You ever stand in a vineyard and realize you have no palate?
In Sonoma, my family tasted “forest floor.” They used words like unctuous and meant it. They closed their eyes. I tasted red, other times white, occasionally sparkling.
A friend of mine kept a wine journal in college. I know for a fact that this particular beverage comes to be appreciated through effort, because she hated it and was dedicated to learning a way to love it. Many cheap bottles and little arrows pointing to adjectives she’d circled in a reference book, and she did learn to love it. I found this completely admirable and slightly insane, which is how I feel about most serious devotion. Cornell runs a wine course that fills every semester before registration closes, dozens of undergraduates apparently convinced that a degree without tannin literacy is somehow incomplete. My education was incomplete in many ways, and this was not among the gaps I thought to address.
My drink of choice is the four-ingredient lassi. Yogurt, water, salt, cumin. A little mortar-and-pestled mint if I’m feeling fancy. The yogurt drinks of the world, ayran, doogh, kefir in its various forms, sustained humans for thousands of years. Drink of the steppe. Now bottled as probiotic supplements. Younger generations have arrived at something similar, calling it “sober curious,” and throwing out the whole bar, as if curiosity were the innovation and the rest of us were medieval peasants drinking blindly. I felt, accidentally, ahead of something, which is rare enough to mention.
In the Sonoma cellar I hovered. When to swirl? How to hold a very heavy stem? How to sniff? I watched someone decant the wine and thought it must be theater. A prop for those who had already decided they deserved to be impressed. Nobody actually wants the job of tasting and approving, standing there with the table watching.
The lesson came from a fictional drug lord on Netflix. In The Gentlemen, a villain halts the plot to describe double decanting. The first pour draws off sediment. The second returns the wine to the bottle, label facing out so the table knows what it’s drinking. Air gets in. Time does something. What comes back is not what left.
Once a good metaphor finds you, it becomes insufferable.
I applied it to cooking first. Soup is better the next day. Sauce deepens if left alone. Flavors do their work in the dark. I read Brenda Ueland’s If You Want to Write and recognized what she called purposeful idleness, the idea that creative work continues underground, without you, if you let it. I tried it with writing. Draft once to clear the wreckage. Draft again to find what you actually meant. Time removes the cloudiness that comes from wanting too badly to be understood. Sometimes it removes the wanting. Sometimes it does not.
The philosophy failed spectacularly when I spent four days on a pitch — researching, drafting, cutting, tightening — and sent it the moment it felt done. Three hours later a polite rejection arrived. One imagines the editor reaching for the spit bucket before the glass had cleared the table. I walked to the corner bakery, bought a miniature peach pie, and ate it while sitting with a passage from the Bhagavad Gita I have been unsuccessfully attempting to absorb for many years. You have a right to your actions, but never to their fruits. I considered this carefully, fork in hand. And then I wondered, am I the sediment?
Reference:
You have a right to your actions, but never to your actions’ fruits. Act for the action’s sake. And do not be attached to inaction.
Action and fruit continued…
Pitiful are those who, acting, are attached to their action’s fruits. The wise man lets go of all results, whether good or bad, and is focused on the action alone.
From Stephen Mitchell’s solid translation of the Bhagavad Gita [Ch. 2 Verse 43-52]