Why Numbers Make Me Feel Cold When I Drink Wine
(by Justin Christoph - www.bcity.com/winepoet or christop@monet.vill.edu )

I drink a glass of wine to feel warm in much the same way one would curl up with a favorite book on a brisk fall day. In a larger sense, a long winter has descended on us towards the end of the millennium, certain segments of the population may have more financial assets to procure trappings of the good life, but esthetic bankruptcy is universal. Art is under glass and we glide silently past. It is no longer in spiritual contact with individuals.

Wine is color in a drab world for me where other extensions beyond myself dissolve into cold institutions. I can participate in the art of wine tasting, choosing a given wine for a certain mood, less than incidental music, choice food, and a particular moment. By opening a bottle of wine and giving it expression in my unique circumstances, I recreate the winemaker’s art as a reader gives voice and life to a dead poet’s verse. Whatever energy I project into wine tasting comes back to me many fold from the excitement and wonder elicited from both the wines I perceive to my liking and those I am obverse to at a particular moment.

I am fueled by the drive to try something new, to wager on a wine that might take chances, in contrast to a world of flat lines and vacuous standards. And, yes, wine rating scores. It’s not so much I think I could live the rest of my life comfortably without knowing precisely what 87 tastes like, but I would feel a dull pain approaching wine in that matter or having others limit themselves by doing so. It is reassuring sometimes to have my expectations trumped by a wine or a wine tasting compatriot. A drive to compel everything to make sense and line up neatly can only end up in either a desolated landscape or an internal imbalance akin to madness. From the second I touch a wine glass my fingerprints are all over it. Why make its singular contents a tyranny for many tongues? It would be a grim and foreboding experience to imbibe a world where every deviation, wine and enjoyable circumstance are taken into the accounting. An accounting of winners, losers and those who end up playing both sides of the card before their sun sets. I prefer not to drink a wine because it is reputed to be better than another wine or to feel better than another person by drinking it. Living one good life does not necessarily negate other constructions of an esthetically pleasing existence.

In a disheartening world of corporate take over bid cliches and homogenized lowest common denominators, it emboldens me that there is still diversity in wine, in art and in life. People can appreciate difference and partake in peculiarities. We should not strive to manufacture wine any more than we should manufacture consensus; instead, we should allow fruit and people to express themselves.

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