WORDS BY LJ/ ILLO BY JEN
The word Dolcetto sounds like it should be the name of a song, a kind of song, or a story about a song. Or a part of an opera or a style of opera or a sort of symphony.
It’s a wine grape: the “lesser Piemontese wine grape,” it’s called, which makes me want to love it, because it’s more interesting to love the thing you’re supposed to love less more. Loving something you’re supposed to love less because of the reasons you’re supposed to love it less is one of the most beautiful things that can happen to a person, but it doesn’t make very much sense when it comes to loving wine grapes. It makes the most sense when it comes to loving one-eyed, or three-legged, dogs.
I don’t love Dolcettos the wines, mostly I just like them, but I love one Dolcetto, my Dolcetto: My Summer Red. The first time I ever drank it was in the wintertime, but I didn’t like it then: maybe because it didn’t suit the wintertime, or maybe because it needed six more months to age in bottle, or maybe because it was the first Dolcetto I ever tasted, and I was gearing up for myself to love Dolcetto so much more than I love Nebbiolo— the more-er Piemontese wine grape— and was so disappointed to find out that I didn’t that it temporarily blinded me, or my tongue at least.
I was tasting it with a bunch of kids whose boss I am. I was mad at the Dolcetto for not being as good as I wanted it to be: I couldn’t slot it into anywhere, couldn’t figure out if it was serious or gluggable or light-bodied or medium-bodied or fruit-forward or medium-tannin or aromatic or fucking anything, at all, besides being a bottle that looked good on a table, with a matte lipsticky dark pink foil and a swishy little watercolour of a rose on the label, which duped all the children into thinking it tasted like flowers— everyone was saying “It’s kind of floral,” but I couldn’t taste it: I suck at being able to taste the tastes of different flowers in wine— I only know rose, because everyone knows rose, and there’s a certain wine-y taste that I’ve come to know as being “white flower,” but it’s not because I know what white flowers smell like, it’s because I’ve been tasting wines for long enough to know that when certain wines taste like a certain something, it’s “white flower.”