We shall not cease our exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know it for the first time.’
-T.S.Eliot
I’ve been on a Louise Erdrich kick of late, systematically working my way through her dozens of amazing books. Last week, I went back to the beginning, re-reading her first novel, Love Medicine. Originally published in 1984, and recommended to me by the inimitable Sylvia Moubayed when she was the director of the Providence Athenaeum, Love Medicine was the first book I had encountered that ‘got’ my home state of North Dakota and its people. For the first time, I was reading an author who wrote about people and situations that I recognized in a very personal way.
Some 40 years later, that has not changed. And neither has the book; the Athenaeum has only one copy, and I am reasonably certain the copy beside my computer just now is the exact book I read circa 1985. What has changed: me. My 20 year old self understood the stories of tradition, family, and loss. Decades later, I see threads of identity, survival, and how love links all of these. The book is the same, but I am not.
I’ve had a similar trajectory with wine. In my youth, the ‘gateway’ to wine was probably Bartle’s & Jaymes wine coolers: sweet, fruity, and-for an impoverished student- also blessedly cheap. Over the years, I came to want less sugar, more acidity. More structure. And emphatically more flavor. So those wine coolers became Riesling and then Chardonnay and then red wine and…well, the rest is history. Although unlike Love Medicine, if I revisited those wine coolers now, I doubt I’d be finding additional complexity in them.
Wine coolers are on my mind this week, because I’ve been thinking about hard seltzers. In my opinion, hard seltzers are the 2020’s version of B & J wine coolers- a cheap, slightly sweet alcohol delivery system for people who do not love the taste of alcohol. But people do love them and if fine wine is to survive to entice another generation, we need a new gateway to get and keep younger consumers interested. Perhaps that gateway is hard seltzer. So we went looking for hard seltzer with a minimum of sugar and other additives, a reasonable price, and actual taste. And we found Nutrl. It’s vodka-based, as opposed to malt liquor, for a cleaner, tastier profile. Plus real fruit juice, no added sugar. 100 calories per can, $11 a 4Pk.
Everything old is new again. Try Nutrl. And then-maybe, eventually- try some wine.