GOD’S SAKE

According to the Derek Bok Center at Harvard University, memory works in the following way: it is encoded in the senses either acoustically, visually or through tactile experience. At this stage, information flows from the cortex — the area richest in nerve cells — to the hippocampus, a structure embedded deep in the temporal lobe. It is stored there as electrical patterns in four different types of memories: long term, short term, working and sensory. Sensory memory is a deepfreeze storage system that gets transferred to short-term memory each time you are reminded of some seminal sensory experience. Because it is stored so deeply in our brains, it sometimes triggers surprising and complex emotions. It was, for example, the taste of a madeleine that prompted Proust to write In Search of Lost Time.

There have been certain unforgettable moments in my journey as a wine drinker. The first time I tasted that golden palimpsest known as Coche-Dury, for example. There is a restaurant in the suburbs of Paris called Le Coq de la Maison Blanche that is so Gallicly clichéd that you would think it part of a Monty Python sketch. But it exists, and moreover it receives what is considered to be a staggering allocation of these mythical white wines. Furthermore, these wines are priced at levels that are still approachable — which means they are significantly lower than