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While everyone is celebrating Valentine's Day, I'd like to talk with those of you who are commemorating the end, rather than the beginning, of love. There is no holiday for you, no Hallmark card expressing scorn for the person who did this to you. The damned marketers, with their blood-red hearts and paper lace…they don't understand.
Leave the frivolity to the frivolous. Those of us who know the truth about love – that it lulls you to complacency before betraying you, leaving only pain and loneliness behind – will close the curtains on the Valentine's Day revelers so we don't have to witness their foolishness. We have serious thoughts to think, vengeance to plan, psychological baggage to pack so we can go on with our lives. We don't need…well, fill in the blank. We don't need him, the bastard, or her, the floozie. All we need is ourselves, a fire in the fireplace and a glass of the kind of wine that is more puzzle than palliative.
As there are wines for the first flush of love – soulless pinks and vacuously effervescent bubblies -- there are wines for brooding in the wake of love. Every wine-making region in the world makes at least one, because there are miserable people everywhere in need of solace. The wines are dark and challenging, asking more questions than they answer.
Hemingway understood loss and its relationship with powerful wine. In the inevitable let-down after witnessing the life-or-death struggle in the bull ring, or pondering the horrible beauty of war, or considering whether the world would ever accept a bearded man with an affinity for women's attire, he reached for wine as opaque as his black moods. He drank Rioja from the north of Spain, wines aged so long in wood that they retain no trace of brightness or joy. The old Riojas – the Reservas and Gran Reservas -- are leather and smoke and licorice. The Marqueses are where you start: Marques de Riscal ($18), Marques de Arienzo ($22), Marques de Murieta ($20). If you can find it and afford it, there is no more wretchedly beautiful Spaniard than Lopez de Heredia Vina Tondonia ($45).
Perhaps the Spaniards are too black for you. Perhaps even in your moment of bitterness you need some sliver of light sneaking under your closed door, the glow of coals dying in the fireplace. Perhaps a Pinot Noir – lighter, but just barely. There are Pinots that are cheerful and fruity. Forget those. They make Pinots along the fogbound California coast that are as whispy and smoky as the ashes remaining after you've burned your love letters. La Crema makes a decent bottle at $17 and Hook & Ladder for maybe $30, the grapes grown between the rocky Sonoma Coast and the wreckage of the San Andreas Fault. There is no joy in those bottles, but there is wisdom.
Finally, there is Amarone, a wine from Italy that is an allegory to the process of getting over Mr. or Ms. Right. Amarones are made with grapes dried to concentrate flavor. Almost figgy in their gooey opacity, Amarones are slow-drinking wines that change in the glass. They teach by the Socratic method, asking questions and patiently awaiting your answer. Luigi Righetti makes a cheap one, Capitel De' Roari, that runs about $30. Bolla makes a solid and generally available bottle for a few dollars more. Give an Amarone time and it will whisper to you that all of those celebrants of love clogging the restaurants and bars on Valentine's Day…every single one of them…will be miserable soon enough. They will be left, as you have been, broken and scarred, because that is what love does to people.
Tom Johnson writes about wine at LouisvilleJuice.com and is nowhere near as miserable as this piece makes him sound.
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ADD A COMMENT
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PhayBay
wed feb 10 2010
at 10:58 am
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I think I just figure out what I'm doing to celebrate Single Awareness Day...I mean Valentine's Day!
Thank you! :-) And Happy S.A.D!! |
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Tom Johnson