I have started over more times than I can remember, and I am pissed.
The weeds are growing over my garden and it’s not just a metaphor. I can taste the alkaline tang of the phrase’s many meanings melting into each other in the early June heat. Bitter green.
Not at all the kind of day to stare down a relic from the past. And yet.
I am pissed. And the swelter seems to spook me toward an exorcism, something to cast off just one of the demons riding my skin.
It was a wedding gift. From a first failed marriage. Not an extravagance, but chosen with care. And in the split, it came with me. He took my favorite books, I got the bottle. I’d say it evens out, but I loved those books and have qualms about what this bottle has been through.
He took my favorite books, I got the bottle. I’d say it evens out, but I loved those books and have qualms about what this bottle has been through.
We have shared quite the journey.
Long roads, shifting skies, bone-rattling storms, and occasional heat waves. I suspect it is probably past its peak, but there’s a chance something good has been lingering, choosing its moment, waiting to be discovered all this time.
A slim chance.
This is not a meeting of reverent unveiling, of delicate attendance. It’s a dare. A standoff threatening to end in disappointment, like so much else. All this time invested and for what? A missed window. A lost hope.
A rare taste. Flattened or flaunted? Washed out or wonderful? It could go either way. But I’m pissed. So the path I see unfolding is not a lilting stroll down memory lane, but a militant march through mistaken alleys, leading here. Tonight. With this souvenir of a life gone—where, exactly?
Somewhere else.
We went to Paris once. It was Fashion Week and our AirBNB had canceled on us, claiming the apartment we booked had been broken into just as we were boarding the plane. He launched into a panicked frenzy with support teams on layovers, while I, still fresh enough off barely picking my way across Europe without pre-booked hotels, was acting alarmingly nonchalant about the whole thing. Which only panicked him more, it turned out.
We recovered, though, and toward the end of our week, I suggested champagne at the rooftop bar of my favorite museum—we could stare at the Eiffel Tower and dream a little, my treat.
I was still launching my business, so the champagne was just about the only thing I could pay toward our trip. When he started pushing to order dinner as well as drinks, I felt panic rise in having to explain that the champagne was all I could afford at that restaurant. He eventually, exasperatedly, said he would pick up the tab then. Maybe it will taste like that moment.
Or maybe it will taste like the time he drank too much tequila and began outlining the conditions of our divorce—on the honeymoon. Like a fruit that hadn’t even begun to ripen before it was crushed.
There are moments that stand out among ruins, like stones that haven’t yet toppled under the impact or long years of holding themselves together.
Like hearing him call me the love of his life—not in whispered nothings, or footnotes to a perfect day, but as an offhand dedication under the heat of spotlights.
As I remove the foil from the top of the bottle, the cork looks dry and solid. So far, so good. But it snaps in two at the first signs of stress levering the corkscrew up and out.
What does regret taste like? Shame? Abandon?
I should have twisted through a bit further, because it comes out neatly, if tentatively, on the second pull—the weak middle would have held. Immediately, wine-stained oak rushes off the cork.
I am shocked. I had expected to pour something pallid and thin around the edges and it comes out of the bottle like a deep dream. Maybe a hint of age around the rim.
Berry, pepper and yeah, a little wet wood.
At first sip, I recognize it’s not a wine I would have chosen, but would have happily drank if someone else had gotten hold of the wine list.
It does feel a little stretched. Perhaps not quite everything it once was.
My nose keeps stinging with pepper, and I’m having a hard time getting past it, because it’s one of my least favorite spices.
It’s opening up a bit, and I can get some currant lingering. Maybe I’ve taken too long a break from tasting wine, because I keep catching myself admiring the glass. A truly lovely color with a delicate grasp on the curvature of the bowl. Plummy, bejeweled.
Maybe it really has been too long, because what it tastes like is wine, and that’s just fine. There are too few things that exist for the sake of being, without requiring a performance of devotion.
And in its simplicity, its ease, it reveals itself a bit more on its own time. There again, a bit weak, a bit flabby with age (sorry we didn’t meet when we were younger!), but I find myself enjoying that it’s not trying to be too much. Really inviting tannins, smooth, friendly. A bit of earth. It knows something, but won’t say. And that, too, is ok.
Suddenly, I know what regret tastes like. It’s oak smoke and wind and burnt cherry.
Suddenly, I know what regret tastes like. It’s oak smoke and wind and burnt cherry.
The moments, they remain stacked among the ruins. The bottle that never was.
In truth, though, this bottle isn’t ruined at all, to my amazement and surprise. After everything it’s been through. Cross-country U-Hauls in the dead of summer, neglect, dismissal. It still stands tall. Or, tall enough.
Part of the trouble seems to be that when you’ve forgotten how to live, you forget what it’s like to taste. What is that just there on the tip of my tongue? I don’t know if I remember.
Yet in every glass there’s a promise, a hope. Of not just what it is, but what it will be. What it could be. And at some point, some meeting of our choosing, we cut the hope loose and say, “What you are to me now is what you will be to me forever.”
It’s poetry, madness. Gain and loss.
I think, too, sometimes, of how he told me once that what he felt for me was like the way Henry James would write it. I was too young and hungry to see it for the red flag it waves at me now.
It was another summer not too long ago. Only just as far back as the summer these grapes were approaching their own crush. I can readily recall that heat, that hope. Unspoiled by the knowing of the years to come.
It speaks to a patience, an understanding of the waiting that has been asked of it. The wine has been unhurried and even. No rush to stake a claim on forwardness or ripeness or body it hasn’t earned. An ever-so-slightly wearied stateliness that cools the tongue in the gasp of delay.
An ever-so-slightly wearied stateliness that cools the tongue in the gasp of delay.
There’s no room left in the bottle to play or flirt or tease at what it will become. It has settled quite firmly and is holding its frame with dignity on its backward arc.
Despite the coolness, a heat lingers in the glass, thwarting my efforts to drink into it. So I put it away to rest, to try to get to know it better later. And in trying to hold onto it, I have left it too long. It has turned on me.
Now even more fiery, pungent and portly in color and weight, it shows off the characteristic raisin-ness unmellowed by any hint of sugar. It’s fitting that it seems to want to remind me some things can’t be revisited, some things aren’t meant to be returned to.
Having become completely unreachable, I’m not sure what remains of the bottle. In some ways, it’s quite forgettable. In others, clearly not. Some things best left to fade by their very nature persist beyond their keeping.
It’s perhaps the most appropriate finishing note for a beauty queen of yesteryear, turning this way and that in the light of its sunset. Sometimes unremarkable, other moments curious, and yet refined, and then a little mournful, only to burn out with a vengeance. As elusive as any of the hearts we cannot truly know—not least our own—unwilling that I should have any last word.
This is the first post from Wine Crushing, a project about wine as it’s lived; bottles opened to ruin or revelation.
If you like it, consider joining the Crush. We brought perks.