Monday, February 18 2008

Lupercalia and the Food of Love

Dance! Dance! In your little goat-pants!

It may come as a surprise to those who know me as the gruff-but-loveable nerd of wine, but I'm an incurable romantic. Not that I've ever searched for a cure, having found my true love early and stalked her with the cunning and guile of a panther. As a consequence of being filled with the joy of a long and happy marriage, I look forward to anniversaries, birthdays and romantic holidays. Lupercalia is just about one of my favorites.

If you're not familiar with it, it's the holiday appropriated to create Valentine's day. Ancient Romans used to celebrate the 13th-15th of February as a sort of fertility festival, referring to the mythic genesis of the twins Romulus and Remus, who were suckled by a wolf in a cave (Lupercalia = wolf's festival). Actually, it's all a bit messy: the Romans culturally appropriated it from a Greek rite of Lycaean Pan, and although it was technically about foster-wolf and her boys, they still dressed up like (and sacrificed) goats. Part of the fun was the young ladies lining up to get a lash from a thong wielded by goat-panted fellows. It was said that strokes from the thong would ensure fertility and ease pain in childbirth.

Now those folks knew how to have a civic holiday!

Charmed, I'm sure

Being an avowed dilettante at this cultural appropriation stuff I settled on a plan of presenting a token of my affection, the charm bracelet shown above, as opposed to the whole goat-pants-and-whipping routine. While I'd like to claim to be smart enough to have picked out The bracelet myself, romance doesn't come with an instruction manual, so I actually picked it out through the process of being lead to the Tiffany counter by the elbow and being shown the correct model. If I may ever be so bold as to offer relationship advice to women, it's this: men will never understand women. It's categorically impossible. Therefore, if you want to communicate something to a fellow, you must tell him directly. Use easy words and short sentences, don't assume he understood you because he nodded, and be prepared to provide a written summary with bullet points and highlights.

Ahem, my efforts at Dear Abby aside, one may ask what this has to do with wine. What would an evening or romance be without a wonderful dinner? Hungry and thirsty, that's for sure. We had a small but delicious prime rib, from AAA organic beef (I love cows so, so much) along with a mushroom port demi-glace, asparagus, Meyer Lemon gnocchi and a bottle of Nickel and Nickel Dragonfly Vineyards 1998 Cabernet Sauvignon.

A bottle of yummy

I picked up the '98 in a tour of Napa after the Copia 'Wine and the Mind' conference I was lucky enough to attend a few years ago. The winery is located in St. Helena, very close to a Much More Famous Winery, which I had just visited previous to dropping in on Nickel and Nickel. I hadn't been impressed with the extremely expensive wines I had just tasted, but was stunned by how fabulously good N&N was, well beyond any expectation I had for Napa reds, which I was finding bland, hot and alcoholic nearly everywhere I went.

I wound up getting into a discussion with a winemaking assistant there (amazing what access you get behind the scenes when you have a business card that says you work in the industry) about the differences between their vineyards and grapes and the contiguous soil and plantings of the MMF winery next door. We discussed the range of soils on the property, and exposures and all the different wines they made, and he noted that MMF winery next door made only one wine, one way. "I don't know how they do that," he said.

Well, however it happens, Dragonfly Vineyards is a stunner: strawberry, blackberry and a strong wallop of wild blueberry on the nose, super-refined tannins, a harmonious blend of sweet fruit and spice with lingering minerality flirted through a finish that lasted many minutes. With the prime rib and demi-glace it was one of those meals that made you put down your fork and go, 'Wow', over and over again. Now that's a wine.

Posted by Tim AT 6:40PM

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