Laying away wines for the future
Making wine and laying it aside for the future expresses an essential faith and hope in the future.
A clear red wine
This week Treesh and I racked and bottled our latest batch — thirty bottles of clear red wine made from grapes we grew in our backyard. (With this batch, we finally nailed a long-standing haze/cloudiness problem, thus the name for this wine, “Oakley Clarity 2011.”)
I always set aside seven or eight bottles and label them for the future; spacing out the aging for a year, two years, four, seven, ten… and store them away in our wine cabinet. So far, all the wines we’ve made get better with age.
Storing part of each batch for the future means that — in the future — we’ll be drinking some very good wines. This activity implies that the collection of labeled wines will be intact a decade or so from now, that they will be able to lay there in our cellar with little disturbance for years at a stretch, and the world will go on as it has, without end, without undue calamity or strife, and that even if we suffer more of life’s inevitable setbacks, there will still be good wine to drink, family and friends to share it with, and more hopeful days ahead.
I propose a toast — to the future!
