Recently, a tragic event in my personal life made me realise just how transient everything is and that the only thing we really hold on to are memories. Memories that relate to our five senses and therein evoke an image as close to the real as possible.
Today, I find myself flooded with memories. Being a vino, a lot of them pertain to smell. The baby wash I was bathed with as a kid, the smells of fresh spices that emanated from my grandmother?s cupboard, the familiar smell of pencil shavings when I sat besides my mother being taught the wonders of English grammar and the smell of my dad?s first car.
I have other memories too?the colours of a picnic garden in full bloom, the seats of the cinema hall where I went for my first movie, the energy of thousands of people shouting at my first concert, the touch of a saddle the first time I went horse riding and even the taste of my first (stolen) sip of alcohol. It was a beer and it remained the vilest, most bitter thing I had ever tasted till I sipped it many years later again under entirely different circumstances.
If you think I am overtly sensitive and hence managed to wrap my head around all these memories, well, I am the kind of person who can never remember the day or date. Anniversaries and birthdays are only thanks to alarms, prompts on my phone and social network feeds. And yet, I find that certain instances never escape me. Here, then, is some insta-epiphany, dear reader: The material fades, only the sensory remains and nowhere is this more obvious than in the world of gastronomy, where the material presence of any product is only as long as the mealtime, but the memory can linger for long after.
When dealing with wines, I find this not just convenient, but the only way to move forward to better understand my tastes and preferences. I don?t try to remember everything I taste, but some tastes that make their presence marked for more than usual, I take special note of and try to see if I can mark them when they turn up again. It helps build a repertoire for referencing when faced with a hitherto unknown product. For example, if I remember how violets smelled the first time (it was in Italy. Before that, I only knew that smell as talcum powder) and then if I find a similar note in the glass that I am swirling in my hand, I know I am on to something.
This isn?t just me. Most wine tasters work like this. The difference comes in as everyone has different frames of references?they can be quick to pick up certain smells and not too perceptive with others?what they share may be entirely different even while talking about the same product.
The key thing to remember here is that painting the world in black and white?especially the world of wines?makes for a dull place to live in. We have to learn to respect the sensory appreciation provided by others even if it doesn?t concur with ours. If anything, it enriches us, widening our possibilities to experience new pleasures, build new memories.
So when tasting a wine, remember to not bother about how many different notes you can tell. Instead, rely on your memory to bring back notes you already know, notes that you can now find in the wine and then you are truly appreciating wine, not merely critiquing it.
A wine is nothing but the aftertaste it leaves behind, one that seamlessly moves from the present into the past, becoming from a live sensation to a lingering memory. In such, there are few joys as transcendental, so one could argue that enjoying wine is perhaps another possible path to nirvana.
As for me, today finds me stopping at sights and smells to reminisce what they bring back to me. I wish memories of things past could come back to life but even as I sigh this thought away, I take solace in the fact that at least they will last me a lifetime.
The writer is a sommelier