Intense fascination with wines

It probably started four decades ago, when you first heard the word “wine” in some biblical event when water was transformed into wine at a wedding. You went to church and observed that wine was poured into the chalice and start to wonder how that wine would taste. If you were an altar boy, you would, ahem, try to taste it from those nearly empty bottles.

Maybe, three decades earlier, you were a boy at fifteen, and allowed one drink of that alcohol beverage by a doting father, probably beer, rum or whiskey or even wine. Experiencing this liquid for the first time and having been awakened to its delicious sensations, this passion for wine lasts for a lifetime. You start to read books and realize that all wines are imported, because the kind of grapes that produce wine grow best in temperate zones, 30 to 50 degrees latitude in the North and 30 to 40 degrees latitude in the South. You would have learned that a root louse (Phylloxera vastatrix) in 1860, a kind of grape vampire sucking the life of grapes, devasted European vineyards. Your vocabulary improved when you understood what “terroir” is all about.

Perhaps, two decades earlier, you began your own collection of wines, traveled abroad to participate in wine tasting in France, Italy Spain and the United States. You buy more books about wine and start to compare the tasting notes of the wine with that of your own, buying some fruits like fresh elderberry, raspberry or gooseberry simply because your book says it has such smell and you have never seen, much more smell, such exotic fruits.

You become more tolerant about other people’s wine preferences because you are reminded by one simple rule on taste; there is no rule on taste, that the preference for one type of wine over another is individual. By this time, your taste sensations has progressed tremendously that with one smell and sip of an unknown wine, you can, excuse me, tell whether it is a New World wine or an Old World wine and what grapes were used to produce that wine.

As your wine collection grows, you start to realize that its value is now comparable to the assets of the rural bank! You might as well transform your passion of wine into a business proposition. You join hands with fellow connoisseurs (or is it investors to the Ultimate Wine Investment Programme) like French Bank Societe Generale (SG Private Banking, Asia Pacific) and FICOFI, France’s premier specialist in wine investments to jointly own climate-controlled cellars in Bordeaux. Now, you have fun in wine auctions like bidding for a bottle of 1990 Cateau d’Yquem for a mere 250 euros or sweating out with other bidders for a bottle of 1982 Chateau Petrus that has reached the price of 1,800 euros.

You host the SG group in offering clients exclusive wine tasting and this paper’s favorite columnist was one of those few lucky guests invited by Osmeña (Chairman, Hilton Cebu) to enjoy a bottle of 2000 La Tache, Grand Cru, Monopole de la Romanee-Conti with a price tag of US$ 1200. I wrote an article, “Drinking Liquid Gold at Manny O’s” in “An Evening of Indulgence in Trophy Wines & Wagyu” in 2007. The choice of dessert wine was very modest, Chateau d’Yquem, Premier Cru Classe Superieur, Sauternes, at only US$ 1000 per bottle today because of the financial meltdown. 

The epitome of your passion is to produce wines that carry your own labels. An ultimate high would be ownership of a vineyard itself; however the type of wine produced would be limited since you are schooled in the principles of terroir, that the wine is not only dependent on the type of soil in “which grapevines have grown, but also to the cultural environs, regional customs, geographic climate, and even the specific microclimate of the plot of land on which a particular vineyard lies”.

Next option would be to choose the vineyard that would carry your labels like the 2007 Discipulus Blanc Manny O and 2006 Discipulus Syrah Manny O from the Languedoc region of France and the 2007 Sumiller, Manny O from Yecla Spain.

The final metamorphosis that would occur in you would be from a student to an educator in the Science of Oenology. You share your knowledge with friends of Unilab Therapharma in an “Evening of Indulgence in Wagyu & Wine Tasting”.

More work for this paper’s favorite food columnist kay guest na pud in wine pairing with foods like Poached Crystal Bay Oysters with Fume de Poisson, Wagyu Shio Yaki Sushi, Tempura Tiger Prawns Cocktail, Wagyu Goulash, Spikey Shau-mai, Charcoal fired Kalbi and finally the dessert, whew, the Tropical Fruits dances with Haagen Dazs among Nuts.

Such is the life of a food writer who also believes in what Benjamin Franklin said… “He who drinks fast, pays slow.”