Remember when

Douglas handed me a piece of goat's milk cheddar on a slice of sour dough loaf bought from Sonoma’s gourmet store, Epicurean Connection, and poured me a tasting of Hawkes’ 2011 Gravel Bar Chardonnay. 

“Here, try this,” he smiled.

I sipped and savoured the wine, took a bite of the food, and enjoyed that sensation when time stands still as the wine, cheese and sour dough combined in my mouth delighting my tastebuds.

But of course time waits for no-one and in its constant steady march we are but passengers.

Perhaps this is why I can cast my mind back to similar occasions (like the one Douglas inadvertently had just imprinted on my memory).

Because how often can time stand still?  For wine enthusiasts, it can feel like it does when one partakes in a good wine.

I recall the glass of Prosecco, a varietal I was trying for the first time with my German friend Trixi, whom I had visited in her hometown of Frankfurt after meeting her the year before on a travel tour in Africa.

The bottle of Rose, my good friend from Sydney, Ischa, who had recently moved abroad and I shared on the embankment of an Amsterdam canal, under the diminishing light as a coveted July summer evening slipped by.

The sips of Penfolds Grange I snuck from my father’s glass when he had decided to splurge with his partner at the time, opening the $450 bottle over birthday dinner at a family pizzeria in Melbourne.

For me, many memories partner with wine along with music, people and travel.

I listened to Portishead’s debut album Dummy, over and over again in the Berlin flat of an Irish architect I’d met while backpacking around Europe, and again in the upscale east side Manhattan apartment ANZ had provided for dad during his six weeks working in New York. 

I sipped red wine from my local gastro pub, Lamaros, in South Melbourne and listened to Mumford & Sons as I packed up my home of six years to travel India and eventually relocate to the States.

Good wine makes lasting memories and one can’t argue, it’s best to bottle that. 

Photo - Ischa's lovely painted toenails in Amsterdam that sunny July day in 2008 with our rose.