It had been exactly thirty years since they’d last seen each
other. The young reporter with the velvety eyes and the trainee œnologist with
the candid smile. She, a globetrotting New Yorker; he, a local guy, Médocain
through and through, both of them crazy about great wines.
They had met in the cellars of Calon during a tasting. Scribbling
down, out of habit, a few tannin-stained tasting comments and smiling more and
more with each new glass they had been handed, they had ended up agreeing on
what in their opinion gave a wine its soul, on how these moments had a special
flavour, and how power was beautiful when allied to tenderness, something that
sent a shiver down their spines, before they turned and departed their separate
ways.
Today, thirty years later, in the shimmering splendour of a
re-discovered Calon, their paths crossed once again. As they met, they looked
long into each other’s eyes, for a second; perhaps for eternity. He advanced,
as he had done all that time ago. His smile radiated. Pleasantries were
exchanged, and the first tentative words were uttered. Their complicity soon
returned. Suddenly, it felt like only yesterday, as if each year that had
passed only counted as a second. As the sun began to set
over a wide gilded horizon, and the crowds started to wend their way towards
the gardens, they exchanged a complicit glance and lingered at the tasting
table.