The Most Delicious Wine Ever

The most delicious wine I ever drank was terrible.

It was made with grapes that were left over after a winery had picked all the best grapes from their vineyard. It had about seven varieties of grapes in it, white and red, all picked on the same day, some unripe, some over-ripe. It was made in a couple of plastic bins, and spent no time in barrel. 

I have to confess that I made it. In my bathroom. It was so tart that I crushed up berry-flavored antacid tablets and added them to the wine to reduce the acidity. 

When I drank this glass of wine there was a dead insect floating in it.

But here's the most important part:

Wendy and I shared this glass during our wedding ceremony. We picked the grapes together as one of our first "dates." The wine was almost as old as our relationship at that time. We wrote a special part of our vows to include it. 

Did I care that a fruit fly was doing the backstroke in that glass when it came time for us to take a ceremonial gulp during our vows? I did not.

It was the most delicious glass of wine I’ve ever tasted.

(Wendy cared a bit more about that bug than I did, but I think she’d tell you that it was still a meaningful moment.)

It showed me that wine is not about scores and data and information and grape names and region names.

I began to see that wine is about sharing beautiful times with great company. Wine is about connection.

That’s when the idea of Centralas was born. We wanted to use wine to build connections. As Centralas grew, so did our understanding of those connections.

Wine is a product of connections (as we all are).

A fruiting plant is an intimate connection between heaven and earth. Plants use cosmic light energy to transform the air and the rain that falls from the sky into carbohydrates. It uses these sugary packets of cosmic energy to feed the trillions of microbes that make up the networked socio-biome, the most biodiverse ecosystem on our planet: soil.

Isn’t it interesting that we refer to our home as Soil, aka Earth? (And don’t get me started on the Hebrew meaning of the name אדם - “Adam.”)

We began to realize that we had the ability – and the respons-ability – to either break or build these connections.

We may ignore these connections. We may discount their importance. But these connections remain between us even when we disagree about politics, religion, wine styles or everything.

We still need our connections to each other and to the soil through plants to survive. These connections are something to cherish.

So that’s why we do what we do with Centralas. To support, build, and enhance connections in the soil and among those of us who grow from it.

(If you want to learn more about how we do that, or discover what it tastes like, check out CentralasWine.com and the Organic Wine Podcast).

Because we want to help you have the most delicious wine of your life... with or without bugs. 

Cheers!
Adam