On our final day in the city, we stopped into a Taiwanese coffee shop called Laïzé. As we ordered, the barista explained that the Taipei blend would be floral, whereas the Tainan blend would taste fermented, like wine. Stockholm-syndromed from the blur of Champagne tastings, I ordered the latter, curious to see how coffee could taste like wine. We sat in the industrial, cream-colored stone cafe, and after my first swallow, a clear sensation of stinky tofu filled my mouth. “Do you taste that?” I asked quickly, handing Dan my cup. “On the finish?” Meaning clogged my throat; my father, who was born in Taiwan, had loved that fermented tofu dish.
Dan tried it, but shook his head. He’d eaten stinky tofu before, but still couldn’t locate what I had found. “It means that there’s something on your palate that I don’t have. It reminded you of something that I don’t know the same way.”
I have always felt slightly ashamed that I wasn’t fond of stinky tofu. But I liked whatever remnant of it was resurfacing now, lingering on my tongue after each sip.
I had felt like I was pretending as we’d tasted wines again and again in the country, trying to pull peach from cherry. But I had learned something unexpected: how to access an imagistic reach into the past. Maybe that was why Dan had asked not what I tasted, but what it reminded me of—a question framed in memory, which isn’t static, but can be sparked, as well as built.
What does Champagne remind me of now? It’s the basement chill of the wine caves. The delicate electricity of the bubbles. And the two of us, holding wine glasses in the rain, just a couple of months into marriage, wavy hillsides all around.