Are you wine connoisseurs, Squiders? My husband and I watched Bottle Shock this weekend, which is the story of how California wines rocked the world by beating out French wines in a blind taste test back in the 70s. (In as much as any Hollywood “based on a true story” is based in actual truth.)
Which got me to thinking, because nowadays the California wines are pretty full of themselves. When we lived in the San Francisco Bay area, it was lovely because we were halfway between two major wine regions: Napa/Sonoma to the north, and the Central Coast to the south. We drank a lot of very good wine. But then we moved home to Colorado, and you can’t get a lot of those wines here, and what you can tend to be their lower end, more generic stuff.
So we looked into Colorado wines.
Let me tell you what California wines think about Colorado wines. (I bet you can guess.)
But the thing is, Colorado wine isn’t worse than California wine, it’s just different. Sure, the big red grapes–zinfandel, cabernet (sauvignon — the franc’s pretty decent, actually), syrah, and pinot–don’t grow well here. I’ve yet to have a really good Colorado big red that didn’t import their grapes from California. But Colorado excels at gewurztraminer, reisling, fruit wines, mead and a ton of grape varieties I had hardly heard of out in California, like petit verdot, carmine, frontenac, mourvèdre, and lemberger.
(Mmmm…lemberger.)
I could go on all day about wine, but that doesn’t really have anything to do with the point of this blog, so I’ve created an analogy for you.
Good wine comes from all over–Chile, Peru, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, California and, yes, even Colorado. Picture each type of wine as a genre of book. You can try a multitude, get a full experience out of them, see the world, as it were.
But it’s okay to stick close to home, to become intimately familiar with what those that are local. And each of us has a genre that they return to, time and time again, that means something special and occupies a place in our hearts.
And, you know, sometimes what we need changes, and it’s okay to change that “home” as well.
