What 45 years can teach us about wine, life, and love.

Time is one of wine’s most important ingredients.

Not because time automatically makes wine better—it doesn’t. Most wine is meant to be enjoyed relatively young, and even wines capable of decades of aging require the right combination of grape, structure, vintage, winemaking, and storage.

What time does, when given the right foundation, is something more interesting.

It reveals character.

A young wine may announce itself with vibrant fruit, bright acidity, and immediate energy. With age, those characteristics can evolve. Aromas become more complex. Texture softens. Secondary and tertiary characteristics emerge. Individual components that once seemed distinct can begin to form something more integrated.

The wine hasn’t simply become older.

It has become different.

And that distinction offers an interesting way to think about something else that develops over time: a marriage.

The Vintage Matters

In wine, vintage refers to the year in which the grapes were harvested. It is more than a date on a label. Weather, growing conditions, vineyard decisions, and countless variables throughout the season influence the character of the finished wine.

No two vintages are exactly alike.

Some seasons are generous. Others challenge the grower. Heat, rain, drought, frost, storms, and harvest timing all leave their fingerprints.

Yet a difficult vintage isn’t necessarily a meaningless one.

It becomes part of the wine’s story.

The same can be said of a life shared over decades.

Forty-five years contains plenty of different “vintages.” There are seasons of celebration and seasons that demand resilience. There are years remembered for major milestones and others remembered simply because of the ordinary Thursday nights, long conversations, unexpected laughter, and quiet moments that filled them.

A life together isn’t defined by a single year.

It is the accumulation of every season.

The Art of Balance

One of the most important concepts in wine is balance.

A wine isn’t balanced because it lacks acidity, tannin, alcohol, fruit, or oak. Quite the opposite. Great wines often contain considerable amounts of each.

Balance occurs when those elements work together rather than compete for attention.

Age can help that integration occur.

Tannins may soften. Acidity remains a structural backbone. Fruit characteristics evolve. Oak becomes less prominent. Aromas and flavors that once seemed separate can become part of a more harmonious whole.

Long relationships have their own version of balance.

Two people don’t become identical over time. They become increasingly familiar with the places where they are different—and increasingly skilled at understanding how those differences can complement rather than divide.

The goal isn’t perfection.

It is harmony.

And like wine, harmony rarely happens all at once.

What Time Reveals

There is a common misconception that aging is simply a process of waiting.

It isn’t.

A wine cannot become great merely because it spends forty years in a cellar. If the wine lacks the necessary structure and balance to age, time will not create those qualities. It will simply reveal what was already there.

The same principle applies to relationships.

Time doesn’t manufacture character.

It reveals it.

Forty-five years provides an unusually long opportunity to discover who someone really is—not only in moments of celebration, but in difficult seasons, unexpected changes, ordinary routines, and all the moments that never make it into photographs.

The remarkable thing isn’t that two people have spent forty-five years together.

It is everything they have learned about one another during those years.

The People Around the Table

For all the science, history, geography, and craftsmanship that make wine fascinating, there is another truth at the heart of wine culture:

Wine is meant to be shared.

A remarkable bottle can be evaluated through aroma, acidity, tannin, body, finish, provenance, vintage, and age.

But none of those measurements can explain why a particular bottle becomes unforgettable.

That often has little to do with the wine itself.

It has to do with who was there.

The bottle opened to celebrate a wedding. The wine poured at a milestone birthday. The bottle discovered on a memorable trip. The vintage saved for an occasion that finally arrived.

Years later, the tasting notes may be forgotten.

The people rarely are.

That is one of the reasons wine remains such a powerful part of human culture. It creates an excuse to slow down, gather together, and give an ordinary moment the attention it deserves.

Forty-Five Years

This September marks forty-five years of marriage for Tammy and me.

Forty-five years is a difficult number to comprehend when viewed as a single measurement of time. It becomes easier when viewed as a collection of seasons.

Forty-five years of meals and conversations.

Celebrations and challenges.

Adventures and ordinary days.

Thousands of decisions made together, large and small.

Like a wine, a life together develops through accumulation. No single moment explains the finished character. Each one contributes something.

And perhaps that is what makes forty-five years so meaningful.

Not the number itself.

The story contained within it.

The Sapphire Anniversary

Traditional anniversary gifts offer another interesting connection to wine.

The 45th anniversary is associated with sapphire—a gemstone valued for its beauty, durability, and enduring character.

Those qualities make the symbolism particularly fitting.

After four and a half decades, love isn’t necessarily louder than it was in the beginning.

It is deeper.

It has more history.

More context.

More understanding.

More evidence of having endured every season together.

The Finest Pairing

Wine has taught us a great deal about patience.

It has taught us about place, season, craftsmanship, balance, and the extraordinary ways that time can transform something without changing its essential character.

But perhaps its most important lesson is simpler.

The best wine is not necessarily the oldest, rarest, or most expensive.

It is the wine that belongs in the moment.

A bottle shared with the right people can become part of a memory that lasts far longer than the wine itself.

That is why, after forty-five years, the most meaningful measure isn’t how many bottles Tammy and I have opened, how many places we have visited, or how many milestones we have crossed.

It is the people who have shared those moments with us.

Wine may be the subject of SOMM&SOMM, but gathering around the table is what gives the subject meaning.

Because ultimately, wine is not simply about what is in the glass.

It is about what happens around it.

A Toast to Time

Forty-five years is a remarkable vintage.

It contains seasons we would happily repeat and others we would never choose again. It contains growth, change, patience, resilience, laughter, discovery, and an enormous amount of gratitude.

Most importantly, it contains a life shared.

Perhaps that is the real wisdom of time.

It doesn’t necessarily make everything better.

It makes what matters easier to recognize.

And after forty-five years, there is one thing I recognize with absolute clarity:

The finest things in life are rarely the things we collect.

They are the people with whom we share them.

So, as we raise a glass to forty-five years, we celebrate not simply an anniversary, but every ordinary day that made the extraordinary possible.

And if you’d like to hear the rest of the story, there’s a song for that.

Sapphire.

“Before the gray… before the miles… there was your smile.”

Happy 45th Anniversary, Tammy.

Thank you for being my greatest adventure—and always my home 🥂

Cover Photo by Doğu Tuncer on Pexels.com