all that's changed

I may live in wine country, but I'm not a big wine person. I enjoy it, I know a fair bit about it, but to me it's no big.

All the nonstop wine industry talk bores me. I've learned to be semi-patient with it. Which means rather than true patience, which would be feigning polite interest, I zone out. Wine's great and all, but fuck. It's a beverage. (Words I would never utter to my winemaking friends.) I can talk wine for awhile, drink it a good while longer, but it doesn't captivate me. Plus, wine hangs me over.

One thing about wine talk in particular shits me to tears - the vocabulary. Sweet Bacchus in Hades I want to beat my head on the table at phrases like "sex in a glass" which say precisely Nothing. People use that language for food, too - totally don't get it. Words like "haunting smoky finish" or "overripe plum," yeah, that language can be trite and easily mocked, but at least you're getting somewhere description-wise. Sexy desserts and sex in a glass - if that's your idea of sex, 1) you're overfed and 2) you need to get out more.

Nothing to me smells "like sex." That's not how I come at the concept of sex, I suppose. However.

The Dreamer by Versace. It doesn't smell like sex. It smells like one hell of an evening, at the end of which you already know you're going to be dying to be in bed with someone in particular. It smells like expensive gin and even more expensive cigarettes, rich tropical fruit, sweet cream, and something else, maybe oil on a hot tailpipe. (Whoa, phallus police! But that scent's in there, or something like it. Smell it and see.) It's my favorite men's fragrance, yet I've never smelled it on a man. If I ever did, I would probably either faint or eat him alive on the spot.

Here's Chandler Burr's description:
"You smell this thing, and not only do you not think men's cologne (because you can't possibly), you think "My God!..." and then "What the hell is it?!" "It" is, first, absolutely mouthwatering. It is walking through a French pastry shop next to a spice market in southern Thailand. Then there's ice cream, gun powder, fruit candy, hot cocoa, marshmallows, blood orange peel, and probably some DDT. It is the most mesmeric fragrance I know."

Admit it. You're curious.

Posted by em on Saturday, June 24, 2006 at 4:06 PM | Permalink