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As my boyfriend and I savored a recent dinner at Alinea in Chicago, we discussed how each wine played off of the sumptuous course in front of us. Debating if the Tempranillo or Riesling had been the best was a far cry from our early days of wine consumption.
Early in our relationship, a date had to be canceled. I decided to send him a bottle of wine, a way to at least make the evening memorable. I scrolled through the limited selection at the grocery store with my even more limited knowledge and picked out a bottle of Apothic Crush, a $9 red blend that I recognized drinking with a friend. I sent it off with a note to keep the bottle and we would drink it together sometime.
After that evening, it became a symbol of everything we looked forward to, through the difficulties of our post-divorce lives and the myriad of changes that came with it. When times were tough and my eyes were full of tears, he would remind me that we had that bottle of Apothic waiting. The $9 lifesaver we needed.
We had known each other a long time and had a strong foundation to build a relationship. But sometimes you still need that cornerstone to bring it all together. Ours became wine.
