To taste or not to taste

​As COVID-19 spikes and political rancor rises to new heights, we are led to wonder if it is a good time to drop in on one (or two) of our local wineries.  To answer this question, I turned to the Bard: “To taste or not to taste, that is the question.  Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take wine against a sea of trouble and by getting looped end them.”  Of course, the Bard’s characters even fantasized about wine: “Is this a wine glass that I see before me, the stem toward my hand?  Come, let me clutch thee.  I have thee not, yet I see thee still.  Art thy not, favored vision, sensible to feeling as to sight?”  Then there is this: “Give me a bowl of wine.  In this I bury all unkindness.”  Or this: “Come, come, good wine is a good familiar creature if it be well used; exclaim no more against it.”  But this might be his best quote on the subject:  “The wine-cup is the silver well, where truth, if truth there be, doth dwell.”
So, then, it seems that the Bard agrees with Lord Tennyson that “tis better to have tasted and tasted than to never have tasted at all.”  Wineries are open – what are you waiting for?