Wine Owns Me

For all practical purposes, and the aches and pains of early morning punchdowns and long vineyard sampling walks and hours standing at the press and days without end carrying a bag of wine on my shoulder will all attest to my beneficial and complicit servitude. Wine owns me.

The preceding sentences are not hyperbolic, and it gives me great pleasure to know that I am so thoroughly bound up by and for the becoming of beauty and joy.

Slaking another’s thirst, feeding others, making love to that one are acts of generosity and intimacy that know no equal. That wine should be part of this holy trinity is no mystery. That it should accomplish what it does with such elan and celebration (even on a Tuesday night) is a function of its ebullient nature.

Factors from the outside — political, financial, economic — can affect our relationship with wine, but they bat harmlessly against wine itself, like bugs on a screen door. Wine is sui generis. It exists in an incorruptible bubble (assuming the good intentions of the winemaker), and exists simultaneously in that chamber and in the world of joy and contentment.

Every time I open a bottle of wine, I am coming closer to a kindred spirit who helped to shepherd along this brightest of things to a conclusion that makes life more delicious and hopeful, that connects us to the adamantine reality of dirt and history and freedom and connects us to the green and growing things at the heart of the world.

An open bottle of wine is an invitation to and a kicking-to-the-curb of those malignant things that weigh spirits down and make us pawns to the worse angels of our nature. Pull a cork and let life breathe.