Oct 11 2002
Love/hate: Wine
Love/hate for Friday, October 11, 2002
Wine
It’s especially fitting that today’s “Love/hate” is about wine, because I’m going out for a glass or dozen of wine tonight with my friend Kathleen, who is gracing San Francisco with her presence this week, to the detriment and despair of Detroit, her hometown. How’s that for alliteration?
I guess it’s not surprising that I love champagne, since I’m the fizzy side of this blog. I am also a hopeless luxury addict. I tried to like beer when I was poor, in college, and a luxe-addict wannabe, but it never took. I remain, and always will be, a champagne kind of girl.
Not that I limit myself to champagne in matters of wine. I can always be found buying Beaujolais Nouveau on the third Thursday in November, for example. And I have happy memories of visiting the major wine-producing areas of France and Italy, where you can taste and buy wine not shipped outside the country. If I’m at a restaurant, I enjoy reading the wine list, whether or not I’m actually planning to drink any. It’s something like reading recipes, in the sense that I “taste” them in my mind as I read.
The study of wine is surely one of the more pleasant forms of homework, whether you travel abroad or just through your local wine merchant’s. Drinking wine makes any occasional more special, and certainly more convivial, with its “ability to banish care”, as Thomas Jefferson observed. It complements food like no other beverage, and is now considered to be good for one’s health, though you shouldn’t let that deter you. It’s a pleasure to be savored in good company.