Always.

The other day on a very warm border winter afternoon, I was sitting on the patio with my wife Linda, sharing a bottle of delightful Bouzeron. We were watching a rare pair of hepatic tanagers at the feeder. These birds evidently don’t get hepatitis. It was all very pleasant and I recalled again a passage from the journal of a Kentucky schizophrenic who had escaped from an asylum. He wrote, “Birds are holes in heaven through which a man may pass.” I had this little epiphany that wine could do the same thing if properly used. We all have learned, sometimes painfully, that more is not necessarily better than less. When Baudelaire wrote in his famed Enivrez-Vous, “Be always drunk on wine or poetry or virtue,” he likely didn’t mean commode-hugging drunk. Wine can ofƒer oxygen to the spirit, I thought, getting ofƒ my deck chair and going into the kitchen to cook some elk steak and dietetic potatoes fried in duck fat, and not incidentally opening a bottle of Domaine Tempier Bandol because I had read a secret bible in France that said to drink red after dark to fight oƒ the night in our souls.

The rest of the sermon is here (scroll down to the fifth page).

Being an idiosyncratic man with idiosyncratic tastes I still won’t drink white wine after dark. The darkness beckons red.