Story by Susan J. BarbourWine people have a million dollar question. It goes, “What was the bottle that did it for you?” I don’t have a proper answer. For me, there was no bottle. For me it was an actual grape. A moldy, rotten, wrinkled grape.
You do not have to have an amazing sense of smell to love wine. You do have to have a sense of wonder. When you begin to pay the smallest bit of attention to anything, I guarantee it will open your perception. If you are very devoted, it may even become like a little guru. Wine will begin teach you how to appreciate more of what you already have around you. Your senses quicken and are put to use. That is why I call it falling in love. Because it is as though a new person has swept through your existence and introduced you to the life you’ve been missing. In other words, your nose (not to mention your heart) is a whole lot better than you think.
Botrytis cinerea, also known as necrotrophic fungus or, among wine-lovers, Noble Rot. This is the grape used in the famous sweet wine Sauternes, located just outside of Bordeaux, France. It is also used in Barsac, a lesser-known neighboring region, where I paid an innocent visit several years ago.
Everything I knew about wine at the time came from a DK Guide to France. I could, however, tell magic when I saw it. Noble Rot, I knew, referred to the serendipitous discovery that a particular fungus could shrivel a particular grape into a fuzzy raisin that produced one of the most exquisite sweet wines known to man. But it was not until the curmudgeonly old producer who ran the chateau bid me take a wrinkled grape and put it in my mouth that I became a convert. There was an explosion of honeysuckle and peaches, yes, but what did me in was what the old man said while I chewed. “You can be a red or white wine producer and have a bad year, there are still things you can do in the cellar to remedy that. But a Sauternes or a Barsac,” he shook his head, “it doesn’t cooperate with you like that. One receives the right conditions for rot from up above or one does not. It’s something….mystique,” he said. Then he sighed the sigh of one who spends one’s whole chasing after a proud and fickle mistress.
He motioned for us to follow him to the cellar where he ran to unplug one of the hundred barrels lying on their sides. Then he put his ear flush against the oak. I thought he was mad. “Allez, allez!” he waved us over. I pulled my hair back and did as he told me. And then I heard it. The grapes whispered and hissed in a steady chorus. The man laughed a giddy, idiot’s laugh, and I couldn’t suppress my enormous grin. Then he took us to the tasting room, where we compared the colors of vintage bottles with new ones, and tasted a sampling of both. Before we left I dabbed a bit of it behind my ears and promised myself to start committing every smell I encountered to memory, so that I could find the proper words for what I was experiencing, so I could go on feeling that awake and that alive.
So, yes, I confess. There was no “bottle” that did it for me. There wasn’t even a robe or a bouquet initially. I was seduced into oenophilia by the mysticism of the vinerows and the music of the barrels. But it makes sense that I, a poet, would fall in love this way. You can spend your whole life sniffing out something that you think an “expert” might adore, but it is only when you find what enlivens you that that very long love affair will enroll you in its wondrous course.
Susan J. Barbour is a Paris-based poet/sommelier. She has studied and worked in France, Italy, Cyprus, Malawi and Japan. Susan received her B.A. in English Literature from Dartmouth University and attended the Writing Program at Johns Hopkins University where she met and worked with the poet-scholar Allen Grossman, who had a profound impact on her work and thinking. Susan currently lives in Paris where she is working toward a doctorate in English at the University of Oxford. Her first book, Metaxu, a unique pastiche of prose poetry, memoir, literary essay, and lyric fragments is forthcoming next spring. Learn more about Susan and wine at her blog, Savvy Sippers.
