At the Tasting Table as in Life
Following Taste, Finding More
After writing my last Tessera, The Beauty in the Space Between, I felt called to more deeply explore what my experience with wine around the world has come to teach me about tasting with a beginner’s open mind. If I just consider time spent sipping four varietals, Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc on the white side and Shiraz and Chianti on the red side, I see that they present easy-to-access metaphors in growing, learning and living.
Somewhere along the way I realized, and I think this is essential if I’m committing to Taste, My Compass, as the guiding force in my life, that where there is a hint or promise of variability, be that local interpretation or translation, the influence of the land and climate, a break-the-mold story and rebellious creator or encircling traditions, taste is more of an open book than the labels we put on wine lead us to believe.
In my early days with wine, I did all the cringey things. I clustered around White Zinfandel, went through a humiliating White Merlot phase, and defaulted to sweet or overly pronounced notes of almost everything in the glass. It took time and trial, but I eventually stretched my palate beyond a starter set. I’m certainly no expert today, but I geek out in my committed, casual pursuit of understanding more and more.
In fact, I can think of no other journey with taste that has taken me so far from where I started. Wine is the only category where my tastebuds so vehemently reject my first, early preferences. Coffee maybe, as I traveled through Mochas, Flavored Lattes and Frappuccinos to edge closer to the taste I had actually grown to love. The bean. Expressed more purely in an espresso, drip coffee or americano.
I don’t think acknowledging that steep growth curve is a coincidence given its timing either. I think it’s a breadcrumb from Taste and a signal from the universe.
As I meandered along the path of discovery in wine, at least where whites were concerned, I tended to fall in and out of love with varietals. Fifteen years ago, I would have said I was a big, buttery Chardonnay girl who dabbled in the sweeter American Rieslings. Somewhere along the way I veered, too, through those unfortunate cut-grass, bell-pepper-heavy New Zealand Sauvignon Blancs before settling into my Sancerre and Chablis phase. Along the way, as I dismissed varietals, I ignorantly closed myself off to the idea that any set of circumstances would bring me back to them.
Now, I’m enchanted with skin-contact and as willing and promiscuous with my whites as I have always been with my reds. But only Travel could have unlocked that for me. When I approached wine-tasting in new regions with a thirsty beginner’s mind, I came to see how my own ugly-American mindset stunted my growth. To think I once believed that my Cabs had to be Napa or Sonoma to be worthy, that Chardonnays were forever doomed since California couldn’t get them to my liking, and that more obscure, emerging regions couldn’t possibly know grapes. Order a wine from where? Slovenia? Not a chance. I wasn’t just being a pitifully ignorant wine snob; I was closing myself off to meaning and connection. To worlds upon worlds of taste.
Travel inspired me not to let one global expression, one blanket assumption, hold me back. I first returned to Chardonnay with curiosity in Australia’s Yarra Valley. I continued to taste my way back to it in New Zealand and the Western Cape of South Africa. I also accepted when I tasted in Martinborough and Waiheke, New Zealand, that not every Kiwi wanted to make that certain kind of Sauvignon Blanc. I expanded my consideration set as I expanded my misinformed, small mind.
I even unknotted my scrunched-up nose, stretching it out instead into a slow head-nod of acceptance when I conceded to give Shiraz an unheard-of second chance after Trader Joe’s Three Buck Chuck ruined it for me. In Chianti, assuming I had likely never tasted the real stuff, I put decades of tannic, tongue-zapping reds masquerading around without the rooster seal of endorsement on their bottles behind me. And so from a tiny family-run winery in Tuscany, I swirled and sipped a Chianti for the very first time.
With Taste as my compass, it makes sense that I can use wine as a metaphor of discovery and becoming. How I show up at the tasting table is how I want to show up for life. Curious, open-minded and thirsty.
