THE BENEFITS OF WINE
A few days ago on the radio, several celebrities were asked what wine meant to them. All of them associated it with positive moments
A few days ago on the radio, several celebrities were asked what wine meant to them. All of them associated it with positive moments:
- A dinner with friends
- A meal with the family
- A special occasion
- Having fun on a terrace by the beach in the summer
- A glass of wine while cooking
- A moment relaxing on the porch with a book and a glass of good wine...
And so I started thinking. Wine for me, apart from being my job, my profession and my passion, above all else is friendship. All those friendships that have come about around a bottle, or several bottles, of wine. Those endless get-togethers with other colleagues in my profession, stealing time out of impossible schedules, we meet to chat, to be together, and why not?, to argue too. They are moments when we take off our uniforms and enjoy the company of others, and wine. We are not tasting wine there, we are drinking it.
Friendships that one also forges with wine-makers. That thin line that separates work from pleasure is crossed, and a friendship is formed. That is when one truly understands what is really enclosed in a bottle of wine. Good and bad years, hail at the end of the summer that spoilt the harvest, the label commemorating the birth of the first child of your favourite vintner, bottles that become mythical because the person who made them will not see any more harvests... Those wines are meaningful on a wine list, we recommend them as something that almost becomes our own.
Joyful times, like when that winery opened its doors and showed us the barrels, which in defiance of time, patiently await their day, or when another one invited us to their harvest... part of us inside a bottle that somebody, somewhere in the world, will uncork.
Friendships with customers, such as with the one who you opened the bottle for, eagerly waiting, and then opened the doors of his home to invite you to eat paella on Sunday.
And yes, wine is capable of all that, and more. It is not just a drink, wine takes us on journeys, it reveals landscapes we would otherwise never see, the steep mountainsides of La Axarquía in Malaga, the catamaran on the Sil River in Ribeira Sacra, the soil in the liquor producing Priorat area which gives the vines all the strength of its minerals, or the mist in Napa Valley cooling the grapes in California. A journey can be through a glass of wine.
Spain, despite being the country with the largest area of vineyards, 969,000 hectares, is not among the 10 main wine consumers in any of the rankings I have checked. Our 21-22 litres per capita is a far cry from consumption in Portugal of over 50 litres, or in France and Italy where it is 40 litres.
There is a heritage that brings life to sparsely populated areas and wealth to rural zones, and it is in our hands and the hands of the institutions to promote consumption through which we will be able to preserve our culture through the joy of drinking a good glass of wine.
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