What 40 years of friendship tastes like

We've known each other since 1985. That's not a flex, it's just a fact, and at some point a fact long enough becomes a small piece of architecture you live inside without noticing.

Forty years of friendship doesn't taste like anything you'd expect. It doesn't taste like the big moments — the weddings, the funerals, the move across the country and back. Those are the postcards. Those are not the trip.

What it actually tastes like

It tastes like a slightly-too-warm Cabernet, in a mismatched glass, on a porch, in October. Russ is in the chair he refuses to throw out. Todd has the dog at his feet. Neither of us has spoken in maybe eleven minutes and that's totally fine.

It tastes like the third bottle of the night, when one of us says "do you remember" and the other one already does.

It tastes like the time we drove to Maine in 2003 and got hopelessly lost and didn't care, because we had a six-pack and a road map and that was enough infrastructure for the day.

Why we made the cellar

We didn't start making wine because we love wine. We started making wine because we wanted a thing to do together that took long enough to give us an excuse to keep showing up. A batch of red is six weeks minimum. That's six weeks of "hey, I'll come over Saturday and we'll rack it." Six weeks of texts about temperature and SG readings that are really just texts.

The wine is the side effect. The friendship is the actual product. We just don't tell people that on the bottle.

What you do with forty years

You don't do anything with it, really. You just keep showing up. You keep answering the phone when the other guy calls at 9:47 on a Tuesday because his kid did a thing. You keep driving the two hours when it matters. You keep making wine in the basement on a Saturday because the basement on a Saturday is where the friendship lives now.

And every once in a while, on a porch in October, you taste it. You don't say anything about it. You just notice.

Then you pour the next glass.