Top Italian wines will face off here on Saturday in an elimination tournament for the title of Right wine 2008.
This crazy pronouncement comes from Italy Magazine.
Yes, you can pay and taste wines, just like any wine tasting. Then they proclaim, evidently, one wine as “the Right Wine.”
This galls me. The Right Wine. One winner. You see, people are always asking me to point them to “the best place in Europe.” When I can’t, they think “the bastard is keeping it all to himself.” I can’t win.
I’m a relativist. So shoot me. Or tell me your interests and I’ll find a place in Europe that will satisfy them. Either way.
You know what tastes real good when you’re on a Greek island and you’ve been hiking all day and you arrive at a little shack of a bar just as the sun is setting and the temperature is finally down to where humans can bear it? An icy retsina with a plate of olives.
Now if you were to ask me what the best wine in the whole darn Universe is, I’d be as likely to answer “retsina” as I would to jump from an airplane naked with a pine cone stuck up my left nostril.
It ain’t gonna happen any time soon, I assure you.
The answer comes with a context. Wine can be evocative. It can go with or oppose food. It can be the one you remember drinking with your sweet honey back before she revealed her all-consuming lust for shoes. There can be all sorts of wines that were right at one time or another.
Everybody wants to feel the safe glow that comes from serving “the right wine” no matter what the context. Nobody wants to discover these days. Nobody wants to stand out on that ledge with a bottle from some little village nobody’s ever heard of and say, confidently “try this!”
Repeat after me: there is no right wine. Now, go and drink some. Any some. Doesn’t that feel right? It’s not a big gulp. It’s not loaded with sugar and chemicals. It’s just grape squeezin’s, just like they made it in Biblical times but in glass bottles instead of amphorae.
I’m glad I got that off my chest. Now for some original zin. I gotta go.