Defenestrating Your Entire Life
TASTING NOTES:
Ventana Vineyard, Arroyo Seco - “This Grenache Noir is big and bold. Compote of plum, black cherry and black berries with spice and earth. This wine fills your mouth with juiciness and flavor that will stand up to bold food and friends. Stop, sit down, and have a glass!” (AbV 14.3%, pH 3.66, TA 5.70)
Ventana Vineyard, Arroyo Seco - “This Grenache Noir shows the subtlety that single varietal Grenache can only show. Black cherry and black berries with spice of clove and nutmeg with an elegant touch of sagebrush on the finish! Classic and complex with enough weight for lamb and steak but also fresh enough for seafood.” (AbV 14.4%, pH 3.66, TA 5.70)
VARIETALS: Grenache
BARRELS: 10% new French Oak and 15% New American Oak
PAIRS WITH: Classic and complex with enough weight for lamb and steak but also fresh enough for seafood.
THAT REMINDS ME OF: Ventana Vineyard, one of the sources for this Grenache, takes its name from the Spanish word for “window.”
Windows.
There’s a particular genre of terrible decision-making that only happens next to a window on a long flight. You’re three hours in. You’ve watched something forgettable. Your neck hurts. You glance out at the clouds and think: I could move to Portugal. Just like that. Full reset. New language, new apartment, tiles everywhere, a little café where they know your order. You’ve never been to Portugal. You don’t speak Portuguese. You own a sofa that would be genuinely difficult to get rid of. None of that matters. The window has opened a door.
This phenomenon has been documented — not scientifically, but extensively — in the journals of people who did not, ultimately, move to Portugal. Psychologists might call it “psychological distancing,” the way physical elevation and removal from your normal environment loosens the grip of the practical and lets the hypothetical breathe. Poets would probably call it something nicer. Whatever it is, windows are the original daydream delivery mechanism. The Romans called a window a fenestra, which is also where we get “defenestration” — the act of throwing something out of one. Which is maybe what your brain is doing with your current life every time you press your forehead against the cold glass at 37,000 feet.
