I was in my late forties when I finally admitted to myself that I would never love wine. As other women fake orgasms, I have faked hundreds of satisfied responses to hundreds of glassesβnot a difficult feat, since my father schooled my brother and me in the vocabulary of wine from an early age. That admission was a sad one, because my father, the writer Clifton Fadiman, who had died a few years earlier, loved wine more ardently than anything except words. He judged wine contests, supplied introductions to wine catalogues, and co-wrote an entire eight-pound book about wine.
No other food or drink gave him as much sensory pleasure; no other pursuit made him feel farther from the lower-middle-class neighborhoods of immigrant Brooklyn from which he had worked so hard to escape. Not only did it fail to relish Two-Buck Chuck; it was equally incapable of appreciating even the greatest of wines. And, of course, excellent wine. To accompany the main course, glazed short ribs sous-vide, my host brought out a Bordeaux. Before he removed the frail cork and decanted the wine, he showed me the bottle.
My fellow-guests took their first sips. Several broke out into mmmmm s and aaahhh s and little susurrations of pleasure. I later looked up tasting notes for this Haut-Brion vintage. Other people had smelled violets, sour cherries, white pepper, blue cheese, autumn leaves, saddle leather, iron filings, hot rocks in a cedar-panelled sauna, and earth. They had tasted pencil shavings, sandalwood, tea leaves, plums, green peppers, goat cheese, licorice, mint, peat, twigs, and toast.
I swallowed a drop. It tasted, or so I imagined, like a muddy truffle that had been dug up moments earlier by a specially trained pig.
I could tell I was in the presence of something complicatedβintelligent, smoky, subterraneanβbut I could summon only the fragile ghost of a response. When the next course arrived, half an inch of Haut-Brion was left in my glass.
