Wine Not?

September 19, 2008

I think I was getting a bit preachy yesterday.

After all, who am I to tell anyone how to live his or her life? I am pretty new to this moderation thing.

And, as I said in my post of September 16, "moderation in all things, including moderation" is really my goal. Occasionally throwing caution to the winds is a good thing, as long as it doesn't involve life-threatening and/or illegal behavior, such as driving while intoxicated, or going duck hunting with Dick Cheney.

Speaking of intoxication, wine is one of the great pleasures of life, especially good wine. I don't claim to be much of a serious oenophile, but as I get older, I appreciate it more and more. Wine drinking has a long history, going back at least 8,000 years; coincidentally, to about the time of the first recorded hangover.

Hangovers result, of course, from immoderate wine drinking; although if you listen to a character in Brideshead Revisited, after a friend revisits his dinner through an open window, it is all in the mix: "The wines were too various...it was neither the quantity or the quality that was at fault."

I try to limit my consumption to two glasses in any given day. I like both red and white, but red sometimes gives me a headache (no, not because I have sucked down an entire bottle). I think it is the congeners, or impurities, in red wine but I am not sure. However, as we all know by now, drinking red wine has all of these fabulous health benefits in addition to making you feel like a happier, better, more Continental version of your self. Any reasonably good red wine works for me, whether Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon or Shiraz or a combination; I don't usually spend more than $12.00 - $15.00 for a bottle, but occasionally I will splurge on something more expensive, perhaps for a special occasion.

White wines are also quite enjoyable; I like a dry Riesling or, recently, a white Bordeaux was very nice with a summery meal.

One of my favorite wine-drinking memories is a bicycle trip through Tuscany that I took with my brother Jim and sister-in-law Stacey twenty years ago. Tuscany is hilly, so the biking was challenging, even thought I had been riding a lot. We would bike all day, and then stay in some wonderful medieval castle or villa; one morning we biked to the top of a hill where sat an old monastery. Our group of about 20 lunched on some of the best food I have ever eaten, and drank much wine, sitting outside in the mellow Tuscan sun at long white-clothed tables, while turkeys strutted and gobbled in the courtyard. It was early October, and the grapes were ripe.

The fall is a good time to drink wine. It is getting cooler, the air is clear and dry, the grapes are ripe. Pour yourself a glass, sit outside, contemplate the sky, sip slowly and enjoy.