Skip to main content

Keeping Tradition

Reading this story about the French drinking less wine got me thinking about my former co-worker and friend E, a native Parisian. When we visited him at his home right outside Paris, several years ago, he took us to his wine cellar to pick out a wine for dinner. The tradition in his family had been to travel through wine country during summer break and pick up wines from vineyards they had known and loved for generations and there was always room for new discoveries. E extolled the virtues of the Bordeaux he had picked out dinner and it mattered little that I did not understand most of the finer points. His exuberance made up for it and we knew we would be in for a treat. The dinner was lovely and the wine paired nicely with the entree his wife had prepared. Everything about that evening in the backyard of his home was a thing of perfection. It would have been incomplete without the trip to the cellar and the stories about the wines, including some that his grandfather had passed on him. E's kids were in elementary and middle school at the time but they absorbed the ambience at the dinner table and probably knew more about wines than I did. 

I thought it was interesting that the current sentiment is that a person will doubtless die of cancer even of they drink a single glass of wine - so complete abstinence is preferred and recommended. Something feels wrong about this because that does not square with commonsense. If the risks were really that high and indubitable, everyone in France for centuries now would have suffered and died of cancer. Those are not the facts that I am aware of. E and his wife drank is moderation and not a lot more than I did. More importantly, that wine had a story for them, it brought back memories from a summer past when they had visited Beynac et Cazenac where this wine was from, walked around the charming village and the store where E had bought his wife a pretty pendant that she happened to be wearing that evening. The value of the wine was well beyond the temporal joys of imbibition. We spent about three hours at that table and it remains one of the most memorable dinner experiences. I am not sure what would remain of it without the anchoring force of the wine and if it was replaced by a glass of water.  

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

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...
111 comments
Read more

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...
6 comments
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more