There is a term in winemaking I only half-knew until this winter. As wine ages in the barrel and the bottle, a portion of it evaporates. Slowly, invisibly, year after year, some of it simply leaves. The old cellar masters, needing an explanation for the loss, decided the angels were taking their share.
I met this idea properly in the basement of an old manor house at Vriesenhof, outside Stellenbosch. A winter afternoon, six friends, a sommelier leading us down into the smell of old grapes. Dusty dates scribbled on the shelves. 1988. 1986. 1982.
With my fiftieth birthday a few weeks off, I asked, half joking, whether anything from '76 was hiding down there. The sommelier squinted, lifted a finger, and disappeared into the deeper dark of the cellar. He came back holding a filthy bottle of red and wearing a slanted smile. The label was unreadable. The cultivar uncertain. The age of it, undeniable.
Wine bottled the year I was born.
He held it up to the light. Fifty years of evaporation had done its quiet work. Of the original 750ml, maybe 650 remained. The angels had been generous with themselves.
He was not optimistic. Corks this old are brittle; wine this old is usually vinegar. He eased the cork out with the care of a surgeon and poured us each a small taste. We braced ourselves.
It was sublime. Smooth, sweet, alive. It had aged well.
I have been thinking about that bottle ever since. It stood on a shelf at my fiftieth birthday party a few weeks later, empty now, still dirty. I refused to clean it. Something in me knew the dust was the point.
Here is what I keep circling. We spend the first half of life filling the bottle. Building, achieving, labelling. The label matters enormously then. The estate, the vintage, the awards printed proudly on the front. We work hard on how the bottle reads to the people picking it up.
And then time starts its quiet taking. The label fades until it can't be read. The level drops. Things we were certain we would keep forever simply evaporate. Youth, roles, certainties, people. The angels take their share, and they do not ask permission.
I used to think of this only as loss. I am less sure now.
Because the taking is also a distillation. What evaporates is volume. What remains is essence. The wine that survived fifty years in that bottle was not diminished wine. It was concentrated presence, the whole point of the thing, everything unnecessary given up to the dark of the cellar.
Standing at my own half-century mark, I asked myself the honest question: vinegar or vintage? And the honest answer is a bit of both. There were seasons where bitterness and fear made my decisions for me, and they were dreadful decisions. There were seasons where grace invited me deeper, and I sometimes accepted. Richard Rohr gave me the phrase for it decades ago, in the title of the first book of his I ever read. Everything Belongs.
The vinegar seasons belong. That is the part I resisted longest.
What I notice now, in myself and in the people I sit with in my work, is how much energy we spend trying to stop the evaporation. Gripping the roles. Restoring the label. Topping up the bottle with achievements so the level never visibly drops. It is exhausting, and it does not work, and the angels take their share anyway.
The alternative is stranger and simpler. Let the label go unreadable. Let the level drop. Trust that what remains, unlabelled and unadvertised, is the truest thing you have. Transparent glass, brittle cork, no awards left on the front. Just the essence, as it is.
The old cellar masters had it right, I think. They lost wine every year. Could have named it theft, but chose to call it an offering. A share, given to something larger, in exchange for what the years were making of what stayed behind.
The angels took their share of my fifty years too. Friends, certainties, versions of myself I was fond of.
But what's left in the bottle is sweeter than I expected.
And that's okay.