Table of Contents
CHICKEN SOUP
FOR THE
WINE LOVERS
SOUL
Jack Canfield
Mark Victor Hansen
Theresa Peluso
Backlist, LLC, a unit of
Chicken Soup for the Soul Publishing, LLC
Cos Cob, CT
www.chickensoup.com
We dedicate this book
to those who cultivate the soil,
tend the vines, and coax the essence
from a humble fruit to create
an enigma that has charmed
man for centuries.
Introduction
The grapeelegant in its simplicitythrough a combination of science and art is turned into wine, which is sensual and complex, mysterious, romantic, and even intellectually stimulating.
Like snowflakes, no two wines are alike. The same variety of grape grown in the same soil can smell, taste, and look different each yeareven day to dayyet, fine vintners learn to use what nature gives them; a small yield of grapes one year simply means fewer barrels of high-quality wine.
Winemaking is an art form that began centuries ago. A jar once filled with resinated wine was excavated from the kitchen of a Neolithic (8500-4000 BC) home in what is now Iran. Winemaking scenes appear on Egyptian tomb walls dating back to 2700 BC, evidence of a thriving, royal winemaking industry where wines produced in vineyards in the Nile Delta constituted a set of provisions for the afterlife.
Herodotus, the 5th century BC Greek historian, describes shipping wine down the Tigris and Euphrates rivers from Armenia in round, skin-covered boats loaded with date-palm casks to be delivered to Babylon (Iraq). And winemaking in Crete, the largest of the Greek islands, flourished during the roman ages (150 BC-AD 529), when no less than fifteen pottery workshops on the island made clay jars for transporting wine. Remnants of those jars have been unearthed in towns all along the Mediterranean shore. When the Venetians occupied Crete in the early thirteenth century, the local authorities took the first measures to limit vine cultivation to protect a prosperous commodity.
The Catholic Spanish colonists brought winemaking to Mexico in the 1500s, practicing their faith and honoring Christs sacred act of turning water into wine, but the climate of Mexico proved too harsh. When the Franciscan fathers transported cuttings from Mexico to a more suitable climate in California, winemaking in America began. During the 1800s, Chinese laborers lured to California by the great Gold Rush stayed to work the vineyards that would establish California as one of the premiere vinticultural regions of the world.
In the early twentieth century, immigrants came to the United States dreaming of prosperity. Worldly possessions and treasured momentos, including carefully wrapped grapevines from Italy, Greece, Spain, and France that would be planted in the soil of their adopted home, were packed into satchels and trunks. Vines were tended in small gardens until their roots took hold and the fruit ripened. When the grapes were ready, they would be pressed, and the juice fermented in oak barrels stored in dark, cool cellars dug below homes built with their own hands. When the wine was ready, jugs were filled and carried up to the kitchen where a daily glass, served in a simple tumbler, would accompany each meal. Some of these new Americans ventured West, and began vineyards in California, Oregon, and Washington that still exist today.
From those humble beginnings, viticulture has evolved into a billion-dollar industry of the twenty-first century. There is a wine for every tastefrom the simple to the sophisticatedand for every pocketfrom a few dollars to several thousand for a bottle.
This beverage has mesmerized poets, artists, philosophers, and leaders of the world; turning some into conneusieurs, while others fell into a life of debauchery.
From harvesting the grapes to uncorking a fine bottle, wine holds a special place in our customs, diet, social life, and religion. It is as embedded in our culture today as it was in ancient Egypt.
Wine challenges and engages all of our senses, but smell most profoundly. We taste only the basics of wine. Without the aroma, flavors become one-dimensional. Of all the senses, smell is the one hardest to describe, yet the one most capable of processing the complexity of wine.
Perhaps that is why describing wine requires a vocabulary dictated by nature. A limitless number of adjectives are invoked to describe subtle nuances and overpowering aromas, or to simplify hundreds of variables so that one can communicate the common structure of a wine.
Our eyes feast on dazzling colors of gold, garnet, or the shyest pink in a glass. We feel the oily sheen or the silky sheer of wine, its lightness or full-body, with our mouth. And the sound of a cork slipping from a bottle accompanied by the laughter of friends is music to our ears.
Whether its a jug wine to complement a midday meal, or a fine wine crafted by gifted hands and obsessed over by connoisseurs, enjoying wine is an experience. Wine can turn a mediocre meal into a memorable moment, and the pairings to compliment and enhance one another are endless. The only rule: eat and drink what you enjoy. If thats a full-bodied red with fish, so be it.
Come... pour yourself a glass of your favorite red or white, and join our writers in a toast. To the celebration of life, to family traditions, to love and happiness, all made more memorable by the essence of a simple grape.
Salute!
Theresa Peluso
DELECTABLE DELIGHTS
Food of the Vine
Good family life is never an accident but always an achievement by those who share it.
James H. S. Bossard
Wine is not drink, my Baba says. Wine is food. Baba is the Croatian word for Grandmother, and my Baba is the epitome of an Old-World grandmother: a meaty woman with a sturdy, slightly-hunched frame, face creased with deep wrinkles from years of hard work, dressed completely in black (as all good widows are), feet in black sandals revealing worn and dirt-stained toes, and the customary babushka (a headscarf folded and tied under the chin) adorning her head.
Baba, now eighty-two-years old, lived most of her life in what is now called Croatia. When she was growing up, the country was called Yugoslavia. Baba still has a house in Croatia on the island of Pasman (located in the northern most part of the former Yugoslavia), and she goes there yearly to reunite with her only remaining sister and her sisters large family.
Every year she returns from her visit to her homeland with various smuggled items: homemade olive oil, bulbs and bulbs of garlic, fresh bay leaves, prosciutto (a dry-cured ham), and wine... lots and lots of homemade red wine.
Two fingers of wine each day keeps you healthy, Baba always says. As she does so, she holds a juice glass in her right hand and uses the first two fingers of her left hand to illustrate how much wine to put in the glass. Wine glasses are a needless luxury in her eyes, so she always drinks her wine from a juice glass or tumbler.
In the fall of 2005, I accompanied my Baba on her yearly trek to Croatia. After nearly twenty-four hours of traveling, we arrived in Nevidjane, the town on Pasman where my Baba grew up and has her house today. Its a farming island, where cattle and crops are as commonplace as are coffee shops and convenience stores in the States. But unlike farming communities in the States, where a farmer has one large tract of land that also contains his or her dwelling, farmers in Croatia have several small tracts of land situated at various locations on the island.
