A Report From Wine Explorer Diego Samper – The Rebellion of Raising a Glass
Portland, Oregon
After a certain birthday, your metabolism becomes a critic.
Late-night lasagna. Party dip by the spoon. One more wedge of cake. The verdict arrives at dawn.
A slice is civilized. Two is a celebration. The whole cake is a cry for help.
Wine plays by the same rules. Too much and the night turns sloppy. Leave the glasses empty and the room feels like a dentist’s waiting room.
One glass, shared and lingered over, turns the lights warm and the people human again.
You have seen the headlines. The constant attacks on alcohol. Labels, warnings, sermons dressed as science. I started doing my own homework and ended up at a talk from the mid-nineties that later became a book called Bowling Alone.
The thesis was not about bowling. It was about what happens when people stop showing up for one another. Social capital erodes. Trust thins. Democracy starts to feel like a spectator sport.
I am not a sociologist. I am an observer with a laptop and a corkscrew.
Reading it now, three decades on, much of that talk lands like a set of premonitions finally arriving.
What I notice is simple. Human activities and interactions are essential. It is a ticket. It buys you time with other humans, time to listen, time to be known.
The bottle on the table is an invitation. It says “stay“. Tell me what your week did to you. Tell me who you want to become.
Every culture has known this. No good story ever started with a salad. Cheap booze is a false economy.
In wine, there is truth.
A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thou.
We do not need footnotes to feel the thread that runs through them. Drinking together is not about intoxication. It is about invitation.
Meanwhile, look around. My single friends check all the boxes. Smart, kind, solid work. Yet, they still struggle.
Dating has become a job interview with worse lighting. People are quick to rule one another out and slow to let anything in. Fewer conversations. More caution. Safer, lonelier.
A headache might go away with an aspirin. The bad idea of being alone does not. You do not medicate your way into meaning. You meet it. Usually at a table. Usually with a glass.
Conversation is not a pill. It is a practice.
The glass is not just a glass. It is a key. It opens the little republic of the table, where status softens, jokes find their groove, and the city shrinks to the radius of your conversation.
Wine carries its own weather. It slows the fork, lubricates the confession, and lets silence be comfortable.
Comment sections do not do this.
Email threads do not do this.
The table still does.
When social capital gets stripped by fear, by fashion, or by policy, it does not grow back by itself. Corner bars close. Commutes swallow the dinner hour. Screens keep neighbors from knocking. We do not control all of that.
We control a table.
We control a bottle.
We control an invitation.
That is why our wine club exists. We bring bottles from beyond the shelf, from remote valleys and stubborn vineyards, from people with calloused hands who make wine that tastes like where it comes from. These are not trophies. They are permission slips. Permission to host. Permission to ask better questions. Permission to stay for one more story because the conversation has not landed yet.
If you open them with the right people, they do more than pair with dinner. They pair with a better habit of being together.
I know we are a virtual community, scattered across states and time zones, but the thread is real. When my first child was born and so many of you wrote to me, I felt it.
The connection Putnam worried was fraying was right there in my inbox. A bridge. A reminder that community can cross a screen when people bother to show up. Thank you for every message.
We do not claim to know all the answers. We are observers. We notice that when people pour and linger, trust grows. When trust grows, communities remember how to breathe.
A small toast can be a civic act. If there is an erosion in democracy, part of the antidote begins at a table where people speak honestly and listen long enough to change their minds.
I want us to change the habit of distance with the simplest move we have. A table. A bottle. A night that runs a little long.
And yes, a trip would help. Pick a map and stab a finger. Douro, Mendoza, Bordeaux, Alentejo, somewhere wilder. If that sounds right, reply with your first choice. I will read every note.
Pour something worth talking about.
Then talk.
Diego
P.S. Members trip next year? Would you come? Yes, maybe, not now. One word is perfect.
