Dear Wine in My Glass — Terroir Talking | Nature, Spirit, Wine | Stories about nature and the life within wine | Interviews with winemakers and growers about their relationship with nature.

Reflection No. 17

What is your story? If you tell me, I will listen. I will close my eyes and breathe deeply. I will let my senses flow within your aromas and search for the sensations that reveal the narrative of your life. I will understand the language of time and explore the images that come to me from a land with a viticultural heritage as deep as the roots of the old vines. I will respect the expression of confidence that comes with age or frolic with the vivacious fruit that tells me you are from excitable young vines.

I will seek a sensation of the soil that gave life to the vine that nurtured you, feeding you with all the sustenance from the earth that it could find — calcareous soils that used to be part of an underwater paradise; dense, iron-rich clay; dry sand that allowed so many old vines to escape the evil phylloxera — and I will revel in the mysteries of minerality that comes from rocks too strong to be broken down by time.

You can speak to me in vivid details of hot Summer days spent dancing amidst radiant beams of sunlight filtered through the canopy of leaves on your vine. Or you might reveal a different place where the nearby sea sent cooling fog into the night to give you slow, easeful mornings.

I will surrender to the impressions of fruits, flowers and herbs that tell me about your family and about friends that might have joined you, like the entourage that often composes a Rhône wine. I will ponder the biodiversity of your environment that might have added to your sense of place.

Your story will have mingled with mine. You will no longer be an anonymous thing poured from a bottle that came from a store. I know you now and I will remember you forever.