Vanilla Ice Cream, Balsamic, and a Glass of White

A few months ago I carried two things home to Bombay from a trip to Italy. A couple of bottles of white wine, and a bottle of proper aged balsamic from Modena, the traditional kind that moves like syrup and tastes almost like chocolate.

One evening at home I put a bowl of good vanilla ice cream in front of me, poured some of that balsamic over the top, and had a bite with a sip of the white on the side. Sweet, then sharp, then cold, then a faint bitter-almond thing on the very end.

I do not know why it worked. On paper it should not work. But I have thought about that spoonful more than I have thought about most bottles I have paid real money for, and I would like to do it again before I die, ideally more than once.

The white was a Vernaccia di San Gimignano. We had bought it at a farm called Poggio Alloro, a family place outside San Gimignano that has been run by the same family for four generations. Swati and I first went there more than a decade ago, and this year we drove back to see if it was as good as I remembered. It was. I liked the wine enough to carry a couple of bottles across two flights, which is not a thing I usually do.

I only started trying to work out why any of this mattered because I sat down to write it down. And to do that, I ended up reading back thirteen years of notes I have kept on wine. A hundred and eleven bottles, rated and dated, with little comments I typed to myself and forgot five minutes later. I even had an AI help me sort through them, on the theory that it would hand me back a neat profile of my palate.

It did. But what I could not stop looking at was not my palate. It was how many people were in there.

I hated my first drink

I did not have a drink until I was twenty-four.

I was a teetotaler straight through engineering in Bombay. The way I finally got a drink into me is a small story, except that it keeps happening, so maybe it is the whole story.

I was about to move to Oregon for business school. Before I landed, I did the anxious thing and started messaging my future classmates on Facebook. One of them, Sumit, lived in Delhi, and found out I would be passing through the city for one night on my way out. He offered to pick me and my friend Nikhil up from the airport. It was past midnight. I had never met him. Who does that?

He showed up in a purple Maruti Zen, drove us to a TGI Fridays that looked shut, and cracked open a six-pack. I told him I did not drink. He said come on, just try it. So I tried it, and I hated it. I remember thinking, genuinely, that I could not understand why anyone did this on purpose. That was my first taste of alcohol. Sumit has been my best friend for going on fifteen years.

A few weeks later Nikhil and I were on a trip through Ladakh, the two of us in shorts in the mountains because we were idiots from Bombay who had never been anywhere cold. On one leg we got put in a shared jeep with a couple and one other girl. I had bad altitude sickness and was in no mood to talk, and the girl asked Nikhil what exactly was wrong with his friend. He explained. She handed me a rum and Coke to help with the cold. I did not know it had rum in it. I said something about the Coke tasting really sweet. She said that is because there is rum in it. That was the first hard liquor I ever drank. The girl was Swati. I married her.

So that is three drinks, and none of them are really about a drink. A stranger who became my best friend. A first beer I did not want. A rum and Coke from the woman I would spend my life with. The alcohol was almost incidental. What I actually remember, in each one, is who handed me the glass.

Where it actually started

The wine came later, and it came the way most good things came to me, which is to say by accident and by being somewhere.

Oregon turned out to be a place where everyone was quietly serious about something you drank. Coffee, or craft beer, or wine. A senior named Josh picked me up from the Portland airport when I first landed, took me to a dark neighborhood bar in Salem, and started me on stouts and porters, which in a cold Oregon October taste more like chocolate than beer. That was the first alcohol I actually liked.

But wine did not really land until the year I spent in Bordeaux on an exchange. They served wine at lunch in the school cafeteria, which as an idea still delights me. There were tastings. I went out to Saint-Emilion and drank things I did not know enough to know I should be grateful for. I was buying bottles at the local supermarket for five or six euros that turned out, when I got back to the States, to be hundred-dollar wines. That was the year it clicked. Bordeaux is where I fell in love with wine.

Which is why it is a little funny that almost none of those Bordeaux wines are in my thirteen-year record. I did not know the app existed yet. The wines that actually converted me, the whole year of them, are the one stretch I never wrote down. The best year has no record. I only started logging once I got back to Oregon, so the diary opens in the middle of the story, in Willamette Valley Pinot country, and quietly pretends that is the beginning.

What thirteen years of notes actually say

I had expected the notes to be a record of my palate. They are a record of my life.

They are full of other things. "With Swati." A bottle logged on Valentine's Day. A crisp white I loved, with a line underneath it admitting that I was drinking it by the bay in Cassis and the bay probably did half the work. Restaurants I have not thought about in years. A wine tasting a bunch of my friends threw for one of my birthdays, a rented bus and a designated driver and a loop through Oregon vineyards.

The ratings tell on me too. My highest scores almost never went to the most expensive or the most correct wine. They went to whatever surprised me. "First cognac I have ever liked." "My first Sonoma Pinot, and I regret not trying one sooner." "Amazing rose, and surprisingly it is a Cabernet Franc." The wine that beat what I had walked in expecting, that is the one that got the 10.

And I am, for the record, not a connoisseur. I have never pretended to be. My notes include the phrase "wayyy too sweet" with three y's and a sad face. I once described a Prosecco as perfect for when you have the taste for champagne and the budget for sparkling water. I pair wine with whatever I am actually eating, which is usually Indian food. Not to make a point about what is supposed to go with what. I just want to know whether this bottle works with this dinner, so I try it, and I write down what happened. There is no formula. Most of the time it does not quite work. I write that down too.

The strangest thing the notes showed me is that I have gotten happier about wine over the years, not more critical. I would have guessed the opposite. I would have guessed that learning more would make me harder to please. It did the reverse. The more places I drank in, Bordeaux and Oregon and California and Italy and France and Georgia, the more there was to like. I never once caught myself turning into a snob about it. It just kept getting better.

Wine is a thing I have with people

Reading it all back, the obvious thing about me, the thing I somehow needed a spreadsheet to notice, is that wine is not something I do alone. It is something I have with people.

Left to myself I will have a glass and stop. I am a lightweight, so a whole bottle on my own would mostly go to waste, but that is the boring half of it. The real half is that opening a bottle alone would miss the entire point. A bottle is a table with people around it. It is the pour, and the second pour, and someone reaching over to top you up. That is the part I actually like. The wine is almost the excuse.

I own a few bottles. Not many, because a small wine fridge is all the room I have. And what I have noticed is that I keep them for when there is someone to open them with. I am not saving them for a special enough occasion or a good enough year. I am saving them for company.

What I am actually saving them for

I would love a real cellar someday. Room for a few hundred bottles, so I could finally buy more than one of the wines I love instead of drinking the only bottle and mourning it.

For most of my life I could not picture a cellar because I could not picture affording to fill one. That part is not quite true anymore. For the first time, I think I could. And now the thing in the way is not money, it is a Bombay apartment, where there is nowhere to put a few hundred bottles even if I bought them. The wall moved. It used to be money. Now it is space. We will see if it ever comes down.

In the meantime I have thirteen years of notes that turned out to be about people, a few bottles in a small fridge waiting for the right table, and one bowl of ice cream and balsamic and cold white wine I put together at home in Bombay from things I carried out of Italy, which I still cannot stop thinking about.

The wine, it turns out, was never really the point. The point was who I got to have it with. That is the one tasting note I would stand behind for all hundred and eleven of them.

What is even the point of experiencing something good if you cannot share it with people?

I still want to do the ice cream thing again. But not by myself. Never that one by myself.