Forgive me, wine gods, for I have ... lapsed.
Though my personal wine "voice" is a tragically backwards version of Pygmalion (surrounded by many Henry Higgins, I devolved), in the end I subscribe to the school of Matt Kramer: "If you love wine and you’re buying anything decent—let’s say any wine that costs $20 or more—you need to know that the odds are extremely good that the wine you’re buying today will taste better, and be more rewarding to you, if you stick it in a cool space for a year or even five or 10 years."
In that, I had a well-enough stocked cellar of easy-priced wines aging away towards a better future. Most of these wines were accrued around 2010, with bits and pieces thrown into the mix as they piqued my curiosity. And because they are not St. Emilion-age-worthy, they are mostly drinking well about now.
So what I did was: I started drinking them. What I didn't do was: keep adding more into the mix to age. What happened was: I ran out of wine.
Now I am in Wine Purgatory. I could be in Wine H-E-Double Toothpicks, but the lapse is redemptive.
This recently came my way and I opened it and then I drank it and it was D E L I C I O U S.The gentleman who gave it to me was moving out of state and retrieving his ONE case of wine he had stored here, because we're awesome enough to do that, find a way for you to keep what matters to you, regardless. He handed this to me certain it wouldn't be very good.
He was wrong.
I emailed him my apologies for his having given it to me, and of course my gratitude for such an oversight.
Not to be confused with what I opened last night, my most modest purchase from Topline yesterday. It is my punishment for not keeping up the rotation. Not quite $2-buck Charlie, it still affirms Mr. Kramer's advice.
While riding home from Topline, I was thinking what a twit I was to have gotten lazy about the easiest things to manage, really: a decent glass of wine.
Say you open a bottle of wine a week. 52 bottles @ around $20 is a thousand bucks. That's not horrible. That's, like, less than five cases. A five case locker is only $83 per year - next to nothing. This is all it takes. You just have to stay on it.
So now the task begins of getting back...on it. Of shoveling my way out of purgatory one bottle at a time. Worth it! if you've ever had a glass of purgatory.
This was on the tweety yeaterday.
