The never told secret to divine wines (part 2)

This is the second and final part about divine wines.
Part 1 can be found here.
If you want to dive into my utterly incomplete list of divine wines click here.

Learning to appreciate

Another comparison can be made with classic music. As a little child I hated it. When my parents turned on some classic stuff it was the time to run of yelling to my room. Now I love it. I enjoy an evening out at the opera and had some really divine moments over there! If you have seen “La Traviata” live in one or another Italian opera I guess you would understand what I’m talking about.

Again, just the same with wine. You need to learn appreciate it, and maybe you need also some age, some (live) experience. And maybe the sooner you start with wine the sooner you can appreciate the difficult (read DIVINE) wines.

Appreciation and education

Learning to appreciate is of course closely linked with education. In order to be able to appreciate, you need to learn, to understand how a wine is made, how it obtains its complexity. And to train…yes to train your nose, your taste.

I’m heavy pro some kind of “sniffing and tasting” course at school. It is one of our senses we do not learn to use. If you don’t believe me, do the test: just try to catch some smells blind, very difficult thing to do.

So one tip on how to appreciate DIVINE wines: sniff, taste and sniff, taste and sniff, taste and… You can try to sniff a lot of things, just go to your local market and sniff the flowers, the food or step in your garden and sniff the trees, the leaves, the grass, … You will notice that after a while your nose gets trained and you will pick up far more easier smells (yeah, also the bad ones ;-)).

The moment

And divinity is also very largely dependent on the moment. Something that proceeds from God or a god doesn’t come 24/7.

So there are this special moments when every puzzle piece fits in and when you drink some great wine at such moments, you will remember. The crazy thing is that such wines could also be very simple wines. Thus, the exception to my rule that divine wines need to be expensive.

I still remember a trip with school to Rome where we drank an Est!, Est!!, Est!!! di Montefiascone, actually a quite simple wine, but with a lot of college boys combined with an incredible time in Italy, this turned out just as such a memorable moment.

Points that are in advantage of the above theory are of course that I didn’t had any wine education yet!

There are some moments I just can remember because of the great feeling of that moment combined with an incredible wine.

Conclusion

For me, the aspects that influence the divinity of wine are thus the following:

Education

Learning to appreciate

The combination of the two above

The moment

And because of these aspects, I often end up with a wine that is in the higher price range. What can I do about it? I’m just a product of my education…

Some last tip for you wine lovers. If you start with wine and you desire to beef up your wine cellar, do not, I repeat, do not buy too many of the first wines you love, you will see that your taste will change, that you will (learn to) appreciate other (read more complex) wines. And that a great moment isn’t easy to repeat…even with that same great wine!

And on that bombshell….I’ll go to my cellar and get me a divine wine.

Bart

Part 1 can be found here.

If you enjoyed this post, make my day and buy me a glass of wine.

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