Sunday, November 1, 2009

The Unity Wine Pour


In an attempt to jazz up my blog, you may have noticed I added a new picture to the title, so I thought I would give a little context behind it.  This was a candid shot taken by our photographer during our wedding ceremony last June and has already become one of my favorite photos of all time.  Since wine and wine making is a central theme in our lives, naturally, it seemed appropriate for that to be a theme for our wedding, as a metaphor for our marriage.  Instead of doing a unity candle after saying our vows, we took a bottle of red wine and a bottle of white wine, each representing our unique characters and qualities, and poured them in unison to create a beautiful rose wine. 

The funny part about it was, we hadn't really practiced how this blending was going to go before doing it real time.  We liked the idea of doing a wine pour and what it represented in our life together, but for all we knew, blending a red and white together out of the bottles could have made a really mucky and ugly color wine.  And it had the ability to get expensive if we tried to "practice" with multiple bottles of wine to try and get the perfect pour.  At 11:30pm the night before the big day, I was up experimenting with 5 ounce glasses of water and trying to decide how much we should pour, what vessel we should pour from, what we should pour into, and just hoping that with the actual wine that it would all turn out okay.  The morning of the wedding, I called Aaron and instructed him to just pick up two bottles, a red and a white wine that he thought would look nice blended together for this very special and unique moment uniting us as a couple.   Nothing like the last minute details! 

In this picture we were blending our two wine bottles together, while our musicians played a violin and keyboard instrumental of "You Raise Me Up."  I remember watching in awe at how our wines poured together turned this gorgeous raspberry color, which happened to be one of our wedding "colors."  And I could have sworn at that very moment, a ray of sunshine peaked out right through the shaded area our ceremony was taking place and shined right through the giant wine glass we were pouring into.  It could not have fallen more perfectly into place if we had spent months planning it.  Go figure.  The one thing we spent the least amount of time planning and left the details of until the very last minute, was one of the most memorable and meaningful moments from our wedding day.  But of course everything was lovely and special.

Another memorable moment from our wedding, was the surprise "groom's dance," when  Aaron and all of his groomsmen came out on the dancefloor wearing lederhosen as a salute to the night we met.  A little background:  Aaron and I met at an Oktoberfest celebration in Minneapolis, ironically, while drinking German beer, and he and his friends were donning authentic lederhosen they had bought in Munich the month prior.  Apparently, I am a sucker for a tall, dark, and handsome goofball in lederhosen. And so our story began.  And so did lederhosen as another theme in our life.  Not as a materialistic theme, but as a symbol of the silly circumstances under which our whole journey began.



So you'll understand why we thought it was so stinkin' cute to dress our precious (now 85 lb) pup in lederhosen for Halloween to continue carrying out this lederhosen theme in our life...