Part One: A Sort of Apprehension

May, 2008
The Awaiting Table Newsletter

When it rains this hard the snails in the garden begin to climb. The lizards do too, seeking out suitable places to flatten themselves tightly against the stucco, their embryonic alligator eyes appearing to actually sink right into the stone. The Calla lilies begin to jiggle just like popcorn popping, so much so that I can actually hear the individual raindrops pelting the petals, the exact sound of bare feet running on a marble floor.

I'm drinking the most expensive bottle of wine I own, a bottle of Burgundy that I brought back from France last year in my luggage, the value of the wine perhaps tripling upon entering Italy, a nation not fond of importing wine produced elsewhere. In the hundreds of bottles of wine I have in my personal collection, this would have been the first bottle I would have grabbed in case of a fire. Only now it's open and half of it is in my glass and the rain doesn't show any signs of letting up.

In 4 hours I begin my two-to-three year training as an Italian Sommelier, a diploma that I never thought much about before I saw the need to help conserve the indigenous wines of Southern Italy. I opened this bottle to reflect upon my own relationship with wine, one that I suspect will be altered irreversibly by the training. It's been weighing on me lately that studying wine at this level might rob me of some of the pleasure, the way that dentists see teeth instead of smiles.

I wouldn't be so concerned if drinking wine weren't one of my greatest pleasures in life. Because it is. I can easily think back on the major events of the last twenty years and remember each wine I had. Visits. Break ups. The death of my beloved grandmother. Graduations. First dates. The opening of the school. This bottle here, and what it means. I've coupled the events of my life with specific bottles, flavours and labels as distinct in my mind as the faces of my family, the smells of my own kitchen, the comfort of my own bed.
I sip more of the wine and think that in three hours and thirty-five minutes, that question of whether I'll see smiles or teeth at the end of these courses will begin to have an answer.

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