Why we like some things

We sauntered into our favorite WineShop the other day to see what was going on at the tasting Saturday (today) and just to chat a bit.  The store has the friendly ambiance of a country general store where everyone seems to know everyone else and all are free and easy with the conversations.  Good stores are like that. Very good stores are like this one.

Seems there is a pretty darn good Chardonnay on the horizon for this afternoon and we were talking about it, or we were listening to one of the staff tell us that she was putting out something exception for us to sample.  That was enough for us.

When a few people gather for a friendly interchange others who come by often feel encouraged to join in on the subject. Pretty soon there is a crowd.

The discussion got pretty informative, all about the taste and strength of the oak barrel taste, and when it's right, it has a very special, easy quality, with a balance of ripe fruit, oak, lemon and other citrus fruits. It can fill your mouth with a kind of warm glow that lasts a very long time, leaving your throat coated with a rich, sometimes buttery intensity.....; well as you can see the language gets pretty flowery and zip right over the head of some of us who "just know what we like".

But isn't that the rub of it? The affectionados of the discussion crowd liked chardonnay for reasons that they worked out that satisfy them - and all that "buttery" talk was right on point and meant a great deal in their minds. Good for them. Really.  They go about it different and we admire that.  They consider the wine as a food group, a complex sauce so to speak, and approach it on a whole aesthetic level that is, to them, a very satisfying intellectual and analytical approach. 

Others, like us, listen to a very knowledgeable person who we enjoy and admire, who says "this is really really good and one of the best that I know of" and we trot off to the cash register to buy it.  We liked it before we got home to try it with fruit and cheese before dinner.  We liked it because someone we like took great satisfaction in recommending it to us.

We, and the affectionados, left the store equally happy and looking forward to what we bought albeit on a different set of levels. That is why we like some things; the store, the owner and, sometimes incidentally, the wine.