Divine WinesWhat's In A Name?

I just got this great question of Andreas Wiedow, who asked me What's a divine wine?. And I can assure you this question got me thinking?

Well in order to be able to tell you what is a divine wine, let?s take a look at the definition of divine.

DIVINE ? A DEFINITION

A definition taken from the Webster dictionary.

Divine: 1 a : of, relating to, or proceeding directly from God or a god (divine love) b : being a deity (the divine savior) c : directed to a deity (divine worship) 2 a : supremely good : superb (the pie was divine) b : heavenly, godlike

So we are talking about superb, heavenly wines. I would guess this excludes your daily plonk. So it has to be something special, something godlike!

DIVINE = EXPENSIVE?

So, do you have to open your wallet a lot for divinity? Ooooh yes! At least for me.

For this person a divine wine is in general expensive (around 15 to 20 EUR and often a lot more, but there are exceptions. I had recently an extremely nice Nero d?Avola which we sell for about 11 EUR and which is just divine, I mean complex and elegant).

But be aware, this has not always been so (oh no) and can be explained (oh yes).

1. Education

Liking wines is also a bit understanding wines. Let?s compare it to your school period. When starting secondary school at 6 years, I guess you could write and read just a little bit. Well that?s why we have all those years at school, isn?t. If one would have dropped in your hands a book of Milan Kundera or Umberto Eco, you surely would not be able to appreciate it at that age (let stand to read it ;-)). Harry Potter, maybe.

Nowadays I -at least- can enjoy Milan Kundera a lot (this is a divine writer to me) and I enjoy a lot Harry Potter (which are great page turners, hey no divinity here, but a lot of pleasure).

Just the same with wines. You start off with Harry Potter wines, juicy, easy (to understand) wines and you work you?re way through to Milan Kundera wines, complex of an unseen elegance, difficult type of wines. And yes it is an education!

So it took me a couple (lot) of years to find my way to the complexity of e.g. a Barolo wine. Ooh so divine. And as most of us, I started of with a simple juicy wine, such as a Pays D?Oc merlot or ?(just fill in). Maybe at that moment these were divine wines, but now they are no longer divine. Hey these type of wines can be pleasing and sometimes very pleasing. And it makes me smile when I find a wine in the ?below 6 EUR category? that is great. Price quality ratio is important?but for GODLIKE wines, I like to get my stuff in the higher price ranges.

2. Learning To Appreciate

Another comparison can be made with classic music. As a little child I hated it. When my parents turned on some classic stuff it was the time to run of yelling to my room. Now I love it. I enjoy an evening out at the opera and had some really divine moments over there! If you have seen ?La Traviata? I guess you would understand what I?m talking about.

Again, just the same with wine. You need to learn appreciate it, and maybe you need also some age, some (live) experience. And maybe the sooner you start with wine the sooner you can appreciate the difficult (read DIVINE) wines.

3. Appreciation And Education

Learning to appreciate is of course closely linked with education. In order to be able to appreciate, you need to learn, to understand how a wine is made, how it obtains its complexity. And to train?yes to train your nose, your taste.

I?m heavy pro some kind of ?sniffing and tasting? course at school. It is one of our senses we do not learn to use. If you don?t believe, do the test: just try to catch some smells blind, very difficult thing to do.

So one tip on how to appreciate DIVINE wines: sniff, taste and sniff, taste and sniff, taste and? You can try to sniff a lot of things, just go to your local market and sniff the flowers, the food or step in your garden and sniff the trees, the leaves, the grass, ? You will notice that after a while your nose gets trained and you will pick up far more easier smells (yeah, also the bad ones ;-)).

THE MOMENT

And divinity is also very largely dependent on the moment. Something that proceeds from God or a god doesn?t come 24/7.

So there are this special moments when every puzzle piece fits in and when you drink some great wine at such moments, you will remember. The grazy thing is that such wines could also be very simple wines. Thus, the exception to my rule that divine wines need to be expensive.

I still remember a trip with school to Rome where we drank an Est!, Est!!, Est!!! di Montefiascone, actually a quite simple wine, but with a lot of college boys combined with an incredible time in Italy, this turned out just as such a memorable moment.

Points that are in advantage of the above theory are of course that I didn?t had any wine education yet!

There are some moments I just can remember because of the great feeling of that moment combined with an incredible wine.

CONCLUSION

For me, the aspects that influence the divinity of wine are thus the following:

Education

Learning to appreciate

The combination of the two above

The moment

And because of these aspects, I often end up with a wine that is in the higher price range. What can I do about it? I?m just a product of my education?

Some last tip for you wine lovers. If you start with wine and you desire to beef up your wine cellar, do not, I repeat, do not buy too many of the first wines you love, you will see that your taste will change, that you will (learn to) appreciate other (read more complex) wines. And that a great moment isn?t easy to repeat?even with that same great wine!

And on that bombshell?.I?ll go to my cellar and get me a divine wine.

Bart Van Honst? is a passionate wine lover and enthusiastic wine trader at WineRoute who specializes in Italian wines and loves to bring you the stories behind the wine. Always looking for some new hidden gems from every wine country. Next to this he is also teaching wine classes and WSET advanced certificate holder.

Check out his company at http://www.wineroute.be

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Floral craft and floral d?cor are avocations which if passionately followed can become and addiction of a lifetime. Some floral crafts are pressing fresh flowers, waxing fresh flowers and drying fresh flowers. The easy thing about any floral art is just to have the knowledge to begin with and since none of these crafts are time consuming, you can easily squeeze this into your busy schedules - at work and even at home. We will concentrate on pressing fresh flowers.

This floral craft is the easiest of all. You have to carefully select the fresh flower you want to press. It's important that the flower is not wilting. Bring the flower home and quickly put them inside your refrigerator or an ice chest to keep them fresh while you organize your pressing material. For pressing you would require a newspaper sheet, a thick heavy book - preferably a dictionary or a telephone directory / yellow page etc., and some heavy objects weighing about 20 lbs. or above.

This done, take out the flowers from the refrigerator and put them in the newspaper fold in such a manner that all the petals spread out without folding. Next put the upper fold of the newspaper over the flower and open the dictionary or telephone directory from the middle and place the newspaper inside. Close the dictionary/directory and put the heavy weights over the dictionary. The pressing process takes about 3 days, so make sure you do it at a place which will remain untouched for three days. Once the flower is dry and pressed, you can do many a things with them, make greeting cards, use them in an arrangement, art work for wall or your dining table or even that tiny corner for your office place or even designing a perfect gift for someone you love.

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When someone has motive to cleanse impure elements of the populace, it's a semantic hop from vigilante, to Nazi. Vigilantes regard the criminals and people they target as living outside the social bonds and communal ties that hold our society together. It's not so much that they dehumanize their target, but that the target represents an alien enemy that must be defended against. The target must also be punished, and punished outside the law. Any and all legal matters on the subject are seen as unnecessary intrusions on the basic freedom that all communities enjoy to protect themselves. Zimring (2004) says that the vigilante mindset is the opposite of the due process mindset. Vigilante thinking is precisely the opposite of any notion of fairness, fair play, or a chance for acquittal.

Vigilantes do not care to wait for the police to finish their investigation, and they care less about any court's determination of proof. What they do care about is justice -- quick, final, cost-effective justice. To a vigilante, punishment should be inflicted upon those deserving of it at the first opportunity, no waiting, and the more severe the punishment, the better. These are all romantic notions that feed an appetite for punishment more than an appetite for vengeance.

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