Don’t wear perfume in the garden – unless you want to be pollinated by bees. ~Anne Raver
“When nothing else subsists from the past, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered – the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls – bearing resiliently, on tiny and almost impalpable drops of their essence, the immense edifice of memory.” ~Marcel Proust “The Remembrance of Things Past”
The sudden awareness of a scent can occasionally cause you to feel as though you slipped back in time and that you are actually at that scene again. If not for your other senses, you might feel as though you really were back there. Perhaps because smell is more personal than other senses, it can bring back memories of people, not just places or things.
This can be true of wine as well. For me, the power of aroma to bring me back to the bright moments in my life (and the dark ones too) has always been a part of the appeal of wine. But there are only a few wines with the power to communicate exactly where they came from – that can let you know their own little wine zip code. (This goes beyond Proust’s description of the memory elicited by his madeleine cake dipped into a lime-blossom tea.)
If there are only a few very special grape growing places in the world where the wines are truly evocative of their place of origin, it also seems that their numbers are dwindling. More and more wines reflect the winemakers hand and latest technology and less and less the place where the grapes are grown. It doesn’t mean those “I’m from wherever you want me to be” wines are not delicious. They can be very enjoyable as long as they don’t resemble something out of The Stepford Wives. But those wines that do present a clear sense of place (wines of the Mosel, the Loire, the Wachau, Burgundy, and Piedmont to name a few) always show more complexity and are always much more interesting. I prefer the point of view of Terry Theise, “it isn’t perfection we need to look for; it is imperfection, because the assumption of imperfection is the precondition for the miracle.”