World Cup events bore,
Yet dedicated vintage?
Glassware to savor
Parting Ways
Fine wine ages, however, most wine doesn’t age well. In my earlier life, I used to save bottles of wine for a future occasion, until I realized by the time life handed me a worthy moment, the wine’s splendor long left the bottle (see Drink the Wine from April 2013). The bottle often included memories, and parting with the dry receptacle felt like those memories were likewise poured down the drain with the rest of the spirits. Unlike many other objects with similar emotional attachment, wine bottles are dated, so it is much easier to reflect on a moment in time sloshed away with or without a toast.
Truthfully, I lugged both full and empty bottles of red and white for years, even decades, from one residence to the next just to remind me of key moments in my adulthood. Not every moment sparked massive enthusiasm, often just an imprint that I crossed a longitude and latitude at a specified time and hopefully it might have mattered to someone. Usually the only person to whom it mattered pens this recollection. Sometimes a gift, sometimes a purchase, sometimes just a beautiful bottle artistically bedazzled with a splendid décor, I finally parted with all of them when I reached level forty-eight. I just couldn’t justify the space they took up in my life. Like most objects from that time, we parted ways.
A Dry Vintage
In 1994, the United States hosted the World Cup, but since I lived in Germany at the time, it impacted me little, besides, I’m not a fan. However, during that summer, I did take a one-day trip to Paris, just before Bastille Day, and while it lasted less than twenty-four hours, I enjoyed it more than the entire month of World Cup play. Europe celebrated the event with more enthusiasm than me, while not even remotely difficult, but I did take advantage of the celebration abroad to purchase two bottles of wine marking the occasion – a Zinfandel in a clear bottle and a French Bordeaux in a green bottle. I’d love to say the vintages were spectacular, but I failed to drink the latter before it aged beyond good taste, and the former was a Zinfandel.
However, the fun French folk created these bottles with identical imprints on both, and that’s what made me just love it. Featuring a drawing of the Statue of Liberty (a gift to the U.S. from France, of course), she hoisted, instead of a torch, a black and white soccer ball and draped herself in the American flag. Even more delightful, the two low-end decanters include a raised vestige in the glassware of the same image. I doubt many bottles of French Bordeaux feature such a blatant display of that country across the sea where the buckaroos refer to their bubbly as ‘sparkling wine,’ but for this one occasion, the people of Gaul let it slide. Kind of like the way that I let it slide that it was ultimately about a sport that almost three decades later leaves me dry.
Pam Portland 