Originally published on July 19, 2008.
Yeah, I know today isn’t actually Wednesday, but I just read the announcement for Wine Blogging Wednesday #48 on the LENNDEVOURS blog and I’m very excited!
(For details on what Wine Blogging Wednesday is, go here.)
This may be WBW#48, but for me, it’s the first time. And fittingly, the August theme is “Back to Your Roots” so I get to start at the beginning: we’re each supposed to go back and re-taste a wine from our wine-tasting baby days.
Could be 1) the first wine we ever had – in my case, Sutter Home White Zinfandel, or if we’re counting anything with ‘wine’ on the (plastic) bottle, then it would be a California ‘wine’ Cooler.
Or could be 2) something we drank a lot of in our early wine-drinking days. In my case, that would be slightly sweet Rieslings (especially Finger Lakes Rieslings given that I was at Cornell, far above Cayuga’s waters).
Or could be 3) the first wine that was an ‘a-ha’ wine, a wine that was somehow a life-changing (or at least a palate changing) experience.
I’ll probably take the second route and I hope most of the WBW bloggers do the same. The ‘wine-that-changed-my-life’ stories can be a little cliche – mainly because they always seem to revolve around gorgeously-aged Barolos, heart-breakingly perfect Burgundies or a brilliant bottle of vintage Krug pulled out from a moldy cave (preferably by a Krug family member.) And most people don’t just randomly come across a glass of ‘life-changing’ wine – chances are they already have some sort of wine history beyond Yellow Tail before they made it to that moment.
Sure, there are be plenty of a-ha-moment wines that don’t involve 5-star bottle. Moments when our taste buds realized that balance, elegance, even restraint could be a beautiful thing. But that’s sort of cliche as well. Change the name of the wine and the region, but the story is still the same.
What I really want to read about is what came before that. If everyone is really really true to what those wines were, I’ll bet there are many happy bottles of buttery chardonnays, fruit bomb reds, and slightly (or not so slightly) sweet whites that weren’t exactly models of balance and elegance – a graveyard of wine skeletons we now bemoan as suited only for the great lead-palated masses.
But we all had to start somewhere and for those not born into wine royalty, that start was probably a long way from whatever we’ve evolved into, be it a burghound, rock-head, point-chaser (although there don’t seem to be many point-chasers roaming blogland), or just a generally promiscuous wine slut.
The point is, our wine tastes evolve over time. Obviously that’s stating the obvious. But since most blogs revolve around where a given drinker wound up, I think it would be espeically interesting to learn where we started.
Bring out those skeletons!