How many of you have ever fed a two-year-old, or been one? Then you’re familiar with the old “Open up the hangar and in flies the aero-spoon!” maneuver. I never fell for it. It occurred to me quite early that if I closed my mouth tight, no one could put another spoonful of creamed spinach in there as long as I lived.
Which is not to say that people haven’t tried. At wine tasting dinners I’m often plied, for instance, with cheese, which I don’t happen to eat. Whether this is because I’m: a) lactose intolerant, b) health conscious, or c) a founding member of the Bacterial Rights Movement, is hardly relevant. Yet my refusal doesn’t sit well, and people continue to push. I simply must try this Stilton with the Port.
People are quite certain what ought to give you pleasure, whether the realm is cars, music, clothing or wine. Being a social creature, you might find yourself caving to the pressure, although when you’re all alone you switch PBS to Elimidate, and drop the Camus for FHM.
Day after day, like a priest, I receive the shamefaced confessions of penitents admitting to the sin of liking sweet wine. Of course their spouse is right, they’ve got to get beyond this hang-up and into the realm of serious, dry reds. As though tuning into wine mystique were an item to cross off the to-do list: take down the Christmas wreath, drop off the clothes at Good Will, and get over those bottles of infantile, pink fizz.
This is so topsy turvy. For one thing, the spouse is off-base. Sweet, pink and fizzy are all…cool! Don’t believe me? Go to the best restaurant you can afford – the kind where wine is displayed in a twelve-story ice-cave and trained polar bears shimmy up the walls to retrieve your order. Ask the sommelier to recommend a rosé, a semi-sweet white, a gloppy dessert wine, or (gasp!) the trifecta: sweet, pink and fizzy. Does the man in white scoff so hard he spews in his silver ashtray? Hardly! He loves these wines! He thought you’d never ask. And he understands immediately that you, not your status-bound spouse, really notice what you taste.
But suppose we give the benefit of the doubt to your poor spouse, who might be advocating from a true, sensual love of certain wines and just wants you to see the light. Nice, but still misguided.
Here’s why. I don’t like the rug pulled out from under me, and wine is a master of this trick. I fight back by taking detailed tasting notes so I can accurately recall a wine whether I tasted it in moonlight with the winemaker holding it to my lips and whispering sweet sales pitches in my ear, or in the neon light of a physics lab with a nerd whispering sweet chemical formulas.
But even the best notes can be foiled by your own, personal chemistry. In sickness and in health, medicated or stone cold sober, sweating or shivering, sleepy or buzzed – all of these states and more can totally change your perception. Immune to my obsessive note-taking, a white might scour like Brillo one week, and go down like lemonade on a hot summer’s day the next. Velvety, generous reds can go tarry and bitter, only to resume the seduction a few weeks, months, or flu seasons later.
When it happens in your own mouth, it’s easy to grasp how profoundly different wine might taste to someone else. Debating “red” with your spouse might be as relevant as arguing “green” with the color-blind.
Next time you feel pressure to like the “right” wine, respect your own, personal mouth. Foil stupid debates by buying half bottles, or ordering what you each want by the glass, and know that if things get ugly, the sommelier will cover your back. Finally, when all else fails, shut down the hangar and make the airplane detour to Detroit.
