Where sunshine and wine combine
The visual pleasure given to us by wine is underestimated in the overall scheme of things. We may feel that our sense of sight is less important to the overall experience of wine as we tend to use it to glean surface information, compared the complex and encompassing impressions yielded by smell and taste, which are more about tasting the wine in its entirety. Yet our visual perception also triggers a cascade of instantaneous responses and associations and stimulate brain activity.
On occasions, we want to grasp a moment of intensely sensual experience – and even memorialise it. The feelings associated with the perception of something beautiful are ephemeral, as the memory of them inevitably fades or becomes furred up, the sense of awed pleasure at the very instant of the original experience diluted over time.
Many wine lovers will therefore take a picture of the bottle and store it on their phone and/or post it on their social media feed. The picture, when retrieved, although two dimensional by definition, can trigger positively warm memories when viewed later on.
Personally-speaking, April was the most indulgent wine month. In terms of vino, I carped a lot of diem. Joy’s grapes were burst repeatedly
And so to balcony wines. The balcony is precious to me in this scenario, because I live in the middle of a city and it is a location which is quiet and ideal for a moment’s contemplation and is bathed in light no matter the weather.
While at home when I begin to connect with a wine in a poignant way, I have this strange urge to remove it from the more formal context of the dining room and go somewhere different to make a memory with it. The ritual of taking the bottle and glass upstairs and placing them on the balcony parapet in preparation for a photo creates an expectation that further heightens one’s receptivity.
If all wines were deemed equally worthy of being balcony wines, then would be little value to this currency.
The time of day is critical too. The quality and nature of the light is essential. Early evening light is characterised by a softer, diffused glow with warmer tones, especially during those twilight hours before full darkness. This is due to the lower sun angle, which results in more scattering and absorption of shorter wavelengths of light. The light is also less intense than during the day, creating a gentle, relaxing ambience and adding to the atmosphere.
Emotionally also, a beautiful sunset may give rise to simultaneous feelings of celebration and regret. Savouring those final moments (the dregs of wine, the last of daylight) feels like homage to the circadian rhythm of our lives. Although our pleasure may be tinged with regret, tomorrow will be another day with another wine. The sense of transience further sharpens our appreciation for the present, however, and prompts the desire to take a photograph as to freeze this instant of joy for eternity.
Sunshine and warmth transform the spectacle and make the wines glow. In every sense. As I scroll through the photos on my phone I find myself captivated by those taken during the period of spring/summer 2020, when balcony wine epiphanies (as I came to regard them) became also quotidian. The weather helped enormously, as well as the fact of the protracted lockdown which gave time to appreciate those things we take for granted. Every taste of wine seemed like a new blessing.
From March through to the end of June that year I drank some of the best wines I have ever tasted. Or, to put it more accurately, I always chose what I was in the mood to drink, and the wines seemed to taste the better for that. With the sun is shining day-after-day so brilliantly boosting serotonin levels, the wines seemed bouncy and healthy.
I kept a wine diary for 2020 and wrote at the time:
Personally-speaking, April was the most indulgent wine month. In terms of vino, I carped a lot of diem. Joy’s grapes were burst repeatedly “against my palate fine”. Every evening I dutifully took a bottle and a glass to my balcony and photographed them with an all-singing, all-dancing sunset in the background (my fave photo-trope was to have the dying rays of the day slanting into the glass of – preferably orange – wine.) Natural light really does make a wine come alive and the quality of turbidity is unstrained. The final glass of murk was invariably brimming with solids, the changing hues, textures and wild flavours of the wines momentarily inspirational.
One of the by-products of lockdown is that we (by which I mean “I”) are drinking better. Wisely and well, not just in more copious quantities. For example, I am buying and drinking wines that I would normally only broach on very special occasions. Devil hang the expense etc. Slowing down in all aspects of my life further means that I can take pleasure in every aspect of the wine. When I pour it, I allow myself the slow luxury to examine the colour in the glass, as if admiring it for the first time. The greater the depth of colour, the more immersive the visual experience. I take time to smell, to taste, to savour, allowing the wine to envelop my senses, rather than chasing after it, so to speak. It is like remembering how to breathe.
The wine in the glass shimmers and hums with colour suffused with light. The bottle must be present too, standing by its contents, like a proud mother. Colours become beautiful fluid glowing memories; labels provide the cue.
Colour is not fixed. Natural wine, like natural light, can be gentle, dangerous, dreamlike, bare, living, dead, misty, clear, hot, dark, violet, springlike, falling, straight, sensual, limited, poisonous, calm and soft. And natural light seems to infuse natural wines with life.
The wine in the glass shimmers and hums with colour suffused with light. The bottle must be present too, standing by its contents, like a proud mother. Colours become beautiful fluid glowing memories; labels provide the cue.
I felt this energy every year we held our big artisan wine fair at London’s Tobacco Dock. The sunshine that flooded from a cloudless sky through the glass roof imbued the tasting with a vital seasoning. The brightness naturally lift the spirits and also seem to dynamise the very pigments of the wines themselves. And what a multi-hued palette there was! Liquids that seemed to attract and hold the light, wines saturated variously with dancing mauves, crimsons, pomegranate-reds, coral-pinks, ambers, buttercup-yellows and burnished golds – a painterly spectrum indeed. Over and again one was reminded of Galileo’s effortless description of wine being “sunlight held together by water.” For whatever reason, wines tasted better.
Inner light exists. As the saying goes: Beauty is a light in the heart. Limpid glistening colours in wine denote healthy transparency, yet even the more turbid examples possess their own vitality. A wine which is stripped to the gills can, after all, be clear in the sense of a denatured cleanliness – what I witnessed (and felt) at the Real Wine Fair was a quality and “acoustic depth” of colour. You know it when you see it; it is as if the light – even through a glass darkly – radiates from within.
Back on the balcony. The photo puts the wine, the rays from the setting sun, and pale blue sky in a single frame. Tasting the wine creates a tactile resonance that lodges deep in the memory. Now, when I look at the photo months – and even years – on, I can almost taste the wine in mouth.
The words of Pablo Neruda’s Ode To Wine seem apposite here:
But you are more than love,
the fiery kiss,
the heat of fire,
more than the wine of life;
you are
the community of man,
translucency,
chorus of discipline,
abundance of flowers.
I like on the table,
when we’re speaking,
the light of a bottle
of intelligent wine.
Drink it,
and remember in every
drop of gold,
in every topaz glass,
in every purple ladle,
that autumn laboured
to fill the vessel with wine;
and in the ritual of his office,
let the simple man remember
to think of the soil and of his duty,
to propagate the canticle of the wine.