In Vino Memoriae

I have come to be a big believer in the phrase above. In wine there are memories!

Some studies say aromas are the most potent memory trigger in our body. Some say it is taste, others might say old photographs. But I am here to say I believe it is wine!

Let me give a couple of recent examples.

Just last week I hosted a reunion of a group of my old college buddies. We were a small group of 13 who came to know each other back in 1970. For most of us the last time we each saw one another was at graduation 45 years ago – and certainly we had not all been in the same place at the same time since then. Two have passed on and out of the remaining 11 of us, ten of us gathered in a hugely impromptu reunion at our home. I couldn’t decide what to do for a table centerpiece and then while I was shopping it appeared to me. There on the bottom shelf at our local liquor store was a display of Boone’s Farm. Coming of drinking age in the ‘70s absolutely meant Boone’s Farm and its ilk. I did several other decorations around the house, but none brought out the stories or the memories like that bottle of Boone’s Farm!

Then it happened again just yesterday. I remembered it was the anniversary of the Celebration of Life for my wife. I was more than a bit melancholy all day and when it came time to undertake my evening ritual of taking our Lab down to the lake to let her have an evening swim and for me to watch the sunset there was no question what I was taking in my glass. The wine she personally picked for us to serve her best friends and family who gathered that day – Charles Krug Generations, vintage 2012. I am down to just a precious few bottles of that vintage, but yesterday the memories were so strong there was no other wine to toast them with than that. And oh is it ever drinking super smooth right now!

During the reunion one of the fellows was in the wine racks picking a wine for one dinner when he exclaimed ‘Well, Scott, you certainly have no Dago Red in here!’ Two words and I was tripping down memory lane. My wife’s Italian grandfather always called his homemade wine Dago Red. I’ll never forget the night I asked him for his blessing over my wanting to marry his granddaughter. We toasted that evening in his basement ‘winery’ with his Dago Red right out of his large, oak barrels. He said ‘I have been told you love my granddaughter. That is good enough for this old man.’ Then he began telling me the story of his wine and the grapes – how the grapes came from an Italian immigrant family who used to live there with him in Virginia, Minnesota, but then went out to make their fortune in California. He was invited to join, but stayed in Minnesota. The fact those grapes were from the Mondavi family was lost on me at the time, but not the memories of all the times we drank that wine over the years, including at our wedding.

It also may seem odd, but I have a memory for each of the Napa wines in our cellar. I can recall when it was tasted and purchased. Often those memories are supplemented with more memories of recent occasions when we uncorked a bottle or two of certain of them. A memory, creating a new memory. It is one of the reasons I consider wine such a wonderful part of our lives.

And if someone uncorks a bottle of Merlot, a whole different set of memories gush out. You see back in the mid-1980s my wife convinced me to try a new wine she had brought home. Having drunk far too much of the earlier mentioned Boone’s Farm in my youth, I was a confirmed beer drinker at the time. But that night and that bottle of Clos du Bois Merlot changed my thinking and began a years’ long love affair with Merlot for both my wife and me.

Oh and the music industry knows wine and memories go together too! It may be an older tune, but whenever Neil Diamond comes on my iTunes I stop and hope it will be ‘Red, Red Wine’ because as he so aptly sings:

“Red, red wine
It’s up to you.
All I can do, I’ve done
But memories won’t go
No, memories won’t go…”