So She Thought: A week in Wine Country, with not a whine to be heard

So when is a bottle of wine more than a bottle of wine? Why, when you're in Wine Country, of course.

My husband and I recently spent a week in the sun-dappled hills of the Alexander, Napa and Sonoma valleys of Northern California in search of fine wine, good food, and peaceful, romantic days together.

It's the kind of quality time we old-time, married folks only get when our teens are watching TV and playing computer games ... providing those activities are happening several hundred miles away, back home, while they stay with other family members and we get away from it all.

We told them to consider it one of (hopefully) several practice runs we plan on making before they go away to college. After all, by that time we'll probably be so lost without them we'll need to find other activities to fill in the awful gap left by the lack of nightly baseball practices, party-chauffeuring duties, and hampers of stinky laundry.

Yes, we'll miss those things so much so that we need to start bracing ourselves for the shock now. And what better way to begin acclimating ourselves to the loss than to spend time in luxury hotels, sipping wine and motoring through the countryside with other similarly bereft middle-agers. It's sad, but a necessary discipline if we're to survive without them, we say.

But if the final days of raising teenagers have taught me anything, it's to spot verbal silliness posing as expertise a mile away. Teens do it all the time. And so (we discovered on our vacation) do vintners.

You see, if raising children does nothing else for you in terms of increasing your wisdom, it's guaranteed to give you a superman-like ability to cut to the truth of almost anything you are told. And in wine drinking, that's a good thing.

That's because in Wine Country, tasting can get complicated very quickly, if you let it. In the tasting rooms of any winery, for instance, there will be claims that if you are a sophisticated wine connoisseur, the wines you are sampling contain will contain obvious yet still subtle flavors like blackberry, cedar, roses, and maybe just a hint of woodsmoke. Or perhaps gunpowder (no, I'm not kidding, one card really did say that), oak, tallow, and coriander.

Or day-old tuna sandwiches, room temperature cheddar cheese and empty chocolate pudding cups. Oh, wait, that's the smell of the contents of our rental car coming downwind. Sorry.

For my husband and I, who are content at the age and stage we're at in and pretty comfortable with ourselves, the wine we drink generally falls into two categories -- good wine, which we like, and not-so-good wine, which we don't. We're definite connoisseurs in terms of that. Oh, there may be a subtle undercurrent of blackberries, vanilla, or, hey, even aging 30-weight motor oil in whatever we happen to be sampling. But in the end, it doesn't really matter. It's either good, or it's not.

We've learned the simple tricks of living. It's even the same way with dining now, as well. We know that the best, five-star restaurant in the world won't be enjoyed if you're stuck at a table next to the kitchen, or adjacent to the entrance to the busy sports bar in the next room. Or that a hotel room with the communal hot tub located a mere 10 feet away may sound romantic in the advertisements, but in reality will lead to you calling the front desk all night and complaining about the noise. Things like that, we spot right away, and take care of them before they become issues. That's the best thing about being our age. We just don't even go there anymore.

I guess when you get to this stage in life, the Emperor no longer has any magic, invisible clothes on, and even if he did it wouldn't change the fact that we could see right through them. Which certainly makes life simpler, and a lot more enjoyable.

I'm not afraid to admit that sometimes I need a break from my kids in order to remember what brought my spouse and I together in the first place. I'm not afraid to demur when urged to become awestruck over a wine which may have subtle essences of cedar and creosote, but which nonetheless tastes like overpriced vinegar.

And I'm not shy about telling the reservations people that a room next to the hot tub is not a "desirable location," and that sitting next to the kitchen for dinner is something I do at home, not while dining out.

Yes, maybe even better than being young and going off on a challenging world trek is being my age and motoring around Wine Country with my mate in tow, ample funds in pocket, and the knowledge of not so much what to buy, but what not to buy into.

Perhaps the true gift of age is that while our eyesight may not be as good as it once was, our inner knowledge of both ourselves and the world around us is stronger than ever.

I'll drink to that.

Diane Sayre is a freelance writer living in Hanford. Her column appears weekly in the Sentinel. Readers can write to her at The Hanford Sentinel, P.O. Box 9, Hanford, CA 93232.

(June 15, 2009)