Ah-ha!?!

On my favorite food forum they’ve been discussing “Ah-ha!” moments when it comes to drinking wine. As the one forum member put it so well: “that moment where someone tastes a new type of wine, or takes a chance on a wine that they've never heard of before and has that little vinous epiphany where a door that they never knew existed opens for them, and a gorgeous ray of enlightened understanding comes through and they say to themselves, "Damn, this is really great stuff!" (or words to that effect).“ (If you’d like to see the whole post look here.)

So I read through the first few posts on the thread and decided that I have never had a wine Ah-ha moment, or at least nothing compared to what these people seem to have experienced. Then I started to think that it was all just another circumstance of the world of wine making me feel rather inadequate. But… upon perusal of later postings, I think there might be hope for me yet…

It appears that most people started out drinking, for lack of a better term, low-end wines. Gallo Hearty Burgundy gets mentioned quite often. Then sometime in their adult (or near-adult) lives they got a taste of a quality wine and… ta-dum! Or, more appropriately… ah-ha! Their eyes were opened to the joys of wine and everything was good in the world (well, that may be overstating it, but it gets the point across).

However, being a native-Californian with wine-loving parents, I never drank bad wine as a child. And yes, I did drink wine when I was far younger than the legal drinking age. My parents did not drink much, but anything resembling a special occasion always warranted a bottle of wine and everyone got a glass. My folks believed that allowing my sisters and me to have wine at home made it (and all liquor) not such a big mystery and, therefore, less enticing as an illicit pleasure. Well, that approach worked with me (and one of my sisters – two out of three is not bad) and I was never one to go out drinking just to get drunk.

But back to drinking good wine… not only did my father insist on fine wine at the dinner table, but also in church. Every time he was assigned to a new parish, the first thing he would do was to get rid of the crappy, frequently corked (why is that?), communion wine (often labeled “Communion Wine”) and replace it with something drinkable. Oh, the little old Episcopalian altar guild ladies would about keel over at such a radical change, but my dad would just buy the wine himself and pour the old stuff out if they tried to thwart him. And once the wine was blessed, there was nothing they could do since one simply cannot pour consecrated wine down the drain.

So my thinking is that between the good wine in church and the good wine at home, I did have an Ah-ha wine moment, but it was so long ago and I was too young to realize it at the time. For me, there was no time when I started drinking good wines – I’ve always been privileged to do so. I guess I’ll just have to be satisfied with having an Ah-ha moment about my wine Ah-ha moment.