“We can only trust these wines to be themselves. But what they will become would surprise even the grapes.” Serge Hochar
It is April – almost May – a startling thought.
It has felt we’re in a state of continual beginning for a few months now, yet somehow we’re almost half-way through the year. It may simply be the nature of our existence - our human, fast-paced, superfluously noisy lives sharing a space with the quiet, imperturbable forces of the sure-footed deep life around us.
The promise of Spring has been at the tip of our noses for a while now, playing hide-and-seek with our beleaguered, over-wintered souls. Its jack-in-a-box explosions of sunshine and birdsong, however, have not fully coaxed us out of the wraps of grey trance the end of Winter brings. Not just yet. But it is here. All around us. Keeping quiet, mounting its forces, waiting for the right moment to explode from a dreamlike certainty into a pneumatic life power. We await - it and all the promises it’ll bring. This time – the time of promises - may be the sweetest time of the year. Unsullied by the anguishes of an unfolding growing season, ignorant of the doomsday scenarios we’ll be grappling with in the months ahead, we brim with childlike earnestness, eager to experience our world anew. Wide eyes, open hearts. Lyrical and rambunctious all at once.
It has recently dawned on me that wine is “simply” an eternal game of promises. Every season is a promise for unchartered territories – as is every fermentation, every single vessel in the winery, every single bottle that leaves us to arrive on someone’s table, or on our own. Maybe, that is why when we fall in love with wine, it’s mighty impossible to fall out of it. The kaleidoscope of possibilities, the whispered hope and the yearly rebirth is a hard-to-resist triad. What truly seals the deal is the plain fact that even when our wines settle into their bottles, we only know what we think we’ve learned about them. We pass onto the world our universe of potentialities and hopes, and the promises given to us – or did we invent them? Our cognition of exactly what these promises are is barely a spiderweb of images, impressions and past lessons floating in the air – more empty space than connecting threads.
Indeed, isn’t it here where the true magic of wine is? An unknowable chain reaction of dreams, hope, promises, surprises and shattering heartbreak… Only to fall in love again, when around the corner you stumble on more surprises – whether shocking or heartening – and then, discoveries that bear newborn promises again, and on and on. It is a tumbling cavalcade of emotions and sensations and there is no certitude anywhere in sight.
Amidst it all, there is something much more substantial and unshakeable: an energy - a desire - buoyed by the rising of wines you could have never imagined. Here they are - completely new, undreamt of and unpromised.
And yet somehow, the shivers of a deep recognition bolt like lightning rods between us.
Again we fall into their mysteries – the unrelenting struggles that bore these wines subside into the past, the torment morphs into power and the expansive world of soulful promises beckons us forward.
This has been our story every year, but never truer than in 2021. In two weeks, some of the creatures that surged out of this most tumultuous of vintages will be undergoing the most momentous occasion in the life of a wine (apart from being that drunk, of course) - bottling. It is an important link in the chain of promises: it’s the crux between gestation and emergence, and the amalgamation of one beginning with another.
We will release some of them in June. In preparation for their jubilant entry into our summers, I’ve decided to tell you about their lives so far in a series of stories here. I’m still not sure whether it’s in celebration or simply in anxious anticipation? Is it the rising sense of quiet elation when tasting the wines, or the visceral desire to exorcise the ghosts of cruelty - our tireless companion in 2021? It doesn’t matter really.
It is a story of how anguish deepens the spirit, how sorrows become the promises of gleaming new visions.
It is the story of wines of charming, witty and enlivening energy blooming into dreamlike, graceful existences.
It is the story of numinous light and floating elegance supplanting the stark darkness of trials and tribulations.
The beautifully incoherent promises of a painful year can unfold into wines that beguile in their vulnerability and shimmer our fears into oblivion. It may be our most important lesson to date.
