The wine remembers disappointment. He makes
a nod to my husband and down we went,
following the owner’s polished pate, through
the dusty archives of the cellar shelves where
bottles are ranked like terracotta warriors
waiting for their call to arms, all to look at,
not to drink, as so many things in life, all to
have and to keep. And there, a little table and
a bottle, there, glasses and a decanter, as though
we’d fallen through the smoky glass of
one old wine into Wonderland, and the
trap was set – ‘drink me’, ‘eat me’,
or we’d come upon some Russian Roulette
and had to guess the poisoned chalice.
This was where my husband would have his
birthday tasting, under the bare yellow bulb
of vintage light, under the bare yellow gaze
of our vintage guide, he’d swirl and sniff and
swig and spit and pretend to detect the notes,
divine the nose, distinguish colour, acid,
tang, or perhaps my husband really can.
I asked the owner what he meant, while
he pulled the dagger from the bottle’s
heart. We had a fella through one time –
he took the tour just like you, who said they
have a technique now for the oldest wines,
so easily forged, so easily falsified, when
shining a light through them doesn’t work,
or checking the level, assessing the cork.
They measure the levels of Cesium-137.
The oldest bottles do not have a memory
of our bombs, our hot nuclear age, they
taste innocent of all that, the sun that
shone on their vines was a different sun,
the rain was a different rain. I wondered
if each bottle’s grapes had felt that season’s
falling dust, what words had drifted
as they swelled, what sounds and sights
had zephyred down on harvest day and
were genied under the cork’s cool mouth.
We’re tasting a wine that was treaded in
the year my husband was born, the cork’s
wet plug stained with the secrets the vineyard
heard, the lost dark velvet of that day.
There’s wine down there in that labyrinth
of blood red and white grenades, which was
laid down with bright hope on the day
that I was married. I wonder what I
would taste if we opened it up and
let it breathe my expectations out.
I wonder what that wine remembers.