Philosophy and Wine
Dear readers,
The best philosophers of our day have known about this fact for a while: there is more knowledge in a single glass of wine than in every book on our earth combined. They have found every answer they’ve wanted at the bottom of a bottle somewhere, which seems to me like a good way to go about it if I had to choose.
But my favourite part of a bottle of wine tends to be its sticker. Not that I am not also intrigued by its contents, but the sticker just tells you so much. The people writing about the wine always have a very poetic way of doing so, and it always feels very uniquely personal, the way wine is written about. Why don’t we do that for flower bulbs?
Perhaps the problem is that nowadays, flower bulbs don’t really need it, as they are always accompanied by a photograph that shows them at their best. But writing this does make me think of one of our very first American business partners, one who told me, at the very beginning of my (photography-)career, that words can do much more than even a perfect photograph. If you say that a flower has a colour like the heavens fell from the sky, you just know that everyone is envisioning a perfect colour of blue, accompanied by the dream-like feeling of imagining heaven. This man, also a good friend, has recently passed and is no longer among us, pointed this out to me so many years ago, and I still think about it often. He had a very successful mail-order flower bulb company in the United States of America, and he was a masterful writer himself. This was back when you had to sell bulbs (and everything else) by description alone. If you were lucky enough to get space for a photograph, it was going to be black-and-white, so the text had better be good. But when he wrote about flower bulbs, it was as if you were strolling through a garden next to him, looking at everything he pointed out. You could smell the flower bulbs he told you about through the paper, and I think about him every time I read a good description. He has helped me with many things, but this is the advice I probably think about most often.
Nowadays, you have to be more careful about what you write, because if the picture doesn’t include it all, people will doubt your honesty, even if we know flower bulbs can be hard to capture in a photo.
This same dear friend showed me many times that the story behind a flower bulb can be just as captivating as the bulb itself. People love to know where a bulb comes from, and how it has survived being grown in the northernmost area of North Holland, where the trees are curved due to the strong sea wind, and where windmills are trying day in, day put to turn as much of that wind as possible into energy.
These beautiful flowers come from a grower who is one of the largest men you’ve ever met, a man who has the unfitting nickname ‘Poffertje.’ A poffertje is a Dutch delicacy, a tiny pancake made in a special skillet, and he has this nickname because his father’s was Pancake. And when Pancake has a tiny pancake, there is only one thing to call him. And when Poffertje is selling you a beautiful Daffodil, it makes you even more excited to see that flower in your own garden when you know where they come from.
I am writing this newsletter in Santiago de Chile, and I knew what kind of travel day this was going to be as soon as I caught sight of the airplane. Many people were surrounding our flying machine, its nose was opened, cables and other intestines were coming out, and before we knew it: flight cancelled. But by now I have learned never to be frustrated, especially not when it comes to things I have zero influence on. I have learned this from my friend Eric, and when I combine it with my favourite hobby, waiting, I cannot complain. I was impressed with just how quickly the AirFrance people had booked every passenger on a different flight, and I was put on a plane to Paris that same day, from where they would bring me to Amsterdam. But luckily, first I got to wait about thirteen hours.
Muscari armeniacum, the regular muscari.
But we were talking about wine, I think. And wine is made of grapes. In Dutch, we call Muscari ‘little blue grapes’ when talking about them. The Muscari grapes are cheap ones by comparison, I found out.
You can get 50 beautiful Muscari flowers for 7 euros and 50 cents, or the more expensive variety, Mountain Lady, for 9 euros. 9 euros also buys you a nice bottle of wine, which needs about 750 to 800 grapes to be produced. If you had to sell 800 grapes for nine euros, and also have to put those in a bottle while you’re at it, you won’t make it to one cent per grape. Maybe flower bulbs do get the better deal there, but to be honest, the wine guys still have the better writing on their side.
But I think we’re about done, the newsletter has to be translated, too. And before I forget to mention anything commercial: This week, we were surprised with this beautiful Amaryllis, Burgundy Haze.
I always tell our suppliers to let us know if they have more varieties to offer later in the year, and this week I got a call about Burgundy Haze. I was very happy, the pictures can’t quite capture just what this Amaryllis has to show you. When you see the flower, you know right away that you are dealing with a Grand Reserva. The colour is like the flower has been sprinkled with the best red wine… a beautiful flower to adorn your room during a Christmas- or New Year’s party. New in our web shop this year.
Kind regards, and until next week,
Carlos van der Veek
