Saturday noon, sitting in the kitchen of a friend’s, with the sunlight pouring in through the French windows — a rare sunny day lately — I felt sleepy and lazy, just waiting for lunch to be ready.
My thoughts drifted away. My eyes glanced over what was in front of me and then landed on the label of that bottle. Didn’t think anything of it till after a few seconds when it occurred to me the label’s background colour was exactly the same as that of the bubbly liquid in the adjacent glass, not even a single shade of difference.
Coincidence? I asked myself. Right that moment, Mattia’s figure appeared in my mind. No, this was definitely intentional.
Back in March, I visited Ballabio winery in Oltrepò Pavese (see here for the account) and saw for myself their immaculate, almost obsessive-compulsively organised winery and cellars; I also heard Mattia, the winery owner, talk about his winemaking philosophy: only picking grapes by hand, only pressing whole bunches, only vinifying the purest juice of the first press. Halfway through the tasting, I asked Mattia for a glass of water. He came from afar with a filled glass and handed it to me. The water bottle was nowhere to be seen. I guessed that was a plastic one. Given his perfectionist personality, he wouldn’t have been able to bear the presence of a hideous plastic bottle in his tastefully-adorned tasting room.
Gazing back and forth between the colour of the label and the rosé in the glass, I could almost picture Mattia attempting to adjust the colour of the label to match that of the wine, and could almost imagine him frowning and clenching his teeth, determined to get it right.
The label is the face of a wine, yet it can be easily overlooked, especially if it’s not colourful nor showing a cute animal running around or an expressionless human face on it.
If I hadn’t been to Ballabio in person, or had I not met Mattia on my visit, I would’ve paid zero attention to the label in the first place.
Yet right this moment of blogging, I still remember vividly, and probably will never forget, the moment on Saturday when the surprising discovery dawned on me, the feeling of my heart being touched and even lifted. I realise that being able to perceive details is an ability, and whoever has that ability is a lucky one.
Then again, when we finished the oyster appetiser and moved on to the scampi pasta, we opened a bottle of Assyrtiko by Gaia Winery in Santorini, Greece. A truly wonderful wine, with Sauvignon Blanc’s passion fruit, gooseberry and Etna’s volcanic minerality. A touch of oily texture. It felt like an upgraded version of Vermentino in terms of flavours and body. But then that was all that Assyrtiko was to me, because I’d never been to Greece, and I didn’t know much about Greek wines. Maybe there was also a secret message the owner of Gaia Winery had intended to convey through the label of this Assyrtiko, but I simply did not have the ability to perceive it in this case.
The truth is that it’s impossible to have visited all the wineries that make all the wines we drink in our lives. And sometimes even visiting personally doesn’t count much. There are times you just don’t remember much or even anything about it. In fact, it’s exactly this that makes those rarest moments when a wine label detail touches your heart like it did mine on Saturday all the more precious.
