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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.  

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