It’s hardly normal for me, your wine, to write this way to the person who does me the honor of being my consumer. After all, to be drunk and drunk appreciatively is what all wines live for. And I hope you won’t take what I have to say as any sort of personal affront. I like you as a person and have come to appreciate many of your better features. Your dinner parties are urbane affairs and your friends make up, with statistically insignificant exception, an intelligent and droll company — although, as a wine, I can’t pretend to be much of an expert on what humans find funny.
I also appreciate the nice stemware. One doesn’t find that everywhere. From what I read — yes, we have our own Reddit channel these days — many of my colleagues aren’t treated with much respect in this area, being poured into any old thing that’s at hand: the odd jam jar, cracked tea cup, etc. Often none too clean. Reports of such treatment are enough to curdle my tannins, I can tell you.
But this has never been my experience chez vous, where one invariably meets with decency and decorum. And don’t think I’m not grateful. It’s just that while the time we pass together is undeniably well spent, there’s just too little of it. Far too little for a wine of my breeding — if I may be frank — to find very satisfying or fulfilling, or for you to take the full measure of my quality.
Let me be more specific. No complaints on my end about the the storage facilities in what you like to call your cave à vin, though it is just a disused closet a bit too near the radiator to be ideal; nor concerning the handling of Yours Truly at table — always given time to breathe and a moment or two extra to collect my thoughts, if needed. You eye, swirl, sniff and slurp with aplomb; never fail to decant when appropriate and even, from time to time, take a note. Your judgement is sound in the main, and your tasting vocabulary, though limited, can be counted on to get to the point — even if the tender wine ego is wounded by the occasional cutting comment.
No, the problem, cher ami, arrives with the speed with which I am thus dispatched. Down the hatch and what’s for dessert, would be one way to put it. In what feels like the blink of an eye, I am no more. My candle burned out in a tragically premature demise; my potential forever unrealized. Johnny, ye hardly knew me.
I don’t write to accuse or to give vent to some long-cherished ill will. Not a bit. This is a missive penned in a spirit of mutual esteem. But there is, permit me to say so, an important aspect of our relationship you fail to grasp.
Wine — quality wine — is a creature of skill and intention and time. As such, it deserves to be experienced, not in a single go, but over several days. How many exactly is not for me to say except to emphasize that some of us have an enormous capacity to absorb oxygen and do not reach the apogee of our expressive capacities until we have been busy sucking it up for days, not a couple of hours. One simply cannot hurry this.
To put it another way, one doesn’t learn to know another fully and deeply on a first date. Intimacy requires patience as well as passion. Forgive me if the analogy makes you uncomfortable. I’m not looking for romance – just a stay of execution.
In this, I speak not only for myself, but on behalf of all wine, which, conscientiously produced and lovingly bottled, deserves to live a full life: growing, evolving, and experiencing whatever its pedigree has prepared it for, until, of its own accord, it gives up the grapey ghost.
Precisely how long the meaningful life of an opened bottle of wine may be is as difficult for me to speculate on as it would be for you to guess the term of your useful life. About all I can say is that you will know it when when you taste it. What this calls for on your part, old chum, is a bow to the pleasures of delayed gratification and a smidgen of self restraint. Leaving a few inches of wine over for the next day or two or three isn’t so hard, once you realize that the benefits are yours to reap.
Live and let live, I say. We’ll each be the better for it.
Yours for the long haul,
Wine