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| You're in my sun, brah. |
But I digress, the of this new post is "What I'm Doing Now", a summation of current goings-on, not future projections. We will get to those. However, I feel as if I haven't been out much lately. I've gotten a bit cozy, a bit domestic. This is a good thing--a great thing, actually, with the small shortcoming that I haven't been quite as in touch with folks, haven't been out on the town catching up as often, and I realize that my life has changed quite a bit over the past year. I'm proud of it. I wish to share it with you, if you care to know.
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| On second thought, maybe you don't care to know. |
In the interest of user-friendliness, I'm going to be presenting this post in parts. Making a go of a year's worth of changes at once seems like a daunting prospect for both reader and author, so I'll spare us both. I'm still trying to nail down the tentative subjects for the various parts. Fitness will likely be one. Food another. Books, perhaps... At any rate, stay tuned.
Part 1: Beverages
Starting with drinking seems a little jokey, but it was a big part of my life a year ago, and remains so. But it's different now. The whole approach has changed. Drinking, like any other hobby, can mature as we do, becoming something more didactic rather than something we do just to blur our evenings together. The past year has found me taking a respite from the bars (read: bar) that I used to frequent. My searches through Charleston's grubby nightlife for cheap beer have given way to searches for a beverage more nuanced and challenging. I've gotten into wine. And not just boxed wine! But good wine and great wine. Fabulous, interesting, and thought-provoking wine.
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| Recommended reading. |
There isn't much of a twenty-something presence on the wine scene in Charleston, at least not that I've seen. In this sense, Bill and I are somewhat unique in our ventures to Bottles in Mt. Pleasant (a very excellent purveyor of fine wines of all regions and styles) usually three or four times a week to pick through the French reds; quietly discussing, deciding, re-deciding, sniffing out the oldest vintages we can afford, and myself trying to insert a German dry white or cava brut among our purchases, because Demon Summer looms, my friends. It LOOMS.
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| Not pictured bonus: The Senor Tequila next door. |
Wine can be an expensive hobby, and rest assured you that you'll never find me turning my nose up at an honest can of PBR. But, with well-chosen wines, the expense becomes part of the experience. Our current expenditure on wine is about $30-$40 a bottle for some of our more carefully chosen picks. Now, we've gone well over that a few times, and well under. You can find good wines for $15 and even $10. If you're looking for some great value, a good rule of thumb is to look for wines from South America, where the labor tends to be far cheaper than in Europe or the United States. Argentina and Chile in particular produce some great Malbecs that are quite inexpensive for the quality. The oldest and most truly outstanding wine we've had so far was a $50 1995 Ségla Margaux. Apparently the '95 vintage usually sells for over twice that much, so we consider ourselves lucky to have landed a bottle for half the average value. If you're thinking of looking for a bottle for yourself and the idea of $100 wine is scaring you a bit, keep in mind that older vintages usually cost more. You can secure yourself a reasonable bottle from almost anywhere if you look for a younger wine. There's no shame in grabbing something recent either-- most wines are not, in fact, intended to be cellared for years upon years, so you should be able to find nice picks from 2009, 2010, and even 2011, depending on the wine. If you'd like to be sure, you should ask your local wine merchant what young bottles he or she recommends.
 We like old, though. And this old bastard was DELICIOUS. |
So, how do you drink something that set you back $30, $40, or $50 or even more? Hopefully you drink it mindfully, and slowly, paying attention to all that you smell and taste, how the flavors emerge and disappear, and to things like the texture or "body" of the wine in your mouth, and how the wine changes as it "breathes" over the course of an hour or two. There are things to really ruminate over and savor to get your money's worth in a good bottle of wine. So, this is a very different kind of drinking than throwing back countless High Lifes (Lives?) somewhere rife with distractions. This is drinking with quietude and awareness. It has a lot more to do with appreciating the craft and creature of wine than it does with getting hammered. Not that getting hammered doesn't still happen on occasion. I've just become a bit more selective about the occasions.
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| Maturity. I haz it. |
What I like most about drinking good wine is being able to talk about it. Everyone has had a lifetime of different flavor experiences, so everyone experiences wine a different way. For example, maybe you've never tasted blackcurrant, so when tasting a wine that your wine drinking buddy describes as tasting like blackcurrant, it happens that you have no way to identify that flavor. Maybe you think it tastes like blueberry sorbet instead. Perhaps that same buddy grew up eating Twizzlers instead of black licorice, so when you tell them you taste licorice, they don't get that at all. Upon taking a first sniff from a glass a few weeks ago, I declared that it smelled like a swamp. Bill smelled old, wet leaves and mulch, I think. The common smell was decaying vegetation, but it manifested in our minds as two distinctly different things.
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| Maybe your wine drinking buddy keeps hissing that everything tastes like human blood. Maybe you need a new wine drinking buddy. |
Comparing what you both find, what you taste differently, or identify as different flavors (as with our decaying vegetation) ends up being quite the interesting little experiment with each new bottle. It can sometimes even comment on your past. Did you grow up somewhere rural, familiar with the scent of fresh earth, animals, vegetation in various states of growth and decay? If so, here's a whole palette of scents and flavors that you will likely be able to access more easily than someone who grew up in an urban setting, or is generally less familiar with what I'll term "farm smells". I've always been great lover of fruit and strongly-flavored sweets, so I have greater ease in parsing out particular fruits from certain red wines, whereas someone else might just get berries or fruit in general. I also almost always get some degree of dark or bittersweet chocolate in red wines. Bill almost never does. This also goes to show that as long as you take your time and pay attention to what you're drinking, you can never really be wrong about what you taste or smell. It's all subjective as per your life's particular flavor experiences. That said, if your experience with fruit doesn't go far beyond apple juice and grape jelly, I would encourage you to try some more things out in the interest of widening your flavor vocabulary before you make a big leap into good wine.
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| Not getting that flutter of schnozberry? Make some music. Dream some dreams. |
Anyhow, that's what I'm doing now. Drinking wine. Learning about wine. Talking about wine. If anyone's been inspired to go seek out a nice bottle or two with which begin their own wine odyssey, allow me to reccomend a few other resources to help you on your way. First, the book pictured at the top of this post (Oldman's Guide to Outsmarting Wine by Mark Oldman) I would recommend to anyone with any interest in wine, whether you're a wine newbie or a seasoned wine drinker that just wants some fresh ideas and new things to try. Oldman's writing is approachable, funny, and hugely informative. We found it at Barnes and Noble a few months ago, devoured it then, and constantly refer back to it. He gives great suggestions for varietals you may not have heard of and why to try them, how to find good bargain wines, why certain regions and sub-regions are traditionally more revered than others, and what the wine hotshots of the world like to drink, among many other wine-related topics of interest. I realize my description might border on overly-glowing, but it really is an awesome book. If you think you might be interested, I'd suggest you thumb through it at your local bookstore and see if you like it as much as we do! Another great resource is Wine for Normal People, which operates as both a podcast and a blog. Elizabeth Schneider is the wine educator behind both operations and, like Mark Oldman, she manages to talk about wine in a way that is neither snobby nor overly complex. I listen to the podcast on my walk home and find that it's really easy to listen to and gets me in the mood for evening wine time. Not that I'm ever not in the mood for evening wine time... If you're going give the podcast a try, I'd suggest starting from the very first one and moving forward in order, as she tends to refer back to stuff she's covered in early podcasts.
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| I will have it... Someday... |
Following no particular order or direction whatsoever, the next installation of the What I'm Doing Now series will be Fitness-themed! I'll be posting notification on the large social networks when it's freshly posted. Hope to see you fine people back for more.
