Hi, I'm Raphael. Welcome to my 'blog, Thursday Night Tasting!
First, a promise. Even though the 'blog is called Thursday Night Tasting, I swear an oath--with my hand atop a 1959 magnum of Chateau Lafite-Rothschild Pauillac--that I won't ever call it TNT.
OK, I don't actually own a Chateau Lafite. But I do swear.
So, here's the idea. Each Thursday night, I'll pop open a bottle or two of great wine from my small but growing collection, drink them with a couple of friends, and describe the experience as best I can on this very screen. I'm doing this because I love to drink good wine and talk and write about it. And, I want a record of all the great wines I've been drinking, and a 'blog seems like the best way to set it all down.
Who am I? Well, if you're reading this 'blog you're probably one of my close friends, so I'm not sure how much I need to say. But I fantasize that someone I don't know will stumble across Thursday Night Tasting and want to know.
So: I'm 39 years old. I live in Brooklyn, New York, with my fiancee, Tracy, and our daughter, Naomi, who is exactly nine weeks old today. I teach writing at a university, I have a dog (Shaba) and a cat (Lalo), I'm learning to play the ukulele, and I love drinking good wine.
Maybe I should just say something about that last bit: I love drinking good wine.
Good wine--what does it mean? It was only a few years ago, on a trip to visit Tracy's family in Napa, that I came to understand the depths of goodness in what I had previously understood only as a mild intoxicant well-suited to food. But good wine is something special. Good wine gets hold of you and tells a story. It moves you from one place to another, it has something to say, it surprises. At a recent tasting in Fort Greene (that's in Brooklyn, dear non-close-friend reader!) I was served a white Burgundy that began with the roundness and depth I associate with the chardonnay grape (from which all white Burgundies are made), thinned and separated into flavors I had never experienced from white wine--mushroom, for example, and something like shallots--and then faded respectfully, as if tucking away its ostentatious wares to make way for the mere satisfaction of the gulp.
I was surprised and excited. I wanted to share this experience with others. I wanted, more than anything, to turn these flavors into words, to talk about them.
There is something about drinking good wine that excites the verbal faculties. Maybe that's the cause of those over-reaching descriptions we've all heard, the ones that declare flavors like saltwater taffy, forest floor, and green cactus. And yet, I can't deny that there's a great pleasure in trying to fit language to taste. After all, tasting wine and making words are both the work of the tongue. Wine asks the tongue to lay flat and just feel. When it's gone, words are the tongue's revenge.
I'm a neophyte, really. I don't know a lot about wine, but I'm happy in my ignorance and cheered by what I have yet to learn. Please join Tracy and me, along with my friends Jon, Robin, Steve, and Deb, as we start getting to the bottom of some seriously good bottles of wine. I've chosen a few Burgundies, white and red, for the inaugural tasting. I hope you enjoy reading about them soon!
In deliciousness, Raphael
please say "edam cheese". Please? I will try to bring a bottle or 2 of local goods from oregon in March
ReplyDeletelove gillian
So I woke this morning feeling a little bad about the "edam cheese". I read your post at the end of a shift, having just spent nearly 3 hours trying to stop a guy from bleeding to death out his nose (really). You've heard my rant about nosebleeds, I think. Anyway, I find that many patients with a terminal disease, like this fellow, have at some level thought about their death. I can't imagine, though, that anybody envisions their final hours being spent in my ER, gagging on blood clots, while an overeducated and well-meaning stranger shoves a variety of objects including an enormous metal chopstick, cocaine-soaked cotton balls, and inflatable items that look like hot tub toys, and a urinary catheter into their left nostril. The juxtaposition of that flail with your post was too bizarre.
ReplyDeleteSo I woke this morning and realized, that of course, why I do what I do, is so that he can go home and enjoy his last few bouquets of morello cherry and lychee, with lasting flinty finish, without overtones of hemoglobin. Which I hope he is doing.
In penance (though it hardly counts as such) I went to the little new wine shop downtown with Jan, and listened to the owner go on for a while in wine-ese, and bought a bottle of Abacela Malbec 2006. No idea, but he made a good case for it. On the bottle it says it "pairs wonderfully with grilled pork ribs marinated in chipotle-mushroom aioli." Only divine providence could have sent me the dessicated chipotle in the fridge that I found tonight, behind the epoxy. I put it in the meatloaf. Will let you know bout the wine. Because life without pleasure is not life at all.
love gillian