Pinot Noir

Wine. This is something I am drinking in . Slowly I take the glass from the cupboard and see it is no longer clean. There is that stain of unwashed red wine from the previous use. Even though I know it will be of no consequence to my health I still decide to wash it. I put some washing up liquid into the sponge and some hot water and clean the glass inside and out and rinse the suds off with cold water. I swish the glass around slightly in the warm air hoping that this will dry off the water, I don’t want to use the towel because towels just smudge and at worst actually put those tiny hairs all over the crystal surface. The swish is barely effective but it is the soul I am satisfying with this gesture and nothing else and bone dry is not important. Action and doing something which shows to myself that I care about this whole thing is what matters. All the while the bottle is sitting. Or is it waiting in anticipation? Is it waiting for me as I am anticipating it? I picture some shady vineyard in Chilli. This is the vineyard which Neruda lived nearby. On the coast where the juice of the ocean came into his soul constantly, moist and wide, the dripping sky. The multicoloured huge ocean of warmth and indivisible depth . This is wine from his region and surely it is infused with some of the passion, that spirit of place which nurtured and fertilised the womb of his heart. Woodland floor. Truffles and wood land floor the label said. In the shop I laughed , how can anything taste of wood land floor, in fact who has ever eaten wood land floor to know it’s flavour. Yet this description in itself leaves me intrigued. It is certainly not a standard issue wine comment, and the bottles has been selected by my highly intuitive partner ( although I suspect her choice is largely influenced by the price and the fact that the shelf is labelled ‘really good reds’!). Wood land floor. Now I guess this is a type of universe. If I were a creature inhabiting this wood land floor, it would be all I knew. The bark chippings and moisture, the darkness and dry pine cones would be my Manhattan sky line. The towering, in fact unbelievable, trees would be a feature which could not easily translate into our human proportions. It would be as if there was a mountain which could be climbed which would take us the Mars, the pinnacle of which we could step off of and find ourselves in space gazing down onto the insignificant planet below. Blue dot with beautiful swirls of cotton wool. The dry ants, the wood lice and beetles living in the wood land floor would perceive a cosmos which we simply crumble and crunch beneath our feet. If we are the type who live in a city, we may be very unfamiliar with this terrain what so ever. Despite the fact that huge swathes of out planet are covered with woods we may have very little experience of them. Used to concrete and constant machine noise, the ambience of woods could be a mystery to us entirely. Truffles too. Talked about but rarely experienced. A kind of food equivalent to diamond. Something to do with pigs. But presumably clean pigs whose back sides are not covered in their own shit! How could something so valuable be hunted out by shit smeared pigs! Dry, brown, huge space of crumbling moist bark chippings. From wine. From a grape, the pinot noir. A grape I have, in a brief space of time become quite intrigued and enamoured by. The reasons for which I remain un aware. Certainly the sound of those words creates a mystery. Noir, black, dark. Powerful and smooth. A hint that this is a grape not to be toyed with. Also that this grape is the most difficult to produce wine from. Therefore, skill patience and perhaps most importantly of all soul, are required. It is here I find a beginning of the answerer to my question. Why wine. Soul.