2023 - Nostalgia and the Future

A nostalgic moment forever gone. Downtown redevelopment has made this photograph no longer possible.

As each year comes to a close, I find myself swept away to a quiet place of introspection. Holidays are a joyous occasion, a tapestry of tradition and togetherness, but I have always found them to have a thread of melancholy woven into them. Nostalgia is a complex emotion. It transports us to an immutable and inaccessible past – a place we can never truly return to. These moments are slowly erased by fading memories, slipping through the fingers of time like grains of sand.

Holidays are a time when we hear the distant echoes of shared laughter from loved ones no longer with us, serving as a reminder of the transience and fragility of life. Holidays are a paradox of emotion, both a comforting escape to beautiful moments and a yearning for what once was – places we’ve left behind, friendships that have faded, and moments forever gone.

I’m learning to find the unique beauty that lies in the balance of embracing the past while savoring the present and planning to make the future shine brighter. It’s important to acknowledge that the holidays, with their unique blend of joy and nostalgia, offer us a chance to honor the traditions that ground us and create new memories that we will once again look back upon with a yearning sense of nostalgia.

A Lesson of Death and Beauty

I have a love/hate relationship with vintage wine, but the very traits I have come to hate are also the source of my passion. These opposite yet interconnected forces, this frustrating duality, came into focus when a Sommelier recently opened one of my bottles of 1981 vintage Chateau Leoville Las Cases Bordeaux.

This bottle had come to the end of a long journey. Forty-two years ago, the vineyard's grapes were carefully tended to over an entire growing season, hand-picked, sorted, and processed. Some of the hands that picked the grapes likely belong to people who have since passed. These grapes were survivors of the deluge of rain that consumed the first half of October that year. The bottle was cellared for decades in a temperature-controlled environment by multiple owners. There were thousands of opportunities for a mishap, but there it was forty-two years later, sitting on the bar of my favorite local restaurant. Cutting the foil wrapper revealed a white powdery substance overtaking the liquid-soaked cork, an ominous foreshadowing of what would come. The wine exhibited an initial hint of mustiness with a short, funk-laced whisper of cassis. It was the taste of oenological expiration. At an unknown time within the last four decades, the wine had died.

My reaction was not disappointment or irritation but a general sense of loss. This wine was painstakingly crafted by a team of passionate people for the purpose of bringing joy, and it never had the chance to realize this goal. Instead, it served as an austere reminder of time's relentless flow, a poignant lesson not to squander our singular opportunity to bring a measure of joy to those around us, and a warning of the precious immediacy to life. Time is slowly consuming us all, and like this bottle of wine, we have but one chance to leave our mark.

Perhaps this is the very source of my passion for wine. Even many of our happiest moments are laced with a sense of melancholy because we know it can't last forever. The emotional power is drawn from this very duality because it's the contrast of one that provides vibrance for the other – light and shadow, life and death.