Monday, August 30, 2010

Take Time to Smell The Bouquet


I took some time away from this blog and other writing adventures to smell the bouquet. Sometimes in life we never volitize our own esters and things get tight, closed in and over oaked in our personal lives.


Today, however, the kids all started back to school. I have one in each level of education now, Jr. HS, HS, and College. As if to mark the beginning of a new season, I am writing again and offering whatever wine advice to my blog readers, wine and food columns and snooth reviews. It is all very hazy, this last time off. We needed to take care of the cluttered garage and basement, get one kid off to college with supplies to cover 120 days, get 2 other kids into their fall sports programs and tend to a dried up garden and yard that was beaten down by a hot and dry July.


The end result being that the vacation was nothing more than home work, working on the home and never going away to the mountains or the beach or an island or a foreign destination like say New York City. No time for baseball games, no time for county carnivals either although my kids and my spouse seem to have gotten past the need or want to go to these places. The family events were focused on the individual rather than the group and this truly marks a turning of pages in life.


These things recognized and set aside, one thing was accomplished on a personal note; I started a new health program for myself and took time every day to spend time on me for an hour. This was my personal "ester swirl" as it were and it helped to open up my closed in self. I removed myself from wine, wine making, grape growing, wine tweeting, wine FB-ing, wine snoothing, wine searching, wine accessing, all of it stopped for thirty days. It was tough at first but really great as I return to the printed word on this subject and a bit of renewed energy.


I, for the time being, will not refer to this as the grind, and with a renewed sense of wonder delve into odd varietals, the place wine has in a healthy diet, all things less hedonistic and more focused on the improvement of life. After all wasn't this the reason wine was first made? It wasn't safe to drink the water and the milk wasn't pasteurized, so fermented grape juice helped life become livable, if not down-right safe. Now we seem to be surrounded with focus on scores, medals, ego, competition, with thousands of wine makers touting their wines as the greatest but nobody really listening. Ultimately nobody is swirling their esters to open up the full bouquet life is offering.


For me, for the time being, this is all I care to do. Cheers