Elegia di Nera

I pulled out the bottle of 2000. Around this time it was being born, right about that time we were watching her last sunrise, she was breathing her last breaths. The appassimento was only ten years old, I shouldn’t have opened it. It was too soon. But things happen.

What can one say about the last ten years that this wine cannot? In ten years I have lived everyday without her, thinking about her, losing her everyday I wake up. She is now younger than me, than all of us. She doesn’t age, unlike this wine. But like this wine, neither had the time to grow old, really age. And so, once again, something is in front of me, dying.

The wine from the Veneto. I was just there. I should have gone down to Umbria and visited her site. I’ll go in the spring, when the lilies are covering her spot on the hill. Now, I am relegated to the gloomy skies of winter, and this bottle of wine and my memories of a love lost to the ages.

Was it any different at nine years? will it be any different at eleven years? Or 20? 40? Probably not. One thing about death, there is no perfect closure. It is open and raw and seething and it hurts and it never goes away. Never.

But we have wine to sooth us. Bright, sweet, lively, filled with energy, ringing though our veins, making us lighter and brighter with it. Maybe a little calmer, a tiny bit melancholic. Read not further, you’ve already gone too far. Stop, surf on, dear cynics, this is my dirge.

Oh, there are sunrises and periods of happiness. There must be. It’s a necessity for survival. The butterfly still flutters, the bee still buzzes. And yes, there's a little honey and happiness too. One cannot sleep forever. Not yet.

Somewhere over pizza in Padova and a slew of natty wines, I got to thinking about the last days of her life. There was nothing natural about the chemicals they pumped into her. Anyone who goes through that knows. So what harm can a little sulfur in the wine do, in the grand scheme of things? And still there are those belted in to their window seats looking out at their last moments, dreaming of the perfect amphora, the great little vineyard with no chemicals on it. Those same vineyards, some of  whose cellars are terminally contaminated with pharmaceutical yeasts, never to leave the building with Elvis. And still we bark, bark, bark at the moon, at the barrels and at each other. And my little glass of appassimento sits half full, waiting for the bells to strike midnight.

Today my son and I will go to visit a new child, his little niece. We celebrate ten years of passing with a new gift of life. A new vintage. It will be a very good year.

In Memory of  Lizanne ~ Feb 14, 1953 - Feb 17, 2001

written and photographed by Alfonso Cevola limited rights reserved On the Wine Trail in Italy