Skip to main content

Story Arc

Reading these lines in Rajat Parr's book The Sommelier's Atlas of Taste made me smile - it perfectly described my first time tasting Sancerre. An easy and likable wine, it just made sense to stick with it:

Sommeliers have a love-hate relationship with Sancerre. They love it because it sells, sells, sells. As one wine director told us, “If we put it by the glass, it’s all anyone orders!” For sommeliers, it’s never bad to have a reliable cash flow. But if you sense a hint of exasperation in the above quote, it’s for the same reason. Sancerre is the knee-jerk selection of people who don’t bother to engage with wine. It’s the same as saying, “I’ll have a Bud” or “Give me a gin and tonic” without bothering to look at a menu.

This is just a notch above asking for the house red or white based on what you are eating. No thinking is involved. You want to enjoy the meal and the company and trust that they who are serving you the food know what they are doing with their house wines. 

I got interested in this book based on the provenance of the author and his background. A guy born and raised in Kolkata who had never tasted any wine until age 20 comes to become "one of the most celebrated sommeliers in the world". It got me thinking about the boundless nature of what a person can be no matter where they started and how limited their horizons had once been. Often the inner drive the fuels such stories, brings about luck and opportunity. The book can go to depth in areas I have very little understanding, but it also has wisdom a layperson could use:

The difference between these two wines can be compared to that of a marathoner’s body versus a sprinter’s. Paradis is the long-distance runner, lean, long, and angular; Chambrates is the sprinter, ripped, thicker, and rounder.



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...