Wine (2)

I’m enjoying food more than I ever did in my life. Before I retired, particularly when I was on the battlefield, meals were often a nuisance necessity, crammed in wherever I could find time for them. But now I linger over my food, always reading while I eat, and savor every bite. The taste I relish the most is the wine that accompanies my meals, my beloved cabernet sauvignon.

The outcome is wine every day. That means that several times a year, I have to go shopping at a wine warehouse not far away. I specialize in cheap cabernet, and over the years I have come up with a list of about fifteen inexpensive wines that I can depend on to be delicious every time. But I always keep an eye out for low-priced cabernets I haven’t tried before. I come home with two or three large cartons filled with bottles of wine and find myself several hundred dollars poorer.

The cabernets I drink come from all over the world. I can’t say that I favor the wine of any one nation over that of another. I have favorites from South America, Australia, California, and the U.S. east coast. I suspect that the French wines are still the best, but their price puts them out of reach for me.

Having wine with every meal, for everyone, including children, is standard procedure throughout Europe and in much of the rest of the world. I’m told that the practice got started because too often available water was polluted. But in the U.S., most people have wine at one meal a day, sometimes one meal a week. In this respect, like several others I’ve blogged about, our country is behind the times.