Arnulf the Destroyer Read Free Page B

taste.
    By now you’ve probably figured out who I am, or rather, who I was.  Leo the Amazing Wine Reader I was called.  Without effort I became the world’s most renown food and wine critic.
    Yes, I can do it with food too.  So of course I became a total food snob as well as popular critic.  But it wasn’t always for the wrong reasons.  With the kind of gift I have you can only eat free range chicken if you eat chicken at all.  It is simply impossible to force down even the finest roasted hen when all I can taste is the feces the bird waded through while penned up in the dark its entire six weeks of life.  Conventional vegetables are their own trial.  All I can taste of them is the powdery and antiseptic flavor of pesticides.
    Wine, by far, is the true tasters delight.  Most people never experience the true complexity of taste.  And to understand wine is to understand what taste truly is.
    With practice and training anyone can taste a lot in wine, can discover some of the complexities of the drink.  I can taste everything.  And I mean everything.  With one sip I can tell you not only the type of wine it is, but also the year, the location and every single condition that went into that wine from seed all the way to shipping.  I even once tasted a wine that had been heavily jostled or jarred.  The amused and incredulous wine merchant scoffed at me until he discovered that the delivery truck had, in fact, been in a wreck, and the bottle I tasted was from one of the few cases that survived intact.
    I am always on the search for that one, exquisite taste of wine.  My whole body anticipates it whenever I open a new bottle and the aroma drifts into me.  It is wonder as well as excitement.  What is the story of this wine, I ask myself.  What are all the subtle parts that went in to making this vintage?
    Deep down I am looking for the ultimate wine.  I want to savor that draft that holds everything within it, that when I taste it, I will know peace.  It may sound strange to hear me say this about wine, but you do not know wine as I do.  There is, however, something in your life that is like this, that drives you and has you searching.
    Maybe you are a builder who longs to build that perfect house, a lawyer waiting for the case that will define your career, a musician who writes songs until he writes that one that he knows he is truly capable of.  Whatever it is that drives you, that has you searching, longing, expecting, it doesn’t change the fact that we are all driven to search, we are all driven by thirst.
    What I thirst for is a wine that can fulfill the potential of wine.  It holds so much in it, but there has never been a wine I have tasted, no matter how full and rich it was, that did not have an emptiness to it.  It is hard to explain, but in every wine I can taste something missing, some element, some flavor, and essence that I know should be there though I don’t know what it is.
    During my first trip to Europe I tasted the legendary 1945 Chateau Mouton-Rothschild.  A mentor of mine, an Italian we all called Santi, pulled a bottle from his labyrinthine cellar of old, dusty bottles one night.
    “I have been waiting many years for this,” Santi told me as we sat on his balcony covered by a Roman night.  “But you are the only one who can truly appreciate this.  I have never seen a palate such as yours.  You were made to taste this wine.”
    He looked at the bottle longingly, studying its worn label by the moonlight.  He was scared to open it.  Perhaps the anticipation would eclipse the reality.
    “No one can say for sure what makes this wine extraordinary,” Santi mused as he carefully poured our glasses.  “1945 was a banner year for wine.  No one knows why.  Maybe you can tell us.”
    As I drank that first swallow of ‘45 Rothschild I felt giddy.  This was, after all, considered one of the finest ever made.  And it certainly was exquisite.  I could taste an ideal year of sun