Every wine tasting is a miracle. By oneself, aided or not and in a community the interaction proffers the great distraction. Groups of people gather, their emotional aches, anger, worries, longing and desires. All their troubles are with them, the vulgarities and banalities of lives, the peaks up high and the valley down low. Writers, sommeliers, servers, cooks, social media marketers, influencers and tasters. All struggling through life, loss and love, family dynamics, friends come and gone, sickness, death, epiphany and revelation. Fights and reconciliations, milestones, divorce and rites of passage. Deprivation, oppression, depression, luck, fortune, bullying, racism, prosperity and indifference. Suddenly they begin to taste and everything just disappears. Just like that. There’s a familiar silence, even while conversation ensues, but it’s as if sublime music plays, is performed, gifted.

All there is and was vanishes into wine. A communal connectivity is bred and all that is ugly dissipates and dissolves into the spirit of fruit, phenols, acidity and tannin. Everyone feels the charge and focuses on the present. The producers and the labels are in their moments afforded their due but most just see the whole and greater picture. Humans, wine lovers, kindred spirits, surrendered to the wine.

Some feel like crying or resting their tired heads on the next person’s shoulder. It chokes them up, makes them realize that things can be this simple. When a great wine is tasted some nod in approval while the more emotional just face the ground because it’s almost too much to take in, or even handle. It’s just so beautiful, all these people tasting and experiencing these wines together. This marvellous communal share and if they are themselves they can’t say because they are out of body and also mind. They wonder why it can’t always be this, why life has to be so hard, so stressful, fast and supercharged. Why does the exceptional not intervene like it does when tasting wine? Why is this not the rule of life?

When it’s over who does not wonder if the true energy of the world might not be a glass raised of wine? Wine is a beautiful thing.

This post was inspired by the writing of the French novelist and philosophy teacher Muriel Barbery. Restful holidays to all. Auguri, for health, happiness and beautiful wine in 2020.

Good to go!

godello

Twitter: @mgodello

Instagram: mgodello

WineAlign