To continue this week’s series on Valentine’s Day, The COVID Edition, we’re continuing the conversation with Regine T. Rousseau, sommelier, author of the poetry collection Searching for Cloves and Lilies: The Wine Edition and CEO of Shall We Wine, an event-planning and wine demonstration company based in Chicago.
The Valentine holiday, always a curious one as I described in yesterday’s post, adopts a new level of peculiarity this year that’s fueled by broader-scope, conflicting reports of the pandemic’s negative impact on things like the reproductive and sexual health of both females and males on one hand and, on the other hand, lockdown’s opportunities for closer intimacy between couples.
With characteristic candor, creativity and level-gazed expertise, Rousseau brings a winelover poet’s eyes to the complex interplay of love, sex and romance. Today we continue the conversation as she comments on a set of poems from her collection, and their wine pairings, that particularly caught my attention this Valentine’s Day. Yesterday’s pairing (Psalm 139 and Château Musar Red) spotlit the traditional Valentine’s theme of romantic coupling, and today’s Part Two explores love relationships among other members of a family.
My hope is that Rousseau’s refreshing approach will inspire you to breathe fresh life into the intention of this week’s holiday. When we aren’t actively looking for opportunities to gesture romantically, we’re doing ourselves a disservice. As Rousseau says, “It feels so good for you. To just love and be loved is so fantastic to me.”
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Poem: Mummy. Wine Pairing: Emilio Lustau Los Arcos Amontillado Sherry
My mother is both skeptical and hopeful about love. Her counsel is both sweet and biting… This wine captures her conflict: there’s the sweetness of raisins juxtaposed with the saltiness of nuts. The wine is mature yet bright, soft, yet dry. This is my Mummy.
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This poem and wine pairing underscores the dichotomy of mother-daughter, sweet-salty love. Sometimes, as with Rousseau and sherry, a wine has to grow on you as you come to know and understand it. And maybe sometimes so, too, does your relationship with a parent.
Rousseau recognizes that the slow evolution of appreciation that happened for her with sherry may also have happened with her mother. She had to understand her mother’s history first, to understand her duality and also her philosophy around love. “I had to get to know my mother’s story in the same way that I had to get to understand sherry,” Rousseau said. “When I was young I dismissed her perspective. I simplified it as just being old, bitter, not modern. But now I know her story. Now I understand the duality and complexity of her, her story, and the wine in a way that I didn’t when I was younger.”
Poem: Claudia. Wine Pairing: Cantina Oliena “Corrasi”
Rousseau describes this wine an “an enormous, defiant, mouth-coating wine with flavors of dark berries, spices, vanilla and smoke that graciously glides across the tongue.” The poem pairing, about her cousin Claudia, describes the scene where Claudia was caught in a house fire and survived. “You dreamed you were asleep, the smoke and fire invitations from both heaven and hell. You’ve always been somewhere in the middle. Half saint, half sinner. Your war was fought on temple grounds and corners of temptation.”
It’s the crackling twist of words in that last line that caught my ear in this pairing: temple and temptation. Saint and sinner. Naughty and nice. For Rousseau, that’s love and romance and Claudia herself.
“What I was trying to convey was her battle with who she thought she should be and who she was,” Rousseau said, “and this inability for anyone to accept that she’s just both. There’s this inability to accept that we are all complex people. I was using her as an example, that we can have this naughty freaky dangerous side to us and still have the part of us that worships a higher being that is loveable.”
Her choice for the Cantina Oliena “Corrasi” wine plays to the element of smokiness — of the wine itself and the house fire in which Claudia was literally caught. Rousseau drank the wine and kept thinking, “smoky silky, smoky silky, complexity and dichotomy, two things you don’t put together… I felt like this wine really expresses the kind of push and pull, this fight that she had, and this fight that we have about judgments” based on who we think other people are rather than who they actually are.
Poem: My Children. Wine Pairing: The Piedmont Guy Vino Blanco
This poem is a love letter and an apology to the children I didn’t have. There is both regreat and longing in this place… As with ‘My Children,’ there is a duality to this wine; the sour-apple notes complement the yearning in the piece, while the lovely floral flavors match my imagination.
In a very palpable nod to “love” beyond romance between couples, Rousseau again engages the theme of love between parent and child and, in this case, the children she opted not to have. The poem, and the wine, speak of loss to her. “There are children in my life that I love, and that part has been in some ways fulfilled,” she said. “I’m okay with not having children but I still feel some regret about the decision I made.”