We can all taste wine. But actually writing something meaningful and entertaining about it is another matter entirely. That is precisely why the Gert Crum Wine Writing Prize was established: to encourage writing about wine in Dutch.
Text: Fela de Wit | Image: Gert Crum Wine Writing Prize
The prize is named after Gert Crum, one of the Netherlands’ best-known wine writers and a long-standing lecturer on the Vinologists’ Course at the Wine Academy. It is therefore a fitting name for a prize that centres on the art of telling stories about wine.
No fewer than 46 entries were received for the first edition. From these, a panel of experts selected five stories. One of these will ultimately be declared the winner. But before the winner is announced, let’s first get to know the five nominees. The fourth is Femke Pruis. You can read her entry below.
A new life
Goodness, after all those months, she’d been looking forward to that first glass of wine. Nine long months in which she’d seen herself slowly transform from a normal, functioning person into someone she barely recognised anymore. The shape her body had taken on, the sounds she made just getting up from the sofa, her emotions all over the place. It was still her, and yet it wasn’t. Forty weeks, to the day, but she still didn’t feel a thing. How would she actually know when it had started? And at what point would she have to ring him to tell him to come home from work? Just wait and see, they’d told her. Go for another little walk, bake a cake. Easy for them to say. Had they ever stood there beating butter with a watermelon on their tummy? And besides, she didn’t even like cake. She liked wine.
Just checking one more time to make sure everything was really ready. Made-up cot, check. She’d been ironing the sheets just yesterday. The hospital bag containing her husband’s baggy jogging bottoms and the first babyveste she’d picked out with her mum at Hema. Afterwards, they’d had a smoked sausage sandwich together. Perhaps in thirty years’ time she’d be standing in Hema with her own daughter, just like that. Passport, health insurance card, printed birth plan – tick, tick, tick. It really did look as though she was ready. Well, almost, anyway. She’d saved the most important thing until last.
She carefully opened the door to her private sanctuary, a place where even he had to ask permission to take anything out. How many times had she held these bottles in her hands? She tenderly stroked the neck of a Biondi-Santi Brunello Riserva. 2010, the very same one they’d drunk on their honeymoon in that trattoria in Pienza. She thought of the young Italian couple sitting next to them, eating. Or at least trying to. Whilst one rocked their inconsolable baby, the other quickly took a mouthful of pasta, before they swapped roles. She remembered the tears in the young mother’s eyes when the nonna a few tables away whispered motherly reassurances that everything would be all right. That she should try to eat something. She had then watched as the woman took the baby from her, cradling him lovingly before returning him, fast asleep after half an hour, to his grateful parents. Sipping her Biondi-Santi, she had watched the scene from a distance, unable to believe that what she had just witnessed could ever happen in the Netherlands.
Her fingers continued to wander over the rows of her favourite bottles. Viña Tondonia Blanco Reserva – too complex. Conterno Barolo – too young; Thévenet Côte du Py – too frivolous. None of them quite did the trick. She thought of her friends who had laughed at her more than once when she stood in front of her cupboard again, muttering that she didn’t really have anything to open. They saw two hundred bottles of pleasure. She saw two hundred unopened memories, waiting for the perfect moment to arrive.
Halfway down a row, her eye fell on a slightly battered bottle, which looked like a Burgundy judging by its shape. Every time the drawer had been opened and closed, a bit of the label had come off. It annoyed her that they at Eurocave hadn’t apparently thought this through. She carefully turned the bottle round. The vintage was no longer legible, but she knew immediately which wine it was. Janots & Bos, Meursault 2015. “A top vintage for Burgundy”, she had diligently scribbled in her notebook at the time.
She’d bought the bottle seven years ago from the winemaker himself during her first proper wine tour. After much deliberation, as she’d never spent that much money on a bottle of wine before. It must have been fifty euros, certainly no more, but in her eyes it had been an astronomical sum and she’d had to save for so long just to be able to go to Burgundy at all; the trip that had changed her outlook on wine for good. A week in which the names she’d previously only known from her textbooks and the most expensive sections of the wine list had come to life before her very eyes. A trip that had made her realise why people could be so besotted with Burgundy that they could never get enough of it.
That insight was largely thanks to their lecturer, the renowned Burgundy expert who had brought the week to life with his infectious enthusiasm and his love for the region and its winemakers. He had made her realise that the difference between a grand cru and a village wine sometimes comes down to just a few metres. It was he who had drawn her attention to famous estates, which turned out to lie in complete anonymity behind unremarkable fences. Through his eyes, she had truly seen and understood Burgundy. She had gratefully absorbed every drop of his knowledge, determined never to forget any of it. When she tried her hardest, she could even recall the scents of spring that had hung in the air all week: white blossom, wet stone and the first purple flowers that had poked their heads out of the damp, brown clay.
“2015: a warm, dry vintage that produced ripe, concentrated wines in the Côte de Beaune. A year that is already a delight to drink whilst young, but still has a long life ahead of it, according to Gert”, she had jotted down in her notebook on that spring day in 2019. She swallowed, took the bottle of Meursault from the shelf and closed the door of her wine cabinet. Sometime in the coming days, she would open this bottle. And celebrate her new life.
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