Suppose it were Friday lvi: Chardonnay with those we love

You and I will be admirers of Chardonnay for our entire lives. In time, sampled from almost every principal growing region in the world - from New Zealand, the most promising in the New World, to Bourgogne, its home - its singular conduciveness to many styles of expression will come to represent questions (one can hear the resistance already) of ethics as much as of taste, as in preference as well as in flavour. Why is it, that if I cannot persuade myself to support balance in the development of a youth, I have no compunction to support the same in my wine? 

A trial has now concluded in Virginia of an under-graduate homicide, one athlete against another, his erstwhile girlfriend, by shades of negligence and intent which a jury split down the middle. In his summation the defense attorney dismissed his client as a "stupid boy [immersed in] "sports, sex, and alcohol."

That this honourable stab at the "twinkie defense" which exculpated the mur-derer of the Mayor of San Francisco, happened not to prevail in this case, is of less moment than that it could describe the cultivation of youth at the University of Virginia. Possibly we'd agree, this is rather poor winegrowing.

Yet the only practical meaning in the attorney's blaming of the University, is that such a place is a universe of cultivation, not a single vine row or wine barrel. Choices of taste have ethical dimensions in both cases. One simply cannot derive a wine of balance by wishing it so; and one cannot miti-gate or conceal an imbalance by exalt-ing a heroic attribute above weakness in others. If we find this simile, puerile, we might recall that lifelong bond with Chardonnay, and our devotion to principles of cultivation and wine-making which assure that our tastes are met. Possibly, we are conscious of this already. Our reverence bears no guilt, only an interesting limitation.

Chase Harnett