Into the Loire

It seems appropriate, given the title of my new blog, that I begin my wine musings with the purchase of a couple of Loire reds. The Loire Valley's whites have long delighted me, but her reds have flown below my personal radar. To this end, I went into Andersonville today and bought two Cab Francs from Touraine, one from Chinon, and one from St-Nicholas-de-Bourgeuil. I love Cabernet Franc. The first nice bottle of wine I bought after a long period of poverty in Hyde Park four years ago, was a simple Cabernet Franc from Jed Steele's Shooting Star line, and it's soft supple spiciness was a delight after months of cheap Chilean reds at University of Chicago parties and four-dollar-beaujolais from the supermarket, both of which were consumed only with an eye towards intoxication. That was the same year I'd get to try the '59 Margaux at work, but no bottle of wine from that period stands out like the Steele, which was unpretentious, inexpensive and not the most powerful example of even that genre of New World Cab Franc, but nonetheless a real wine: the product of countless small, meaningful decisions in the vineyard and deliberate winemaking. Drinking it made me feel like I was reconnecting with wine as an aesthetic pleasure, experienced both intellectually and sensually. I remember great wines I've drunk like great novels I've read, and each experience of even the same bottle from the same year is different, just as re-reading James Baldwin's "Another Country" at thirty-one has been a radically different experience than it was at twenty-one. One brings one's self to wine as one brings oneself to text--the drinking, like the reading, is as integral to the aesthetic experience as the object of scrutiny--in this case, wine.