Bad things happen to good people and bad and thoughtless people in particular, as well as to people who drink wine.
I am going to tell you about an incident that will shock, perhaps terrify wine lovers. Even now, as I write these words, I shudder. In fact, I am going to pour myself a very nice little glass of this Italian vermouth, Carpano Antica Formula, which has a beautiful dark-beer brownness to it and quite a lot of kick.
All right. Now:
I was running late at some event or other, and I phoned home and told Aldo to go ahead and open the wine we would be having for a quick dinner — to let it breathe and so on before we would taste it. Aldo, who I will tell you right now is a wonderful and well-meaning human being whose only conscious cruelty has been directed to insects, and even then only certain insects, said yes of course no problem. He said this in such a way (yes of course no problem) that made me wonder whether he really was minding what I was saying. What I was saying was that the ordinary Trimbach riesling already had been moved from the wine refrigerator into the regular refrigerator (I would rather have Aldo thumb through my cache of pornographic postcards than look through my wine refrigerator). All he was to do was walk to the regular refrigerator, open the door, remove the Trimbach, open the corksrew, insert said corkscrew into aforementioned bottle of wine, and leave it on a coaster to breathe in the evening air, as might a prisoner gratefully exposed to fresh oxygen filling his lungs.
Yes of course no problem.
And yet what did my befogged Aldo do but drift in a zombie-like state of indifference or carelessness to the wine refrigerator, search through the racks until he found something, anything, that said Trimach, uncork it, leave it breathing on the coaster and turn on the television, where he took his usual perverse delight in watching Ann Coulter tossing her blonde mane and throwing out verbal bombs on a news cast. Aldo in his quietly sick way is drawn to lanky, stressful women.
I walked in the door with the insouciant cheer of old Robert Young – yes, I am dating myself here, but I’ll be crucified with the two thieves if I say, I don’t know, Kelsey Grammar – and I said: “Aldo, turn off Ann Coulter and let’s taste the wine.”
Yes of course no problem.
Unfortunately Aldo – and I think here I will call him “my poor little Aldo” – had opened a bottle of a 2000 Trimbach Vendage Tardive I had been storing.
Aldo had made a terrible mistake. Aldo had rocked my world, and not in a good way.
This was an expensive bottle I recently acquired from a midtown wine shop, and I had spent many happy minutes, if not hours, anticipating the day some time since when the wine would have aged even further and Aldo would uncork it and we would have tasted it and analyzed it and lost ourselves in the aromatic wreath of its nose and let its lovely liquid loll across our palates.
Instead we have it before us now to go with a mundane plate of bluefish and farro salad. And I don’t like bluefish. And I don’t know really what farro salad is.
Much recrimination and sorrow and terror, back and forth, a volley of vituperative comments. Aldo’s carelessness versus my highhandedness… a reminder of what I had done when we vacationed in the Bahamas – a very minor indiscretion, which should be judged no worse than a traffic ticket or a parking meter left unattended … and, of course, once Aldo throws the Bahamas incident at me I can’t help at that point faulting Aldo for wasting his family money on a racehorse that was kept mysteriously tethered to a palm tree in Brazil and then died under suspicious circumstances. I walk up and down the length of the apartment, wringing my hands and shaking my head. Aldo stands stockstill, brooding by the window.
But we know each other well, Aldo and I, and after a while the air thaws and we move, however sullenly, to taste the wine. It has a pale straw core that fades to a watery rim. Aldo and I detect medium notes of petrol, flowers, lime and musk. Already the wine is beginning to develop. With 24 grams of sugar, it’s surprisingly just off-dry. The acidity is fairly high, which bodes well for its future – or would have boded well, if Aldo had paid attention. We both find a well-defined but moderate reprise of the nose with additional flavors of pear, melon, honey and especially citrus. Nice long length.
In short, if this were a Hollywood film, the excitement of the wine would overcome any residual sourness in either of our temperaments. The lights would brighten, conversation quicken, happiness come uncorked like a genie.
But I write to you from life, and the truth is that nothing can quite make this wine the one we wanted. It has been brought into the world under the wrong circumstances. It ought to be a butterfly. Instead it is more along the lines of a moth or, worse, a mayfly. It flutters, or tries to, then its life is over.
Never go to bed angry, is the old saying. To this we add never open a bottle of wine angry, either. Wine is an elixir. It is not a cure all.
