In the fall when I was feeling sad about the days getting shorter (circa this blog post) I planted bulbs around the tree in front of my house, as an act of hope. It’s still very chilly here in Chicago, and I was pretty surprised to see some bright green leaves peaking out of the ground the other day.
I hadn’t fully forgotten about them, but it was not on my mind, and I definitely didn’t recall the way I lined the front walk with them, a happy little trip. I don’t have much experience gardening, so I wonder if I keep it up, if I will internalize the calendar a bit more, and maybe many Marches from now, I won’t be cheered by the shoots. But really I think no matter how prepared you are, the spring is always a revelation.
Bulbs are good for people starting out with growing plants, because they’re not too expensive, and they almost always yield results. As I’m learning about gardening I’ve heard about this concept called overwintering. Overwintering is a process where some life forms wait out the winter season, when conditions make normal activity or even survival difficult. Hibernation and migration are the two major ways of overwintering. Overwintering in the world of farming and gardening refers to planting some crops in the fall to achieve a spring harvest. I first heard about it with regards to planting garlic in the fall and letting it lay in the ground over the winter, you can also do this with things like radishes, (radishes in a green house) arguably it deepens the flavor.
Bulbs are not just sleeping beneath the surface, however, there’s a little bit going on with them during this time. In this dormant period the bulbs do not grow in size or produce leaves above the ground, but they still quietly work away at an ever larger and deeper root system, and offshoots are expanding. Root and offshoot formation is an essential part of the life cycle.
Last week I had a wine that we overwintered, so to speak, at Rainbow. We keep some wines to age a little before releasing them when we think they will be different to drink later. Deciding with Em what wines to lay for rest is one of my favorite parts of working together. We almost always say ‘yes’ if either of us has a sense the wine will shift. Having the ability as a retailer to satisfy the question, “how will this be” doesn’t come easy from a commerce perspective, but is greatly gratifying.
Traveling long distances can rattle the wine, prolonged vibration will shake up those compounds, and so sometimes it just needs to recover. If the finish of the wine feels uncomfortably full, if there’s a strong bacterial aftertaste, if the energy just doesn’t feel quite right we will want to wait.
In wine science one aspect of maturation in bottle is attributed to oxygen, basically the idea that a tiny controlled amount of air is getting into the juice through the pores of the natural cork closure. Oxygen acts on the wine in a complex way, depending on various factors like the phenolic structure of the wine, the result is that air smooths and softens that structure, so it’s good for wines high in tannins. (Phenols are chemical compounds that come from the skins, pulp and pits or the grapes. Tannins are one kind of Phenol, they give grip and gum-drying bitterness to the wine). Besides oxygenation, there’s still a lot going on with the wine otherwise, and there isn’t enough research into oxygen and bottle age to speak definitively.
What we do know is that the reactions taking place are mainly chemical reactions between the alcohol, acids and water inside. Over 500 different compounds have been identified in the aroma of a mature wine. These include alcohols, volatile acids, esters, aldehydes, ketones and more.
There are slow chemical reactions going on between these constituents the whole time in bottle. The reactions result in a greater variety of chemical compounds and thus a more complex
You can also age wine! All you need is a cool place, the cooler the better down to about 50 degrees, where the temperature doesn’t fluctuate violently, and where it’s dark. This isn’t that easy in a Chicago apartment, but if you have a cupboard or closet area and don’t let your place get too cold in the winter or too hot in the summer, it works. Especially if you age *over the winter* - the summer heat here is the biggest threat to wine.
When we received Michel Guignier’s Bonne Pioche 2019 in the fall it felt very full, like you were imposing on it a bit by drinking it, like getting into a tub and your body displaces the volume and the water overflows, it was over the brim. Sometimes this is a nice tension but in this case we have another wine already from Guignier which felt more ready to drink, from the 2015 vintage, Moncailleux. Bonne Pioche is fluffy and purple and salty, not as deeply fruity and sanguine as the more elaborate Moncailleux. 2019 was a difficult vintage in Beaujolais, very hot, resulting in uncharastically juicy and bold wine at the cost of delicateness and brightness. Drinking it now it has found a lighter footing, it is gently juicy.
In the case of Bonne Pioche I probably wouldn’t have opened it for another few months, I like to go for about 6 months, but my husband suggested we bring a bottle with us on vacation that we had bought from Diversey Wine, we were going to be eating a lot of fish, and Guignier wines can be the best red wine for fish in my opinion, especially oysters. When it arrived in the shop in late November, we did not try this wine. We looked at the alcohol percentage, we tried a different wine from the same vintage (which we are still cellaring, I suspect but don’t know fully that it is not ready yet in that the water still spills from the tub) and felt to let them rest.
Seeing wine change just like seeing the seasons change makes me believe in the ability of me to grow and change too, which is a comfort to me, that there are options ahead.
I read a book that I finished while drinking Bonne Pioche, it’s by Henry Green and called Party Going, it’s British and published in 1938. Green does this funny thing where he parks little clauses about the human potential for change. For instance, he will input between lines of dialogue, “…and here she began to speak like the older woman she was to become.”
The short novel centers on a group of youngish friends trying to get out of the fog of London to the south of France for a getaway, an escape to the Continent. There’s a character called Max, a charismatic man the kind all the men want to be and all the women want to be with type thing. What an old problematic idea that saying is, yikes, but that’s the feeling, which is not as much of the times, maybe, because the whole thing feels very contemporary, as much about class and power. Max is the host of the group. In one part of the story another man named Robert pays the bill for a hotel doctor visit. Max has just found out from one of the friends in the group, Amabel. He says,
“Can’t have that, you know.”
“Oh Max, you are so sweet!” she said, “but really, after all, it is his own aunt and she was not in our party; really she’s got nothing to do with you.”
“Can’t have it,” he said this cheerfully, as people do when they are living up to their own characters.”
I thought about the wine as Max stepping into itself, or maybe more like me knowing what its character was about. This is a good book to read while drinking wine because it’s mostly dialogue, it’s engaging but light, it doesn’t benefit from a pen in one hand and cup of coffee in the other. You can read it in an afternoon or a rainy early April evening.
☔️
We are open this weekend and Bonne Pioche as well as Moncailleux are available in the shop! Many other nice things to drink too. As always feel free to email us at rainbowwinechi@gmail.com with any questions.
Sources for this post:
Understanding Wine Technology by David Bird
The Garden Primer by Barbara Damrosch
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