What is the best wine?
Sometimes I am asked what is the best bottle of wine I have ever tasted. Certain wines function almost as art or architecture – you cannot help but be enraptured by their sheer aesthetic beauty. I can think of Cheval Blanc ’82 and Margaux ’55, both of which I managed to sneak a dribble of when I was a sommelier in a former life. I can still recall their perfumes and flavours to this day. I don’t feel, however, that I own these wines – they are magnificently monumental, rather than personal. Perhaps the best wine was not objectively the “best” wine, but the product of circumstance, that fortuitous combination of place and time when I was most attuned to new experiences in my life. I don’t even remember what the wine was; I merely recall the fact of it. One might call this the terroir of taste; it is where you come from that makes the wine experience what it is.
The setting is Scarista on the west coast of the island of Harris in the Outer Hebrides. Few people are immune to its magic. I was truly bitten by the bug thirteen years ago (and it wasn’t a midge). The first time I stood on the beach and heard the susurrus of the surf (it can be thunder) I was entranced; this was a timeless place with the ocean rhythmically unrolling itself. You can’t help but tune into these rhythms and feel as insignificant as a grain of sand and yet spiritually uplifted by the beauty around you. It is not something you get blasé about.
...I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And in the blue sky, and in the mind of man
Beauty can make our senses tremble and elevate our spirits and the imagination shapes the sensations into a kind of poetry. For me it creates a glorious context, for a profound, selfless instant I can feel that I am part of a larger plan.
To stand on the edge of a cliff one truly rejoices in insignificance and the transcendence of the moment. For as the ocean moulds the sand and the rock and the wind swirls patterns on the beach and Time, the greatest artificer of all, sculpts and etches the land, you crouch at the rim and bathe in the beauty of the moment, a cosmic creative pleasure, which is like a flower opening its petals and revealing its innermost secrets and “tranquil, muse upon tranquillity”. All the senses are vitally engaged and the blood surges and the heart fills, and the ego is temporarily sloughed off like a skin. And the canopy of summer twilight, the softened forms of the hills and the murmur of the sea invites your spirit into a sweet uninvaded sleep. A thought, an image. At midnight the sun renders the western seas crimson, transfusing its hot blood into cool pelagic depths, the sea and crystal sky co-mingle and yet the vap’rous trail of light never dissipates; it is the simmer din, the day that never dies. It is as if the world is on the edge of dreams and you feel for a fugitive instant a sense of history and the rhythm of the land (as they say in the islands - the blood is strong) and nothing matters because you are part of this rhythm, this dream.
Je me suis baigne dans le Poeme
De la Mer, infuse d’astres, et lactescent,
Devorant les azurs verts.
Rimbaud - Le Bateau Iver
As well as food for the soul there was plenty of food for the body. One superb day we went swimming (paddling) off one of the myriad white shell beaches that circumscribe the Atlantic coast of the island. I call this place “the beach” because it is remote and accessible only via a harum-scarum scramble along a cliff path. The sand is white as snow and about as warm although in the summer it can reach oven-ready temperatures. The water is crystal clear and once you’ve done the baptismal immersion and suffered the thousand shocks that flesh is heir to, erm, quite bracing. And to be completely submerged in that moment, in that ambient, amniotic world of pure water, hot sun, shimmering sand, surrounded, cocooned by cliffs and mountains, to feel joyously childish and utterly insignificant and to let the ego wash away, is to attain dizzying fulfilment. Yes, life is a beach and then you lie on it, first blistering, then peeling, finally bronzing, and generally atomising into your surroundings.
Overdosed on epiphany we returned regretfully to where we parked the car overlooking another beach just as a scallop boat chugged into the jetty bearing bivalve nirvana. Harris scallops are legendary, and are usually exported to the finest tables in Paris, London, Madrid and Barcelona. They contain big noisettes of sweet white flesh, just sear ‘em and whip up a quick sauce with white wine, lemon juice, chervil, butter and shellfish stock. Some wild leaves plundered from the garden, a few new potatoes, sluice down with a premier cru white burgundy and the feast is complete. We bought forty (!) and dumped the clacking sack in the car (we could hear them chattering to each other for the next hour) and wolfed (ganneted?) them day after day after day.
We dined late that first night, enraptured by the peach-fire-and-cinnamon-sorbet sunset then took a bottle of wine onto the beach to breathe the last breath of day. It was quite chilly so we buried our feet in the sand. Oystercatchers like fussy clockwork Napoleons surveyed these human interlopers with beady alarm. The first glass of wine was poured. It was a rosé. The noise from the ocean was soporific, an easeful whisper, the perfume of the machair made one snuggle into the dunes. A second glass slips down. Even after the sun has dipped over the horizon it remains bluish twilight until about midnight, then the sky begins to lighten in the north at about half past two. The bottle is emptied. Peace dropping slow. All is soft, the smudge of the mountains in the north, the sand between our toes, the caress of the sea on the beach. Wine can be most wonderful when you least notice it.
