It's Complicated

"It's complicated," a commonly used phrase uttered by people in a "relationship" and one of the relationship description choices on Facebook, but I find it is equally appropriate when discussing wine.  I could wax on about how the wine itself is a complicated mix of tannins, fruit, terroir, barrel aging and so on and so on, but really the complications come in when I just try to explain how the wine tastes.  When I checked Wikipedia looking for wine descriptors, I was at first quite pleased to see my many dozens of choices.  My first thought was, well this will make it really easy to describe what I'm tasting.  I can be an instant expert now.  I can sound as pretentious as the most suave sommelier and people will think I am really an expert on this wine tasting thing.  I've been faking it all my life, I figured I had just found the crib notes of the wine world.  How complicated could it be?


I immediately started trying to apply the descriptors to the wine I was currently swilling...I opened my 'new post' blog page and started copying and pasting all the words that seemed to work, thinking I would later come back and write the post around them.  Point, click, point, click, point...well you get the idea.  I was on a roll.  This was exciting, I could really write something impotent here.
Accessible, Balanced, Clean, Polished, Spicy (from the oak)...so it went.  These all seemed to apply to the wine I was drinking at the time--Park Farm's 2007 Vineyard Select--but now I needed to craft words around these to make it all sound...professional, knowledgeable, expert.  Well there you have it, that has always been my problem...I need to be the expert, the professional, the know-it-all.  My perfectionism has brought me down more often than any other trait I call my own.  I get called on it time and time again, but I still pop up like a wobble doll, shooting off my mouth and taking another hit.  I decided it was time to learn instead of teach.  Nobody likes a smarty, so I started to investigate all the things I just don't know about wine, wine making, vintage, viticulture, tasting, how to drink, what to drink it in...there is so much, too much.  Frankly there is more than I want to know and then the light bulb went off, albeit, several days later.  I might find it interesting and it might be feeding my ego, but frankly, it was getting boorish.  I was boorish.  If I was boorish, who would want to read anything I wrote.  Besides, don't people just want to drink what they like?  I want to drink what I like and over-thinking it was making it a chore.  Wine imbibing a chore, I think not!  OK, well so maybe this is more complicated than I thought.    

After having another conversation with my blog mentor, It's all about the grape, it became clear I needed to 'refresh'  my page.  What is this blog going to be all about?  I need an edge, an angle, a hook, something for which I will be known.  Something that will bring people back to my site, so that instead of being the smart friend, I can be the popular friend.  I've always wanted to be the popular friend, but alas, that has never been my destiny.  I hate complications.

So what will be my angle?  My original intention still stands, I want to discover the wineries of the area and I want to bring them vividly to my readers.  I want to find the best wines in my region, to drink them, to pair them, to engage with the vintners and participate in the festivals and activities they sponsor and ultimately to bring wine drinkers (of all types--nose in the air, nose in glass, nose to the ground) together with the best the Mississippi river valley wine industry has to offer.  I want to do this with some humor and humility. I want to appeal to people who just want to enjoy a glass (or God forbid, a full bottle...or two) with dinner or laughing with friends around the fire pit in the back yard, enjoying a sippa while reading a good book, or snorting through a straw, that which is grown, sown and bottled in our own backyard.  Don't get me wrong, I love wines from all over the world and will certainly continue to buy them and drink them.  You will see links to other places here too, but primarily, this is about the wines of the Upper Mississippi River Valley.  Now that's not a complicated relationship at all.