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If I had not come to Rome I would not be who I am.” So it was with pain I read the words of a friend who lives in Rome, writing that she heard explosions in the city. The passages of time as the parade winds through the ancient alleys of a town we all owe so much to. Yes, I am back on the trail in Italy, but not yet back to wine.
Tonight I am drinking Champagne, white, rose, light, full, and the pace of life stalls as the actors stop and wave to the crowd before the float takes them into another alley, another time. The world’s longest parade has been Rome, and we all have a part of her inside us.
Do you love Italian wine? Or wine, just wine? Then you owe the Romans so much. I once thought the force behind wine, at least in my case, was the wine god. But I was mistaken. I saw only though my colored lens. And then finally, I saw it was the wine goddess. One needs only to go down South to see the force of her, but I have written of that in other places, in passages past. I won’t go over that again. No, what I have been shown, in a blinding light in the middle of the night, as it awoke me out of a deep sleep like death, was that she went before me, all of us, and forsake her youth and her beauty for a greater cause.
I have to laugh. Earlier in the day a colleague of mine, I’ve known her for thirty years, we were sitting around talking after a conference call that was surreal. The people on the other end were asking for a 50% increase in projected sales for 2011. As if. And like good soldiers, men and women both, we took the charge and will try and take the hill. But the wine goddess won’t help us, she isn’t interested in numbers. She projects the past, not the future. She is about reclaiming the authentic, not the impossible. And so we go about it, week after week, year after year, until someone younger comes by and relieves us. But I don’t hear them knocking.
I go out looking for them seeking them, this week I talked to two of them, over a table with food and wine. Young females, daughters of the goddess, they fly close to the flame of the volcano, not to burn but to feel the heat of passion, so they may take it back to their lair, to keep them warm through another cold winter. I am only too glad to comply. My daughters, these goddesses in waiting. And they have not even been to Rome. They must go, we must send them, so they can be who they are.
But first, let us finish the Champagne.
written by Alfonso Cevola limited rights reserved On the Wine Trail in Italy
