At the market, the girl picked out the wine: it was sunset-colored, more orange than red or pink. Émile had never heard of the type and, afterward, he could never manage to conjure up its name again. At her parents’ house, they opened the wine and had it alongside a first course of braised leeks in mustard sauce and it was the most glorious thing Émile had ever tasted, he said. The wine was sharp and dry and acidic, but also laced with honey. It was like the whole day at the beach had been boiled down and put into a bottle and then served cold, still smelling of all its good, warm summer smells.

Years later, back in Pittsburgh, Émile chanced upon the same wine for sale in a shop. He’d been looking for it for years but hadn’t known what to ask for. He recognized it immediately, though, from the label and also the orange color, and he bought a bottle to take home and then picked up some leeks and whole grain mustard to go with it. But, as he would always tell it to me, when he tasted it all those years later, he realized it wasn’t the wine, it had never been the wine. Rather, it had been “the flavor of the whole day,” as he used to put it—that was what he had been tasting back then. It was brewed, that flavor, from a complex assortment of impressions, the beach and the bike ride and the girl and her hair in his mouth and her family’s second-floor apartment with its windows open to the street and the leeks in mustard sauce and then also, finally, the wine. But it had never been just the wine.