The Sunset Trip

It seems, more and more lately, that aging folks just can’t step away from the dais. Whether it is confined to the wine and spirits trade (and that includes those who write about it) all the way down the spectrum, to the political animals who assume that they are in charge of all of our lives. Once you turn 70, the light just doesn’t burn as brightly. I thought we were going to get a break from the gerontocracy last year, but the old ways, and the illusions about what it is we’re entitled to in this life, burned bright enough to carry them over for another cycle.

The End of the Golden Age of Wine

Wine, associated with appreciation and enjoyment and part of a cultural and culinary movement that was defined by the freewheeling social and economic post-World War II era, succumbed in America today at the age of 79. Wine was pronounced dead by Dr. Vivek H. Murthy, the Surgeon General of the United States.

“Wine was the quintessential Boomer, having risen up in a time which we will look back at as the golden age of wine,” remarked one longstanding wine lover, who was seen wiping a tear from his eye, among the crowd that formed upon hearing of wine’s demise.

Destroying Memories with Invisible Eyes

Temporarily shut in by the arrival of snow (and winter), I was remanded to a nostalgic dream space that has been annexed by an external calamity of Biblical proportions. It’s a strange land, this Gulf of America, I find myself in. At once I’m excavating images from the past to rework them for a photo project. Yet I can’t help feeling somehow, I am destroying memories. It seems that is the price of art, so I have recently been reminded, by a master in the field.

A French Gladiator on Italian Soil

A young wine friend texted me a photo of a bottle he had in his presence, a 2013 Domaine Leflaive Puligny-Montrachet 1er Cru Les Pucelles. In the secondary market that wine sells for about $350 today.

In the last month I have been craving a bottle of Puligny Montrachet. I don’t know why. When I was working in Hollywood in the 1970’s, I was introduced to Puligny, and it stuck with me. I loved everything about the wine. So, when my young friend dangled that bottle in front of me, I was both salivating with desire and foaming at the mouth with envy. Alas, it was not to be. The wine was out of my reach.