"What kind of water will you have?" asked my hostess at a dinner party. She offered fizzy and flat, French and Italian, mountain glacial and deep artesian. I could also choose natural or flavored, iced or room temperature - with lime wedge or lemon twist.
Actually, I was surprised at the somewhat limited choices offered by my hostess. Our corner grocery store alone carries 31 brands of bottled water - from sources in France, Canada, Wales, Germany, Italy and Norway, as well as the United States. The water comes from ancient springs, high mountain streams and mineralized deposits. Three colors of bottles - clear, sea green and deep blue - and all with elegant labeling.This so-called "designer water" has taken its fair share of abuse for appearing to be a pretentious extravagance. But the same criticism could be made of the marketing of beer, wine and hard liquor. Or even films and novels and music. The appeal is to the imagination - to the romantic side of human nature.
I like fancy water.
I'm delighted to drink a glass of liquid that began as snow in the French Alps hundreds of years before I was born, then became ice in a glacier, melted into deep underground springs. Finally bottled and hauled all the way across sea and land, it sits available on my grocer's shelf.
For a very small price, I can have a reflective reverie in a glass - revealing the wonders of nature, the inventiveness of the industrial revolution and the plea-sures of a poetic view of life.
Moreover, this liquid is good for me. It is me, as a matter of fact - 90 percent of my body is water. I'm pleased to have my essential juices get an occasional transfusion of fanciful pizazz.
There is a high end of the water market as yet untouched: rare and historic water. I'm thinking beyond natural purity - of water that has value because of its age or its association with special events or because there simply is no more of it ever to be had. This is the fine-wine division of bottled water.
A few examples: Several years ago, a former student brought me a liter of water all the way from the spring at Delphi in Greece - a source from which the noble Greeks of the fourth century drank when they went to consult the oracles of fate. I drink a little on April Fool's Day.
One Christmas, my wife gave me a bottle of water from the creek we hike alongside in summer. She had carefully filtered the water and filled the bottle on my birthday. I've great memories of fine days in that valley. We drank a toast with the water during our Christmas dinner - a toast to past happiness and present joy.
I know a man who saved a bottle of Colorado River water from the days when the river ran free - before the Glen Canyon Dam turned it into a silty lake. That bottle sits on a shelf in his office in a place of honor - marking both his younger days and the time of an American West that's gone forever. Sometimes he smiles when he sees it. Sometimes it brings tears to his eyes.
Once, I participated in a christening ceremony using baptismal water that had been collected from rain dripping off the fly of a tent during the weekend of camping when the couple conceived their child.
And I attended a first-anniversary dinner celebration of an April wedding that had been turned into a magical occasion by an unexpected snowfall. The bride's father had collected the melting snow and brought a bottle of the water as a priceless anniversary gift.
I realize the examples I've given probably can't ever have much value or meaning if commercially produced. They have two secret ingredients that can't be manufactured or bottled: imagination and memory. Such vintage refreshment is always a product of home brewing. The liquid is flavored by experience and given character by the creative efforts it takes to fill the wine cellars of the heart.
Let the glasses be filled and lifted. Cheers!