What's your Wine State of Mind?
Choose the scenarios & moments that describe your vibe. And see where it leads...
And before the marketing gurus get all exercised about why this doesn't culminate in a wine recommendation to match your mood ... we would say, who are we to say? You choose what you like! Red with fish. White with the venison sausages or beef rendang ... geez! It is all good.
Reflective & Calm
Swim Like a Dragon
Powerful motifs dragons. They appear ubiquitously down, across & between lines of human culture - giant snakes of Mesopotamia in 2 millenia BC, ancient Greek dragons like those Heracles & Jason smote! Ancient Eygptians had dragons, Aztecs too. Ancient Hindu-Buddhist elders no doubt frightened children with the serpent deity, Nāga. Chinese & Japanese share a living dragon culture. And Europe & the UK are infested with dragons. There are dragons aplenty in our South Pacific backyard. The Rainbow Serpent is central in Aboriginal Dreaming & in Aotearoa New Zealand we have our taniwha. Dragons are rife in popular western arts - LoTR/Hobbit, Harry Potter, Pete, The Game of Thrones, Puff ... we love a good Dragon tale!
Here's a nice thought. In Chinese myth dragons are koi fish that swam up the waterfall on the Yellow River, falling through the Dragon's Gate to be transformed into dragons.
From this we are challenged to be like a dragon. To continuously push through hardships to scale our waterfalls, becoming stronger & wiser along the way until reaching our absolute peak; becoming a true dragon.
Keep swimming.
Our Mushy Wine Stories
Images of Home Fields' WineLife
Music for Wine - Easy
Social & Bright
Our Wine Stories
Music for Wine - jaunty
Resources to Amplify your Gatherings
Curious & Creative
Our "Intriguing" Wine Stories
Year of the Elongated, Limbless Ectothermic, Amniotic Vertebrate Reptile
Few creatures evoke primordial reactions in people like a snake does. Great Whites. Tigers. T.Rex, perhaps. You don’t need to be standing in front of a snake to feel a fear response or sense of revulsion. Similar to standing in front of the T.Rex at the Natural History Museum in London where, I don’t mind admitting, feeling an involuntary tremor behind the knees!
The mythical power of these creatures, what humans have invested in them in the stories we tell, exaggerates the menace or danger they otherwise pose - there is little threat from a rubber model of a long-extinct dinosaur! These things don’t make that kind of sense.
Like the Dragon, snake-lore is at the heart of the human story. The Garden of Eden in the Christian tradition. Cobra forming a protective phalanx for the sleeping child Guru Nanak, founder of Sikhism . The Medusa. St Nicholas driving snakes from Ireland. The Rainbow Serpent in Aboriginal Dreaming, creator of land and all life. Jörmungandr the harbinger of Ragnorok in Norse lore. The Feathered Serpent, Quetzalcoatl, symbol of life & death in Mesoamerican myth ... snakes represent transition & change. The circle of life. Shedding one skin to adopt another more suited to conditions. Renewal, resilience, transformation. Letting go of elements that no longer serve their purpose.
As we transition from Dragon to Wood Snake in the Chinese calendar, these characteristics of the Snake seem apt, both for the world at large, our own back yard, and definitely for us at Home Fields.
Now seems the time for flexibility, resilence & adaptability.
Music for Wine - jaunty
Music for Wine - jaunty
Conversation flagging? Here to help!
Wine Life Balance - In Lit.
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
“."..... we had bottles brought up from every bin, and it was during those tranquil evenings with Sebastian that I first made a serious acquaintance with wine and sowed the seed of that rich harvest which was to be my stay in many barren years. We would sit, he and I, in the Painted Parlour with three bottles open on the table and three glasses before each of us; Sebastian had found a book on wine-tasting, and we followed its instructions in detail. We warmed the glass slightly at a candle, filled a third of it, swirled the wine round, nursed it in our hands, held it to the light, breathed it, sipped it, filled our mouths with it and rolled it over the tongue, ringing it on the palate like a coin on a counter, tilted our heads back and let it trickle down the throat. Then we talked of it and nibbled Bath Oliver biscuits, and passed on to another wine; then back to the first, then on to another, until all three were in circulation and the order of glasses got confused, and we fell out over which was which, and we passed the glasses to and fro between us until there were six glasses, some of them with mixed wines in them which we had filled from the wrong bottle, till we were obliged to start again with three clean glasses each, and the bottles were empty and our praise of them wilder and more exotic.
"...It is a little, shy wine like a gazelle."
"Like a leprechaun."
"Dappled, in a tapestry meadow."
"Like a flute by still water."
"...And this is a wise old wine."
"A prophet in a cave."
"...And this is a necklace of pearls on a white neck."
"Like a swan."
"Like the last unicorn."
And we would leave the golden candlelight of the dining-room for the starlight outside and sit on the edge of the fountain, cooling our hands in the water and listening drunkenly to its splash and gurgle over the rocks.
"Ought we to be drunk every night?" Sebastian asked one morning.
"Yes, I think so."
"I think so too."
