My wife Jennifer and I share a bottle of wine every night with our dinners. I often bring home my new acquisitions so that I can scrawl some tasting notes that I will later turn into the more polished reviews that appear on The Wine Library web site. And while Jen does not TASTE nearly as many wines as I do in the course of my work day, she absolutely DOES DRINK as many wines as I do. In most cases, she really enjoys the bottles I select (please ignore the relentless aesthetic browbeating behind the curtain… But, there are always a few instances that she doesn’t really dig what’s in her glass, and in many of these cases, I do recognize that this or that particular wine is indeed a very challenging or controversial bottling – a wine that will always produce wildly contrasting opinions, but these reactions are somewhat predictable in their unpredictability – these are not the instances to which I’m referring.

The concept that I’m citing is what I’ll call the “Is it good”? factor. Sometimes - maybe too many times - if ANALYZING wine is your business (and your passion), when digging for the subtleties and minutiae in a wine, one can sometimes miss what is SO OBVIOUS to a person that has no interest in wine criticism, and just likes, kinda likes, or absolutely doesn’t like this or that wine. Regular analysis can produce, over time, a certain oenological myopia – not seeing the vineyard for the vines if you will…

And this is precisely how Jen keeps me grounded. We still sometimes disagree about a given wine, but that is perfectly normal. No, what she is invaluable in doing is helping me to pull my nose out of the glass (and the experience that I’ve gained in having done this sort of thing for a while), step out from behind the “test bench”, and just put on a tee shirt or a pair of wedge-heeled strappy sandals – uh, well, you know what I mean – and just ask myself “Is it good”? Sometimes the answer is “no” but what is ALWAYS good is having a Jennifer to keep this “Is it good” factor in the front of one’s perhaps overly analytical mind. But clearly what’s FAR more important than having the critical grounding is just having a Jennifer to share the time (and the Bourgeuil and the pork chops with prunes too!) with. Jen is not for sale or rent in case you were going to inquire…

TOM CIOCCO