If You Give a Mouse a Nice Bottle of Portuguese Wine

There’s a picture book called If You Give A Mouse A Cookie, by Laura Joffe Numeroff, that I used to read to my children. It goes like this:

If you give a mouse a cookie, he’s going to ask for a glass of milk.

When you give him the milk, he’ll probably ask you for a straw.

When he’s finished, he’ll ask for a napkin.

Then he will want to look in a mirror to make sure he doesn’t have a milk mustache.

When he looks into the mirror, he might notice his hair needs a trim. So he will probably ask for a pair of nail scissors.

The story goes on this way for about a dozen more pages, until the mouse gets very thirsty, requests a second glass of milk, then asks for a cookie to go with it. It’s a tale about the domino effects of life. And I recalled it this afternoon after struggling for nearly a week to write about Irreverente, an absolutely stunning Portuguese wine.

I bought my first bottle last Thursday and started a blog entry about Irreverente back then, but I wanted to do more than describe how silky and plummy and honey-filled it is, how like Brandy or Port the finish, how it leaves the tastes of cigar leaves and currant in its wake.

So I pulled up a map of Portugal and started studying it, and then I remembered that Jose Saramago, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1998, is Portuguese. I’ve read All The Names, Saramago’s most recent book, plowing through his desultory, no-punctuation style to unearth the quiet story of rectitude in anonymity beneath. But I have to admit, I started Blindness, a parable about a plague of sightlessness and the novel that was most responsible for his earning the Nobel, but never finished. It was excellent — stirring — but also just as dark and murky as the title implies.

I considered, first, trying to read Blindness before writing about the wine (I thought I could get it done over the weekend) but decided that was overkill. So instead, I read a number of reviews and deconstructions online, most of them favorable but a few not, and realized that it probably would be impossible for me to gain a true understanding of Saramago without first reading Albert Camus.

It’s generally accepted that Camus inspired Saramago, and that his novel The Plague directly precedes Blindness. The truth is, I read The Plague a long, long time ago but I have never, shockingly, read The Stranger, Camus’ other masterpiece, so I strongly considered going to the library to pick up both.

By this time it was Saturday. I had a dinner party to attend on Saturday night and didn’t make it to the library. Plus, I was bringing a bottle of the Irreverente to the event, partly because it’s my new favorite wine but also because I was hoping someone would say something profound about it. . . .or about Saramago or Camus. . . .over the course of the evening.

This, however, did not happen. What did happen is that the late night on Saturday was followed by another on Sunday and then a wicked bout of insomnia Sunday night and Monday, which I exploited to read more about Camus. But this caused me even more angst — of course, everything causes me angst when I’m sleepless — because I came to the conclusion around 3 a.m. that I would be a very poor student of Camus, and therefore Saramago, if I did not first establish a firm basis in Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Sartre.

It was a huge amount of work to contemplate, especially as I was feeling guilty that I hadn’t written the wine review already. Finally, this afternoon, sleep-deprived and horrified by my own lack of knowledge regarding Portugal, existentialism, and illness-as-metaphor, I opened my last bottle of Irreverente, drank a glass, and just then received a one-line e-mail from the supplier in response to my query, telling me (in very short form) that Irreverente is a blend of four grapes: Alfochiero, Jaen, Tinta Roriz and Touriqua Nacional.

I took my cue from this. Mind you, I still intend to read Saramago, Camus, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Sartre. But, lucky for you, I have emerged from my circular mouse-and-cookie behavior and am able to say, simply: Go out right now and buy this wine. It’s available at The Wine Thief, Solo Vino, and Byerly’s wine stores.

And, by the way, if you give it to a mouse, he will immediately become as happy as the ones pictured above. No insomnia or existential hand-wringing at all. Guaranteed.