It could have been everything it wasn’t.

It could have been a load of pretentious codswallop with indecipherable art and mediocre wine.

But it wasn’t.

At the recent wine and art pairing event at Bortodoor, I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed myself. I went because I’m a fan of the artist, Michael Pettet.

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect.

I’m not a fan of red wine. I’d even go so far as to say I have an aversion to it.

Anthony de Mello, speaking to me from beyond the grave, figured out what was going on. And a timely reminder from him via Mark Hofreiter’s blog, set me up for an experience that would literally change my life.

Chapter 38 of de Mellow’s Awareness had this for me:

If you had a bad experience with an American or were bitten by a dog or had a bad experience with a certain type of food, for the rest of your life you’d be influenced by that experience. And that’s bad! You need to be liberated from that. Don’t carry over experiences from the past. In fact, don’t carry over good experiences from the past either. Learn what it means to experience something fully, then drop it and move on to the next moment, uninfluenced by the previous one. You’d be traveling with such little baggage that you could pass through the eye of a needle.

I had a bad experience with red port wine.

In Alaska.

On a Monday.

In winter.

It was hot port. Too many hot ports. So many hot ports that, ever since, sitting beside an open packet of wine gums turns my stomach.

As a result, the closest I’ve gotten to red wine is the Hungarian Siller – a red that’s a shade darker than a rosé.

At wine tastings, I usually pass on the reds, my friends benefitting from my reluctance to partake.

But this time, I decided I was going to face my demon.

Our challenge was to taste six wines and using the prompts I sense… I feel… I remember… jot down our reactions.

We then did the same for the 12 Pettet pieces of art hanging in the bar.

We mixed. We mingled. We chatted. We shared. And over the final red, we shared more broadly in a free-flowing unstructured conversation about memories and senses and feelings and wine and art. All of us contributing.

Pettet said of his art:

When I’m done, I’m done. It doesn’t meaning anything unless it means something to somebody else.

As our conversation showed, his art means different things to different people. It’s all subjective. The wine. The art. So much of what we experience, so much of what we remember, is coloured by those we were with. A mediocre wine with good friends is remembered as a great wine. A great wine in bad company loses some of its shine.

The wines don’t change – we do.

Come with an open heart and an open mind, the blurb said.

And we did.

A thoroughly enjoyable event.

While I won’t be rushing out to buy a bottle of red anytime soon, I’m on the road to recovery – thanks to the crew at Bortodoor, who are relentless in their passion for introducing great people to great wine.