Last night’s Sanglier Grenache is still in my head, how it tasted different and disclosed a contrasted song and trot this time.  Not better, not worse, still very much my favorite in Glenn’s portfolio, but how I can’t articulate the reasoning of my own thoughts, what it was, acutely, that the wine varied from those other, all those other, impressions, I’m in my lost seat.  Trying to type.  Trying to categorize.  But here I go, again, overthinking wine, taking away its jazz and palate paradiddles, the versified consistencies of what I sip.  So why—  Is this the English Professor ME telling the wined ME to look deeper?  What does it want me to do, type a reaction, 500 words?  This would be it, professor.  But my reaction predicates and prides itself on the euphoria of being lost in what I sip, ’12 Grenache from that Rincon Valley vineyard at the base of the Mayacamas; the rugged yet feminine duality sipped and perceived, shapeshifting and postmodern— the writer haunted.

Professor Me:  So what’s your thesis?  What exactly are you arguing about this Grenache?

Writer/Wine Me:  It reminder me that a wander should accompany the wonder of what’s in my glass and how it speaks to me.

Professor:  What does that mean?

Writer/Wine:  That to be replete with mechanical notes and to be drowned in analysis erodes wine’s spell and romance.  It should be a conversation, when you sip a wine.  A flirtation, a dance, a successful spell.

The speculative transaction halts and I imagine again, what I tasted, how it looked in the glass, what did the wine say to me?  Certainly more Strawberry syncopation with the stroll of slight saccharine about the herbal ebb; more activity, more electricity, more a bounce to its presence and placement to palate.  There was more intrigue, more instruction, more literature.  Definitely a professor’s wine, so the fictive stichomythia above shouldn’t even be taking place.  The wine is its own argument, rhetoric.  It’s an inviting wine, tranquil and leaning with Zen; The wine doesn’t want us to think, it wants us, wanted me last night and even this morning in this coffee-curbed meditation, to amorously summon its character; think about how it tasted, how it paired with that light pasta, the spinach leaves and red vinaigrette.  Such symphonic synergy.  Music.  That’s the truth, that’s the revelation.  Or, “thesis”, if you will…..

I’ll be in the tasting room today, and I’m sure I’ll taste the Grenache a couple times, well as the other projects, but I’m promising myself that no over-analysis will be executed.  Just a conversation with everything, from the Chardonnay to the Rhône blend, the Cab and Syrah.  Just a breviloquent intersection.  And that’s it.  Then I think, remember it, but no analysis.  Wine is teaching me more composure as a character, which translates to my pervading temperament as a character; wine’s shown me in its, now, ten-year lecture, that the characters change, the wines change, THIS WRITER will change.  And it shouldn’t be resisted, nor scrutinized or rejected, but wholly embraced

(new thesis:  Wine’s pedagogy is taste-based, no right or wrong, just sipped sincerity.)

1/28/16