This story originally appeared on the Gents Cafe Newsletter. You can subscribe here.
Glasses, grasped by the hands of both the pauper and the king: it has been so from the earliest days of civilization; indeed, the very liquid is to some extent the maker of civilization. From the lips of the drinkers, myths, legends, folklore and philosophy have flowed. Phoenicians, Greeks and Romans alike built a lifestyle from this very commodity. Thus from a vine, the rich, aromatic, opulent language of man has grown.
Embalmed in a bottle lies a child’s summer, autumn and winter nights. Families nattering, feasts fattening and names of French towns and villages gilded in candlelight. The child in this such case is me, a quiet observer – and to put the readers mind at rest, I was not at that point a wine drinker, nor was I nattering, nor indeed was I fattening. What I did do was savour, savouring the moments, savouring the stories, flavours, sights and the smells – and on those occasions when I was allowed a sip or two, I put my lips to my mother’s glass and blended all that savouring within. Today a Nuits-Saint-George (of the most modest expense) conjures up not only a punnet of fruits galore, not only the rack of lamb clothed in heady thyme, but an exoticism of connotation and a comfort of seeing, and feeling the warmth of an October night.
Wine is a lot of things for a lot of people: for me it is the elixir of times past, and times to come, the best of times. In a world so coarsened by the batterings of modernity, buffeted by information and where the bright screens of enticement and enchantment can leave one so disenchanted and alone, we must learn from what we have lost, good food, good conversation and most importantly good wine. Wine means encompassment, and for men in particular that, I dare say, is a neglected necessity.
It is easy to say that such a stimulus is surplus to us in contemporary society, that we can thrive on our own with increasingly less discourse. We may now have more knowledge, more figures and more information but we are no more intelligent than those first Armenian wine makers 6000 years ago, nor the Greek dinner attendees 4000 years ago. We adore wine just the same. A drink for the masses, from which we seek answers to the very same and very large questions of life.
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