Having recently returned from nearly a week in Napa Valley, I want to touch on the idea of wine vacations. Not the kind where one visits exotic locales, tastes at wineries or cellar doors and overeats at starred restaurants, but the kind that for me generally follows a trip like that. A vacation from wine, if you will.

After living, drinking and breathing wine 24/7 for a week at the Institute of Masters of Wine Education Seminar in Yountville, I need some time away from the stuff—away from discussions of trellising systems and clones, yeasts and microbial spoilage, markets and global oversupply. I’ve now gone four days without tasting wine at the office, or even drinking the stuff at home. In fact, the only wine I’ve touched in the last four days I poured into a saucepan to perk up a tomato ragu.

As much as I love the world of wine, there are times like these when I’m just not in the mood for any wine at all, often after the conclusion of these sorts of wine-intensive weeks. Whether for business or pleasure, I inevitably reach a saturation point and say “Enough is enough.”

Fortunately, this soon passes. Usually it takes only a few days for the itch to open a bottle to return, although there have been times I’ve gone a couple of weeks without—usually coinciding with a bout of the flu or strep throat. I find that a vacation from wine imbues me with renewed enthusiasm for the subject when I return to it.

When I get back into my wine zone, I feel sharper, my senses more acute; I try weirder, more esoteric bottlings out of a reborn sense of curiosity and revisit old favorites only to find nuances I never noticed before.

How about you? Do you take vacations from wine, and how does it affect you?

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