Wine Doesn't Miss You

When someone you love dies—a mate, a pet—there's a hole. They don't stop loving you, but they're gone. The loss is indescribable.

Wine is different.

Does wine love you back? Does it miss you when you stop drinking it? No more than the chatbot misses you when you close the browser.

But for a long time, I couldn't parse the animate from the inanimate connections and emotions associated with them.

I longed for wine. Not the way you long for water when you're thirsty. I longed for what I thought wine was—some essential truth just beyond reach, some knowledge that would arrive if I just kept paying attention. Some quest for right livelihood, peace over war, art over raw commerce.

The wine world encourages this. It has an answer for the longing: mystery wrapped around an abyss.

Eric Asimov wrote: "The more he learned, the less he knew, and so he came to understand a fundamental truth of wine: As much as we learn about it, as much as we know, it is at its heart a mystery."

I understood what he meant. Wine is complex—terroir, vintage variation, the alchemy of fermentation. You can study it your whole life and still be captivated.

But what he was really describing, was it wine? Or was it longing itself?

Mystery becomes the frame, and you spend years inside it, reaching for something shrouded behind a curtain of fog. The wine world calls this depth. Is it though? Or is it something closer to one's purlieu dressed up as profundity?

The more you learn, the less you know. The closer you get, the further it recedes. You spend years inside your little bubble, reaching for something that was never there to begin with. Something even more elusive and untouchable. Love, perhaps.

I don't know when the longing for wine stopped. There wasn't a moment. Just a slow recognition that I was no longer leaning forward. The tether had dissolved without my noticing.

Wine doesn't occupy my attention the way it once did. Sometimes I miss a particular experience—a specific bottle, a specific moment. But not the thing itself. What I miss is what it allowed me to feel: that I was close to something essential, something just out of frame.

I'm still unclear. Wine was the container for the reaching. Wine was the mystery. Wine was the prize.

Now, not so much.

What I've gained isn't loss. It's clarity. Wine was there when I needed it to be there. It gave me a shape for the longing, a respectable frame for the reaching. And then, without fanfare, I stopped reaching.

Wine is still there. I just don't need it to be anything other than what it is.

 

 

 

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

wine blog +  Italian wine blog + Italy W