What Makes a Wine Worth Drinking by Terry Theise

Author:Terry Theise
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

7

Serving the Thirsty Ghost

I distinguish between wines made since I started drinking wine and wines made before that time. If it’s a vintage I knew when it was young, in some stubborn way it remains young. It’s like looking at an adult you knew as a baby; you always see the newborn. This feckless adult who stands before you is a kind of trick, a chimera. So if I drink a 1971, it isn’t an old wine even if it tastes like one. You might observe that this is just me in denial about aging, but I’m not denying anything. I’m happy to be aging. The alternative is too unsettling. It is, rather, a curious palimpsest having to do with the nature of memory and the curvings of time.

When I drink a wine that predates my wine discovery, that is an old wine. And it is unfathomable. What does the date on the label mean? What can it mean? If you do the math and the wine is seventy years old or whatever, how viscerally real is that at the moment of tasting? Over the years I have come to expect that old wines will be interior in a way that young wines seldom are, and more sedate. But I do not—cannot—approach such wines expecting my soul to be shaken. Indeed, approaching any experience expecting one’s soul to be shaken is a recipe for disappointment. While the repose and complexity of old wines often induce reverie, the appearance of soul is whimsical and capricious, and all you can do is to be ready and have the fireplace going.

But let’s pause for a moment, to try to be more clear. When I speak of soul, I refer to an abstract or metaphysical condition from which we all borrow and with which we are all imbued. If I speak of “my” soul, I mean only the portion of the collective soul that’s given to me in certain moments, and if I speak of a wine’s soul, that is me inferring the presence of this phenomenon in the wine. It’s like sunlight. It isn’t my sunlight, though I might stand in it, and it isn’t the tree’s sunlight, though it falls on the tree. It’s there and we all take from it.

Sometimes my soul may be shaken. If a wine tastes “old”—that is, if it tastes fragile and inscrutable and interior—then I am roused to the core by its dignity and by the soft light of its incipient demise. Alternately, if the wine tastes youthful, notwithstanding its age, that is even more ridiculously beautiful, and that kind of virtual confit of its vitality represents a courage that affirms something for which I have no name. I can’t draw a logical thread between either of these experiences and the sadness that arrives with them. For me, it just does. The evening of a life is a matter of tristesse, and the insistent bright morning of a life caught in the teeth of time and

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