1945 Chateau Clos de Sarpe, St-Emilion Grand Cru

Like a prayer that rises from the quiet lips of an old penitent, there is no beauty as elegant as old wine, resurrecting the glory of the Caryatids on the Acropolis and sunlight shining through high windows of St John Lateran onto hymn singing incense swinging priests, and although in the nose of this wine we inherit those relics whose memories are wrapped in the passage of time, we notice too in a swoon the fragrance of plum blossoms when you fall in love for the first time and your senses vibrate and expand to feel all that can be felt at once, dissolving the boundary of everything you thought you knew but just learned is only the smallest fraction of what can be known because until now you didn’t know love, didn’t know the smell of her skin just below her ear on that soft spot where your own breath mixes with hers and you can taste the commingling in the very air she inhabits, and when we breathe the skin of our loved one and inhale this beauty through our pores, each soft fragrance delineated along the touch of her lips, her neck, the almost impossible space between our skin and souls, we remember in that inhalation a memory of this love right now, and if we are fortunate to fall in love when the earth has moved past the sun and begins its long reflection back into itself we remember the earth radiating its stored heat, the pulse of an almost forgotten summer whose bass notes reverberate through our hands limbs and everything else all entwined and warm with wool and smoke and crystal clear breath and we wonder how anyone could forget this feeling, this full embrace of the world we live in. And how is it that seventy years ago when the scourge of war gashed raw this earth, killing and rupturing so much of itself from each other and a now irretrievable past, how did it come to be in those first months of peace, when the sun without judgment still poured across the land and the wind and the rain blew and fell without discriminating on who or what received its beneficence, how is it that on a field that was worked by farmers long since dead, whose hands are unknown to us today, how is it that they picked these grapes and crushed them with a memory of a tomorrow that just arrived. Seven decades ago, after the fermentation and resting in barrels, these grapes were put into bottles and laid in their caves only to lie there day after day after week after year after decade and my parents were young and they died more than a decade ago and still this wine sat in its cave untouched by light or heat or vibrations and the only thing that touched it was time, unforgiving linear time that softens things that once were sharp and brings down democracies and dictatorships and my almost six decades are enveloped and held in that time and still there is nothing but long silent memories until today when a protester in Hong Kong was shot and dozens injured and meetings were canceled because roads were blocked and still I made it to this restaurant in this quiet hush of an early evening in fall when the sky is washed with a breeze and the tear gas has dissipated and a relic from the past is remembered and poured into a glass and how does time express itself over time, a simple grape whose merest flaws or imperfections could have destroyed it years ago, how does it manage with such elegance to layer itself upon this long arc and still hold within it the lightest blush of strawberries and a bed of earth deep mushrooms and roots that draw up from rocks as old as life their nutrient remains and hold these twin remembories of spring and fall together in balance, weaving the many summers and winters together with this one small vineyard, one single harvest at the beginning of a long peace? How?