UNDER $75 There is nothing like a great bottle of wine paired with the perfect book. Reading is just one of those things I hear so many people, including myself, say they wish they did more of. I have taken a lot more time to read more and I don’t regret it. What I have found is that some books read better with different wines. Yes my friends, I have created an exquisite art if book and wine paring.
Sometimes it’s a bit more simple than others. But sometimes it takes a really special bottle of wine to get me through the first several pages of a book. In this particular case I chose a bottle of Groth because I genuinely feel that if I am reading any book that is encouraging self growth or realization it would be the equivalate to a therapy session. Therefore, I can treat myself to slightly higher priced wine, like Groth, because a therapist is more expensive. And I am not able to have a therapy session in a bubble bath or with a bottle of wine. In my humble opinion it really takes the experience of self growth to much higher level of fun.
What I love about the wine
EVERYTHING! I love everything about this wine! Groth is rich, yet smooth. Powerful, yet not overpowering. And each sip is filled with sweet aromas of blackberry tart and ripe plums, that finish with just a linger taste of wild blackberries, and dried black currant.
This cab is perfect with rich hearty meals or a quick feel good book. I am not one to judge a bottle on it’s wine spectator ratings but this wine does have 90 plus points across the board, and I agree, my uneducated just well experienced palate gives it an A plus!
Groth wines have a collection beyond just a Cabernet Sauvignon. This family owned vineyard also offers an Estate White, which is on my list of wines to try, Sauvignon Blanc, Chardonnay, and of course a beautiful selection of Reserve and collectible Cabernet Sauvignon.
This particular bottle you can find yourself paying between $65-$75 buck for online or for a fair and well wroth $65 buck directly on their site directly.
What I love about the book
The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari: A Fable about Fulfilling Your Dreams & Reaching Your Destiney by Robin S. Sharma. Stop it! This is a must read if you are in a runt in your life or have looked at your list of goals lately only to find that not a single one of them have been reached in over a year.
One would think with the title the book encourages you to just sell everything and become a total minimalist. And it does, but not in the way you would think. It encourages you to rethink what is important and why you are doing what you are doing. Not really to just leave your job, that isn’t realistic but I do think sometimes we get caught up in things and lose focus on we once found joy in it. sometimes I feel we have out grown situations and its time to find a new situation that gets our excitement levels up again.
I will share my greatest lesson from the book with you and then I will you to think for yourself what this book can or has brought to your own life.
There is a part in the book where the attorney who left his high gig to find himself is talking to his old colleague that was his old understudy or something like that. Anyway, the former attorney is taking him through this visual exercise that included a fable told him by the Yogi he had met along his journey. So as I was reading I decided to to the visualization as well. The story read:
You are sitting in the middle of a magnificent, lush, green garden. This garden is filled with the most spectacular flowers you have ever seen. The environment is supremely tranquil and silent. Savor the sensual delights of this garden and feel as if you have all the time in the world to enjoy this natural oasis. As you look around you see that in the center of this magical garden stands a towering, red lighthouse, six stories high. Suddenly, the silence of the garden is disturbed by a loud creaking as the door at the base of the lighthouse opens. Out stumbles a nine-foot-tall, nine-hundred-pound Japanese sumo wrestler who casually wanders into the center of the garden. He is naked except for the pink wire cable covering his private parts.
As this sumo wrestler starts to move around the garden, he finds a shiny gold stopwatch which someone had left behind many years earlier. He slips it on, and falls to the ground with an enormous thud. The sumo wrestler is rendered unconscious and lies there, silent and still. Just when you think he has taken his last breath, the wrestler awakens, perhaps stirred by the fragrance of some fresh yellow roses blooming nearby. Energized, the wrestler jumps swiftly to his feet and intuitively looks to his left. He is startled by what he sees. Through the bushes at the very edge of the garden he observes a long winding path covered by millions of sparkling diamonds. Something seems to instruct the wrestler to take the path, and to his credit, he does. This path leads him down the road of everlasting joy and eternal bliss.
If you could get through the whole story without anxiety good for you! My exercise was more like this…
You are sitting in the middle of a magnificent, lush, green garden….. My garden was small and round with beautiful perfectly trimmed green shrubs creating my circular garden. I had a nice cement bench in near the back of the garden that faced a beautiful water fountain in the center of my garden. I was sitting on it very happily.
You are sitting in the middle of a magnificent, lush, green garden…..Suddenly I started to panic! Wait what stop, I have pretty fountain there, and 6 story towering light house? WTF?!? It doesn’t fit! It’s destroying my fountain and tearing apart my pavers. Wait now there’s a sumo dude? Wait stop! No they are wrecking garden! Stop it!
The rest of the story was a blur and that was enough reading for that night. I finished my wine and thankfully calmed down. Later that night as I was in bed I started to think about my crazy reaction to a stupid story that wasn’t even true. In the book the author explains what each element symbolized. The garden was the mind. That night I realized my mind was very closed. which was weird because I felt I was always very open minded but in reality, after two kids, a few moves and the responsibility of life, my mind just became very safe and closed.
If it was a therapy session I felt that by page 38 of he book I had already had my first break through. And all it cost me a was glorious bottle of Groth.
Happy reading!