Bought to bottle the good times

December 28, 2008|Essay, Tom Haines, Globe Staff

Jean-Marie, a family friend, had just that morning sung the praises of the viognier grapes of Condrieu, a village only a short detour on the route back to Paris from his home in the countryside. So my wife, Julie, and I left the highway to follow the N86 alongside the Rhone then turned left, south of the Cote-Rotie, and drove up and up through the damp-dark August day. Vines were full of fattening grapes but fatter clouds squatted above the fields. Inside the chateau of an otherwise quiet vineyard, a clerk detailed the viognier wines he had for sale. I chose a recent vintage.

"Une bouteille," I said.

Only one bottle, the clerk asked? Yes, only one.

I have been buying single bottles when traveling for more than a decade, hoping to capture in the corked container another kind of moment to carry forward. Like memories of leisurely meals with Jean-Marie and his wife, Helene, the wine would evolve.

More often than at vineyards, I buy in shops, such as the cramped convenience store on a side street in an older neighborhood of Barcelona. The store sold everything from toilet paper to canned beans, but I was drawn toward the back, and shelves of wine, including a bottle of 1997 Priorat.

This was before wines from Priorat, a region of arid fields northwest of Tarragona, and the Mediterranean, became international favorites. The bottle cost, I think, $12, a small price to pay to remember the day before, when 12 friends, old and new, gathered around a table at a rural restaurant near the town of Valls to share in a calcotada. That annual celebration centers not around drink but food, specifically calcots, a kind of giant scallion charred over an open fire and served with a strong sauce made of almonds, garlic, tomato, and olive oil. Then come grilled pork sausages and lamb chops.

As one hour led to the next, we passed a clay pitcher with a small spout. When tilted, it delivered a steady stream of the smooth, rich blend of wine made from grenache and carignan grapes grown in Priorat, less than 30 miles away.

Buying the Priorat to carry back to the United States, then, was an attempt to bottle the intimacy of friendship in the hopes that it would last through time.

That time is often not long. An $8 bottle of Chilean merlot, for example, lasted only two seasons. I first tasted the wine soon after Gabriel and I arrived in Santiago on a red-eye flight from Dallas. By noon, we had made the drive into the Andes to the cottage of Miguelito. He lighted a fire for the day's first asado, and opened the bottle of merlot that - no doubt aided by the trellis of vines blocking the sun, the scent of grilling meat, and the pace of idle conversation - was strong and sublime.