The Wine “Curve”
A few years back while channel surfing I settled on a television rarity – a program about wine that was informative without being insufferably boring or contrived. What stuck was an interview with an older French gentleman who was the latest master of a great Bordeaux chateau, possibly a first growth. He modestly stated that he’d been drinking a bottle a day of the estate’s wine for over half a century…and was just discovering what the grapes were expressing.
That self-effacing revelation undescored what is, perhaps, the only mathematical certainty regarding wine – that there is no learning “curve” per se. Rather, the path to understanding wine is a line in its purest form, progressing by the glass into infinity.
People sometimes ask me the best wine I’ve ever had. My stock answer, without attempting to be disingenuous, is that I’ve yet to drink it. The point being that the love of wine is truly a lifetime learning experience, a passion that should never wane, a book of knowledge with no last page. And as with life, it’s a compendium of bottled moments from disappointing to satisfactory to exhilirating that make it all worthwhile.
Comments
Leave a Reply
Online Wine?
Get connected to the Wine School online! From our popular wine rating & review newsletter to our 1/4 million wine-related contacts on Linkedin to our daily "Life at the Wine School" tweets. Its all yours, for free.
