I’m off for eleven days of wining and dining at the 12^th Annual Epcot® International Food & Wine Festival!  So, I’ll leave you with these brief thoughts, a mood really.  One that I hope you can capture for yourselves…

Head out to a wine store.  Not the grocery store.  A dark, quiet, maybe even dusty, but real wine store.

Find a dollar amount you’re comfortable with for a “good” bottle.  Ask your proprietor what’s the best wine you could get if you only went a few dollars deeper than that in your pocket.  Buy what they show you.  It’s a splurge, sure.  This weekend, it’s going to be worth it.

Take the bottle home and open it.  Pour a glass.  Swirl it, smell it, do all that stuff.  The point is to take your time.

Hold it up to the light and let the color sparkle in your eyes.  Close your eyes.  Inhale it like a blind pilgrim come upon a winery.  Try to smell your way backwards through the ageing, the fermentation, the crush.  Get all the way back to the grapes and the soil.

Then dine with it.  It doesn’t matter what.  Maybe you just microwave a TV dinner and sit cross-legged on your patio as Gulliver surveying your miniature garden with lordly benevolence.

Let each sip play with the aftertaste of food in your mouth.

Wine isn’t just whiskey made with grapes.  It’s the spirit with spirit.  Enjoy it the way it was made, slowly and with care to the details.

Now that’s drinking.