Love, Wine and the Stream of Time

A Valentine's Day Rumination

There has developed for me a real connection between wine and Valentine’s Day over the past few years that never existed before that.

My understanding of Valentine’s Day hadn’t changed much over the past 40 years or so. Like so many people, I feel both gratitude as well as an obligation when February 14th rolls around. I don’t get too upset about the feelings of obligation that result from a certain amount of cultural urging to celebrate. Sure, I get the idea of a Hallmark Holiday. But I shrug it off and generally wonder how I can fulfill my obligation to my loved ones in a way that communicates what needs to be communicated.

But Valentine’s Day has changed for me since Kathy and I were gifted Henry George, our 8-year-old boy who at times seems to stand on the precipice of 28. With a son, I feel an inescapable connection to the past and the future in a way I never did before his birth. His arrival in our lives was like diving into the stream of time that began eons ago and will continue to move forward forever. So, Valentine’s is for me now an inescapable celebration of a love that produced an eternal impact on the world and a love that connects us to humanity in a way that never occurred to me before. So, I happily celebrate this Hallmark Holiday.

Moreover, this feeling of being connected to the stream of time first became a force in my life when I came to understand the meaning and importance of wine. Wine is so much more than a beverage. It is more than an “other drug” as some like to say with a bit too much snickering glee. Wine is more than alcohol. Wine is the beverage that most fully connects the present to the past.

In the same way I now look at my son and understand his connection to the past and the peoples he came from, I look at a bottle of New World Pinot Noir and I see its lineage that travels back in time. When I crack a bottle of 40-year-old California Cabernet Sauvignon I not only observe past vintages flip by until I land on the 1983 Cabernet but then can follow that wine back to Europe in times past, whence it really originated.

In the same way that Henry’s arrival placed me in the stream of time and demanded me to consider his heritage, wine too asks me to consider its connections to the development and spread of Western Civilization. I see Henry’s Jewish and Anglo heritage and consider his connection to those people’s history and the movement of time. And I see the integration of wine into the symbols and ceremonies and institutions of the West.

I am lucky to work in an industry that can overwhelmingly be connected to joy and family and culture. And I am overjoyed, now with Henry in our lives, to finally be able to wade into the stream of time and legitimately be able to gaze both up and downstream.

There are moves afoot in our culture to both celebrate the childless life and point to the foulness of wine for its categorization as alcohol. I don’t subscribe to either. I understand child-rearing as the highest calling a person can embrace and I understand wine as a civilizational touchstone. I understand both to be integral to the meaning that infuses my life.

Valentine’s Day reminds me of this.