Power Tasting is a magazine about wine tasting. It’s our great pleasure to travel through the various corners of Wine Country, visiting vineyards and sampling the wines that are made there. We have found over the years that where wine is made, people are friendly and live well. There is always some rather good food to eaten and washed down with very fine wines. But we have to return home; all we can bring back are great memories and often some bottles of pretty good wine.
As the months, and sometimes the years, go by we open those bottles and savor the aromas and tastes once again. And we remember where we were when we bought them, what it looked like and even in some cases the person who sold it to us. Such is the power of taste and smell to evoke mental images that we can’t even replicate by looking at travel photos.
The same can be said about wines ordered in restaurants. It is rare that we find a wine on a list that is exactly what we tasted when we were where the wine comes from. But when we order a Beaujolais, we can never taste a Moulin à Vent without summoning up images of the famous windmill for which the wine is named. Or if it’s a Morgon, we always think of a fabulous meal we had at Le Restaurant Morgon.
We have made so many wine tasting voyages to California that we have plenty of memories from there too. But no matter how beautiful the scenery, we were still in the United States and a lot was similar to back home. However exotic the winery, even Chateau Montelena or Darioush can’t compete, for example, with opening a Brunello and seeing Biondi-Santi in our minds eye. Part of the appeal of Napa Valley and Sonoma County is that we know them so well. We have had brief introductions to many diverse sectors of Wine Country outside America. It is precisely because we don’t know those places as well that makes remembering them so piquant.
Photos fade. Even the ones we take digitally are locked up in our phones. We don’t look at them very often. But we open wine bottles quite frequently and each one comes from somewhere far from home. Every bottle has a story to tell if one only knows how to listen. It tells us of histories, people, cultures and lifestyles that we have briefly taken a part of…or hope to someday.
So when we open a bottle of Champagne, for instance, we see sprightly bubbles in our glasses but also rolling vineyards, the cathedral in Reims, and sweaty laborers saying hello as they picked the harvest. Of course wine is made of alcohol, but it has the power to intoxicate us without even taking a sip.