I’m sitting here, finally watching Sideways, a movie I was meant to see in the theaters. It is brilliant, of course, but it leaves me with one major sad note in my life. I will never be able to appreciate wine to the extent of Miles, Maya, or even Stephanie for one simple reason: I have a terrible nose. My sense of smell is severely lacking and, while I can appreciate great food and wine, I will never have the ability to differentiate and dissect the intricate complexities of the… of the really good shit.
That’s ok, I will merely retain my title of wino and continue to enjoy the $10-$12 bottles with which I typically stock “my cellar.”
But I’m definitely enjoying this film. One line in particular really sruck me. Virginia Madsen asks Paul Giamatti why he’s waiting to open a great bottle of wine, to which he replies he was waiting for a special occasion. She points out, however, that the day you open that bottle is a special occasion. I’m thinking I need to make a special occasion someday soon with my 2000 Chaddsford Merican. Why let a good thing go to waste?
Hmmm, if anybody’s interested, maybe I can make it a special occasion with a few different bottles…
That whole scene in Sideways just gets to me. That bit about thinking about what the wine makers were doing and thinking when they were making teh wine. Excellent. And it made me think about those bottles of wine that Mike and I bought in France. Now, they are not expensive wines or even fine wines – hell, some are even blushes (dry blushes, though, which was odd and surprisingly good). But we went tasting together in France and we bought up a few bottles that we liked. So they’re really special to us. And we have been saving them. For what? A special occasion, of course. As soon as we drink them it will remind us of that day in the French countryside and will bring back all sorts of special memories from that trip, so I’m not entirely sure what we’re waiting for.