The Wine Novice

Maybe I’m doing it wrong. There is a lot of talk of “structure” and whether or not the wine is “too thin” or “flabby.” I don’t know what this means. There’s also some innuendo, though it’s not meant that way. “My, this is soft on the bottom, isn’t it?” I snicker because I am a 12 year old boy, apparently. What does all this mean, anyway? “Well, if it has structure, it means the flavor holds for a long time. It doesn’t fall apart.”

Three days in I still have no idea what anyone is talking about. I think, “Yes, I like this, it is refreshing, though I wish it was colder.” I think, “Yeesh, this is way too sweet.” Or, “Yikes, that is going to give me heartburn, what with all the acid.” I admire the color of a pale rose champagne, it has a slightly orange-y cast to it in the sunshine. When the guy who knows more about wine than I do asks me what I think, I say, “I like it. It’s pretty. It’s not too pink.” What I mean is that if I did not have anything else to do I would sit in that lawn chair and drink it for a while and admire the very charming wine merchants.

There is a sweet faced girl in a black straw hat that pours yellow sweet wine after yellow sweet wine. She tells me it is trendy and I feel myself shutting down, I don’t care that it’s trendy. It’s too sugary and I’m tired and I want to eat the entire tray of paper thin salmon on creme fraiche with chives.

There are two deadly handsome boys in their 20s pouring icy rose and there are great piles of boiled shellfish, crab and prawns and langoustins. I let them top up my little glass and I throw the red shells from the prawns over the side of the boat into the Basin d’Arronchon.

There’s a Spanish waiter and his accent is devasting and he sets a glass of Kir in front of me. A beautiful girl who could be F Scott’s Zelda pours something sparkling in to my cocktail shaker, it’s got pureed mango and pepper in it and I don’t like it, but I like the idea of Zelda, in her blingy headband, helping me make a cocktail.

I have lots of photos of wine labels, but the bottle sits with food so I can remember what I ate, who was pouring it, what we were talking about at the time. I have no idea if the wine was thin or flabby. Sometimes I liked them, sometimes I didn’t. The last one I tasted was at dinner in the gilded salon off the opera house. The ceilings were very high, chandeliers lined the arcaded space. I ate salmon and it was cooked perfectly but wanted something extra, a little something extra. I tasted the wine. The older waiter, who reached over me to pour or to collect my plate, need a shower. The younger waiter was ridiculously good looking and had a lot of product in his hair.

“What do you think of the wine?”

“It’s grapey,” I said. But I thought, the food isn’t as good as it should be for this environment, and that waiter, he probably wants to be at home watching the Tour de France after a good long shower, and the other one, the handsome one, I’ll bet his girlfriend is African and tall or maybe he’s gay, with all that product in his hair. This place is full of tourists, and it looks grand, but it’s too easy to be here eating, we should be eating somewhere in an alley on a patio, in that other neighborhood where all the students were.

“What do you think of the wine?”

Is “This wine lacks context” an appropriate description?