As Kurt Vonnegut's good uncle once said, "If this isn't nice, I don't know what is."  We in law school are so wont to get wrapped up into our own little struggles that we forget to see how nice we have it.  I won't enumerate the blessings here, but we-and I-have many.  One particular blessing for me is having been able to try a number of really great wines-most of them with some really wonderful people.

I don't know how this should have come to be.  My family is not really into drinking.  My mom occasionally drank Manischewitz (for its curative properties, I guess), but other than that we were pretty dry.  Inauspicious beginning aside, my journey to the port of Port has been one filled with pretty great memories, some of which I will recount in this, the last wine column of the semester.

First Few Drops

It was October 2001, and my parents had just dropped me off in Berkeley so I could spend some time with my high school friends who had started college (I was a spring admit so I didn't start until 2002).  We decided to go to Giovanni's Caffe, a decent Italian restaurant on Shattuck Avenue.

In perhaps a sign of things to come, I was the one who was tasked with picking the wine.  I had no idea what to order.  I didn't start drinking large amounts of alcohol until that spring, and even then I certainly wasn't drinking wine.  So I picked based on the only producer I recognized: Robert Mondavi.  White zinfandel.  It was delicious.

Things have to start somewhere, right?

The Spanish Junior Transfer

Her name was Veronica.  I was a sophomore and she was a worldly, sexy junior transfer of Spanish extraction who lived in my dorm.  I was head over heels for her, but not surprisingly, she had a boyfriend.  That didn't stop her from inviting me over from time to time to listen to music and from exchanging "platonic" full-body massages.

One night she opened a bottle of wine.  "It's syrah.  It's my favorite," she said.  I don't remember the vintage, the producer, or even the country or appellation.  I don't remember anything about the wine, only that it was deep, dark, and mysterious, just like she was.

If I Leave Here Tomorrow . . .

I had been dating Sabina for what seemed in my young mind an eternity: three months.  Now, in the morning I was about to leave for a summer job selling educational books door to door in Connecticut.

We were in my room.  For some reason it was still cold though it was May.  We had bought a celebratory bottle of something-I think a cabernet or merlot-that, at the price of about $13 or $14, was pretty extravagant.  To our chagrin, it was terrible.  The bottle was still pretty much full when we woke and I hopped in the car in which I would drive across the country.  But what we opened that night was more precious than any bottle of wine.  She became my first love.

A Sign of Things to Come

Alex, my current roommate, and I didn't like each other the first time we met as resident assistants in our dorm.  I don't know why this was, but it was just how it was.  However, as we were two of the only drinkers on our staff it was inevitable that we'd get over our initial distrust.  Sure enough, we bonded over our love of German beer and our mutual hatred of most of our residents.

One night we and a bunch of RAs got a big family-style dinner.  There was a wine store nearby, and we decided to go inside and check things out.  We had no clue what we were doing, so we asked the proprietress to help us get a decent bottle.  She picked out a bottle of L'Esprit du Silene, a wine from the Languedoc region of France.  It was $11.99.  I had no cash on me, so I promised to pay Alex back for my share.

This was an amazing wine.  Alex came up with the description that this wine was like a "thornbush": rough, wild, with deep persistent roots and brambles spreading everywhere.  It is still the benchmark by which we measure wines from Southern France.

Home is Where the Heart Is

Ending this column is a bottle I had with my family before I left for GW.  It was a 2003 Chateau Talbot, a Fourth Growth Bordeaux from Saint-Julien.  It was a gift from my brother's girlfriend at the time; we had saved it for a little while because, well, it's not exactly an everyday wine, and it was still very young for a Bordeaux.

But youth be damned-I was leaving for the East Coast!  We opened it up one night before I left.  What a gorgeous wine.  Full and round.  Cherry and plum in the nose.  Subtle spice and tobacco were what I tasted.  But this wine wasn't as much about the taste or aroma as it was about texture-just so smooth and yielding, so wonderfully structured.  It went down like a potion made of velvet, and once it got to the stomach it felt warm and soothing like a nice Port.

My family?  Not big drinkers, but they loved it.  And if sharing a bottle of wine with family-or future roommates, first loves, hot Spanish women, or friends-isn't nice, I don't know what is.