I think that I will never get tired of celebrating life, be it special occasions or ordinary days. And maybe, just maybe, my sudden, borderline-obsessive craving for white wine has less to do with the vintage and more to do with a desperate desire to connection. To clink glasses with the people who make the noise in my head feel a little quieter.
It made me wonder: In a world that constantly demands we pour our hearts out, when do we get to choose what fills our glass?
The last time I had a truly great glass of white wine was back in 2021. I was at Pugad ni Art, with a crew of web developers in tow. I’d invited them there to show them my version of the “Outside”—the space where my actual brain resides when I’m not playing a character in theirs. But if I’m being completely honest, I wanted to give them a break from their routine. I wanted to be the architect of a new core memory.
That was the night Sir Art gave me total freedom to open a bottle. Naturally, I did what any self-proclaimed outsider trying to look the part would do: I grabbed the bottle that looked the most expensive. Et voilà. White wine. The brand has long since faded from my memory, but the taste? It’s still floating around in the back of my head like an unfinished draft, just waiting to be discovered again.
Is it possible to become so fixated on a single taste of the past that we ruin our appetite for the present?
Ever since that night, red wine just felt like an old habit I’d outgrown. I used to drink it simply because it was “red”—the default setting for a brooding writer type, and my color, naturally. But suddenly, I was a person on a mission. I found myself lingering in the aisles of grocery stores and liquor shops, scanning labels for a familiar silhouette. But after years of playing wine-detective, I finally gave up on finding that exact ghost of a bottle.
Then came this year. It suddenly dawned on me that what I wanted for my birthday wasn’t a grand gesture or a sweeping monologue. I just wanted a glass of white wine.
But life, it seems, loves a slow burn. We are now 23 days past my birthday, and I haven’t tasted a single drop of white wine—or any wine, for that matter. It turns out, waiting for the perfect vintage is a lot like waiting for the perfect plot twist: sometimes you’re left holding an empty glass, wondering if the party started without you.
