The boss wasn't able to find a wine rep to come in and help us out with the Tuesday night wine tasting. He picked from wines already on our list, a 2010 Crozes Hermitage blanc, and a 2011 ChateauneufduPape.  A big and voluptuous white, with cooked apple, stone fruit, good with Provencal fish stew or chicken with garlic.  A red from wine maker of Bastide St. Dominique, Eric Bonnet, in conjunction with wife Julia Moro.  Peppery, fruity.

I think of Emily's "Success is counted sweetest, by those who ne'er succeed.  To comprehend a nectar, requires sorest need."  A white Rhone wine being about as close to nectar as you can get.

Reflecting over old Tour de France vintage, one senses the fleetingness of victory.  The great gentleman Fausto Coppi, the Heron, sank into depression after the years of his victories.  And just about all of those in Pantani/Ulrich/Armstrong/Festina Affair era have all gone up in smoke, vanishing, unreal.  The raised arms of the doping playing field's victor leave us embarrassed, raises the question, why single out that "I Win" moment, when the picture is large, and must include the later depression of Coppi, the picked on outsider that Lance was as a school kid.  The picture of victory might also include the duel, the eternal runner up, or the gentlemanly quality of Coppi as a competitor, kind to all cyclists great and small.

And this applies to wine, too.  It's not a battle of a single day, but of a full season of days in the life of the grape and the vine, the slow ripening, the rise of tannins.  The grapes ripen, and then the hands of the vigneron must take over, gently.

Crozes Hermitage surrounds the hill of Hermitage.  One of the great legends of the Arthurian is that of Lancelot, the finest most gentlemanly knight of all of them.  Lancelot's only problem, falling for the boss's wife.  Eventually this love drives him mad.  He jumps out a window in the middle of the night and runs off into the wilds, losing his mind, losing even his knowledge of who he is.  Deep in the woods the animal part of him subsists on eating bugs and nuts, a root here and there, but, he's totally lost it.  (Not even any papparazi to track him.)  A hermit discovers him lying deeply depressed and starved in a bramble patch, takes him back to the hermitage and nurses him slowly back to health.  Yes, even for the great Lancelot, to apply the notion of victory would seem childish.  What is victory?  Would he ever achieve it with Guinevere in the realm of King Arthur of the Knights of the Round Table?  Or wouldn't it rather come in the quiet satisfaction and sacrifice, in the comprehending the nectar through sorest need.  Lancelot and his life, that was something for the people who transcribe and perpetuate legends to bottle up, having made the story a good enough wine so that all its facets could be clear enough for the sensitive reader who, along with the wine, would himself grow and mature so that the story always stayed with him, its nuances shifting, becoming more golden.

One hopes the gentlemanly quality of Lancelot goes along, remembered with his great feats of battle.  One hopes his adventures, completely unarmed, disguised as a normal peasant just checking in on life, an agreeable chap sharing the touch of great honesty, chivalry and general good with locals living day in, day out, are remembered as well.

The lessons, of course, of the Hermitage are of a deeper tradition than normal pleasantries, inclusive of the mysteries of being lost in order that one might finally be found and saved.  They are of the kinds of things that Emily Dickinson herself is able to refer to, a real reconstruction of the concepts of normal reality.  To many, who go about their lives, perhaps such things remain deeper mysteries left to the hermit and the poet to ponder, questions about the notion of a distinct self, etc.  Somehow, Lancelot seems cut out for them.