I did not grow up in a wine household.
My parents drank beer, occasionally vodka at Christmas, and once a year at Easter my mother would produce a bottle of something sparkling that came in a foil-wrapped box and tasted like carbonated fruit juice. I thought that was wine. For a significant portion of my early life, I thought that was wine.
The first wine that made me understand what all the fuss was about was a Rioja Reserva — a Marqués de Riscal, I think, though I'm not certain anymore — at a dinner party in Warsaw in 2011. The party was terrible. The host's boyfriend had just moved in with her and spent the entire evening explaining to everyone present why cryptocurrency was the future. There were too many people in a too-small apartment. Someone brought a dog.
And someone brought this wine.
The Moment
I poured myself a glass mostly because I needed something to do with my hands while nodding politely at the cryptocurrency explanation. I took a sip. And then I stopped nodding.
I had never tasted anything quite like it. There was this quality of — I didn't have the vocabulary for it then — depth. The wine wasn't just sweet or dry or fruity. It had layers. It tasted like it had been somewhere, done something, waited for something. It tasted like time.
I drank two more glasses and then embarrassed myself by asking the host where it had come from and writing down the name in my phone with three exclamation points.
What Happened After
I started reading. This is both my best and worst quality: when something interests me, I go all the way in immediately. Within three months I had read six books on wine, attended two evening courses at a school in the city centre, and started a spreadsheet — a spreadsheet — where I recorded every wine I tasted with notes.
The spreadsheet got unwieldy around bottle number 200. I switched to notebooks. I've filled four notebooks since then.
Why I'm Writing This
Because I've been meaning to for years. Because I have things to say and notes I want to share and places I've been and bottles I've loved (and some I've been deeply disappointed by, which are sometimes the more interesting stories). Because my husband got tired of being the only person I could talk to about this.
So here we are. Welcome. I hope you find something useful, or at least something entertaining.
The cryptocurrency guy, for what it's worth, was wrong about everything. I'm still right about the Rioja.