Sinning With Wine

Well, it feels like sinning, anyway...

So you're at this restaurant, see. With people who know you and think they know what kinds of things you can get up to.

It's the sort of affair that someone like John Brennan might attend: there's career local Navy guys in their fairly dry-cleaned and pressed whites...

It isn't like the old days when Commander Bond was an authentic reflection of many people in the Admiralty (of Great Britain).

Royal Tokaji wine.
Last you easily two hundred years.

Today, Barbara Broccoli hasn't got it quite right - she says there is a credibility problem with 'old Bond' in the modern-day context. But there is no credibility problem with Bond; there is a credibility problem with the Empire.

'Here, John Brennan, you like to do transgressive things -. Here's something right down your alley."

Brennan: 'Who TF are you, pip-squeak.'

'Never mind that -, have this, casually vandalize this in three minutes.'

Hand him the small glass filled with its amber-golden thick liquid that definitely has a sulfurous scent.

Actually, preferably it isn't a glass, but a large glass spoon. That's the traditional way of having this thing.

You continue: 'It has taken fifteen years to have this ready for bottling, and this particular one has been in its bottle for a further fifty years. It takes a long long time to ferment and it hardly reaches 2.9% alcohol by volume even at the end.

'You can wreck this now in just two or three minutes.'

When you think about just how long it takes to turn out a very good Hungarian Tokaji (or Tokay), and you think how blithely one downs the thing until there is not even a single beading drop left inside a decent bottle, it certainly feels like sin doing it. I feel guilty about consuming, making something disappear, that took so long to make.

Very old fashioned style.

But there is a great secret here - Dionysus the god, himself caused humans to forget themselves and what they were doing in the moment; Jesus did the same thing when He 'gave out the wine.'

What goes cannot come back...

...they say.

But what would they know, John Brennan?

What would they really know?

Still, it still feels like an act of sinning to me.

Think of the years it took.

You can keep a bottle of Tokay for two hundred years (and people have done) and it is as perfect after that, or even better than, the day it was originally bottled.

Here we are, we humans, taking things that took so long to build, and consuming them in a moment.

Very old fashioned style.

This strange person told me, one time: 'Every mouthful that you take, think about what went into its making, and hope and pray that all of what it took becomes a part of you going forward.'

There's that phrase again. It's a 'Company-speak' phrase btw. Same as 'non trivial.'

Well, let me tell you - drinking the greatest wines in the world of all time is a non-trivial thing.

How do we go forward from here?

They say you cannot take things out with you when you go from here. That's not true. Because in any case, how would 'they' even know?

You need to find out what someone who has gone and come back says about it.

Going forward from here, take things from the past with you.

Nothing good ever just disappears forever. 

Find out what 'all of you' is, what it means - and then take all of you into the future.