carole King used to sing, I feel the earth move under my feet. What I taste is minerals and strata and soil and hillside and a year's worth of weather and sunlight coalesced into a few rows of vines that bore these fragile yet powerful grapes that made this formidably concentrated wine of cave-like depth and dimension, which also happens to be incredibly succulent and delicious. Grivot raises an eyebrow and smiles shyly and says, "It is very difficult to speak about this. It is a series of small decisions and adjustments." Small decisions and adjustments! So that's how you make one of the best wines in the world! And then we went and had dinner in a Michelin three-star restaurant, because, as I said, it was my birthday. Yay!
Posted by: Fredric Koeppel | January 21, 2007 at 05:07 PM
Sorry you had to resort to Carol King, but I take your point. That sounds like one hell of a birthday, FK!
Posted by: Terry Hughes | January 21, 2007 at 05:10 PM
I once brought home a bottle of 1975 Souverain Cellars Petite Sirah. Bill Bonetti, later to become famous for his role in the branding of the Sonoma-Cutrer wines, was the winemaker at the time. I remember pouring it in a glass beaker that was better suited to beer or water. But the aroma of the wine in that glass was so intriguing and so delicately perfumed that, to this day, I still look for it in other wines, what that wine gave me that night. It was a marker, something I will never forget.
Posted by: Alfonso | January 21, 2007 at 10:53 PM
Hello Gabrio, where were you working at that time? At the King's club by any chance? I think we might have come across a few time perhaps, I was born and lived in Orbetello for many years. As a matter of fact that area can be really magic sometime and I had myself some good time, the same of yours, if you know what I mean.
Posted by: Gianpaolo | January 22, 2007 at 10:25 AM
There's Mondosapore for you, cross-roads of the wine kingdom.
i apologize for carole King.
Posted by: Fredric Koeppel | January 22, 2007 at 11:39 AM
Si al King's lavoravo con Maurizio Amadio...piccolo il mondo
Ciao
Posted by: gabrio | January 22, 2007 at 12:20 PM