Welcome to my kitchen, my cellar, and my adventures in wine, food, and flavor. This blog is the synthesis of my greatest passions: wine, words, and exploration.
A very brilliant writer once told me, “Write what you know.” I know wine and I know food. Most importantly, I think, I know what it means to seek. I was trained as both a writer and a wine professional by some top dogs, and became a sommelier through the Master Court at The Culinary Institute of America in the lovely Napa Valley. My approach to wine, however, is often nontraditional. Like life, wine and food are about open-mindedness, experience, nourishment, and spice. I embrace a perspective that honors wine and food as an art, as a lifestyle, and as a cultural and spiritual medium through which we can explore what it means to be human and alive.
In Vitis Veritas is a small twist on the familiar Latin phrase in vino veritas, attributed to Pliny the Elder back in the 1st Century, meaning, “in wine is truth.” The accepted interpretation of the saying suggests that one tends to reveal their true feelings and secrets after a few too many swigs of the bottle. Well, I’m not going to contest that here (yet), but methinks Pliny may have had a deeper design in mind. Perhaps Pliny saw wine as the miraculous, naturally-occurring phenomenon that it is—a living, breathing, metamorphic substance that touches us on a very primal level as a reminder of a few of life’s simple truths: the best things come from the earth, there’s something out there for everyone, and love what you have while you have it, because we know all too well that everything, even the greatest wine, has a shelf-life. In vitis veritas.
Tonight, I’ll be toasting this new venture of ours with an old and very dear friend (and my last bottle of this favorite vintage of mine, I might add), the Stags’ Leap Winery 2002 Petite Syrah. This molten, inky jewel from my home turf of Napa, California, was the wine that stole my heart when I first started getting really serious about big reds, and like any first love, my affection for her lingers no matter where I may roam. She is a woman in a sapphire velvet dress, leaning lightly against a piano in a dark lounge, a hand-rolled cigarette dangling suggestively from one hand, a glass of blackberry brandy held to her lips by the other. She’s soft to the touch but don’t be fooled—she’s got a backbone of steel. Let me tell you, there is no one more enjoyable to party with.
Now, please, pour the wine already!
Cheers.
Allison
