Thought in front of THE Alaskan wine

In front of us sits a silvery white wine, resting in a glass stenciled with the name of a winery visited years ago in opaque, romantic lettering. It smells like candy – a powerful taste of peach with a fruity, bitter aftertaste – a taste reminiscent of rolling the pit of some tree-grown fruit in our mouth after all the flesh is gone. It reminds us of our youth – picking a peach or apricot from a wild, hillside fruit tree and tasting the beauty of nature. It is a local wine.

Usually it is not unique to find a nice local wine – where we grew up in Oklahoma, the Viognier grape sprang up, lively and green, from the rocky, brown soil; when we lived in Alabama, the locals had nearly perfected turning the disease-resistant, plump Muscadine grape into a desert wine; and when we lived in Europe – well, anything would grow from Syrah to Merlot to Sangiovese to Cabernet to any type of Pinot we could name. However, this specific wine that we sip now, which we know only a few other people on earth have enjoyed, is unique because it is from Alaska. It was not just fermented or bottled in Alaska, it was grown in Alaska. And to us, that is what makes a wine local; the roots of the vine tasted the local water, the minerals from the local soil nourished the fledgling fruit, and the skin of the fruit basked in the local sunlight.

So how, then, do we judge a wine? This is always the question debated at the beginning of any prose on Dionysus’ libations. Is it through the color of the wine when observed with a soft background light at a forty-five degree tilt; or is it the stickiness of the liquid when we swirl it in the glass? Is it the scent that our nose gets when shoved into the glass; or is it the boldness, or the smoothness? Some experts say that the best wines are the ones that we, the taster, enjoy the most. In some ways, this simple statement is quite agreeable to us. We are always right. But let’s go one step further. Let’s say that a great wine is one that is so perfect, so powerful, so distinct that, like a great song or a exquisite dish of food, it reminds us of some far-off place or time. That the wine, due to its unique qualities that it gathered from the local elements, holds a memory in its tiny, transparent, fragile glass body.

Now that we all agree, let’s agree that this journal not follow a specific grape or hold one region superior to another. Rather, we will delve into the qualities that make a wine great for its region. And as we traverse the land, creeping from one region of the world to another, we will change how we describe the wine. We will taste the local sun, the local soil, the local water – and forever, we will be able to take a bottle of superior wine from that region, taste it, and recall the funny, exciting, and beautiful times we had there in those golden days of our past.

photo: Peach Apricot Wine from Bear Creek Winery, Homer Alaska