MOCK SOMM: Kosta Browne Winery, Giusti Ranch, Russian River Valley, Pinot Noir, 2013

IMG_6243So I opened it. Yes, I opened it. Because I wanted to. And I’m sooooo glad I did, elated actually, visibly fractionalized in my joy. The first Kosta Browne I’ve ever opened in my home– “Oh, Mike, you’re such a follower…” Yeah, so? Don’t you buy the wines you follow, or open the ones from the producers you admire? And I didn’t buy this enigmatically verbal bottle, actually. It was a gift from Mr. Michael Browne himself, and I drink this and feel inspired and moved and wanting more exploration of Pinot, but why, I think, none of them will be this good, with the amorous ebb of thick cherry and raspberry and a little Dutch chocolate.. not much pepper or spice but a marvelously meek terrestrial hug and herbaceous jab on “the finish”. But this wine doesn’t finish, it’s prose and poetry and a novel and a short narrative flash. And I couldn’t be more eased and in a wondrously warping Utopia oeno-coma with this bottle, this modernized yet integrity-checkered staple doing true to those imbued Burgundian roots.

Drank the remaining two glasses the following night, which is tonight. And it’s gone. And I’m lowered, with a reflectively slow but charged tide and cognitive seismology, and how, well it’s a Kosta Browne, what do you mean ‘how’? This Pinot makes more more a lover of the type but also more reserved– I mean, how many out there are with this fortitude and charm, allure, enchantment, bewitchedness? Honestly I’m not in my prowess usual to react to what I met in this gifted bottle– and Pinot, such a shapeshifting character and amebic transient of a wine structure I’m not at my most stalwart with the pen, this evening. I’m looking to the Kerouac ‘Book of Dreams’ for answers, since I feel and felt and still so much feel like I’m dreaming after finishing a KB Pinot in my new house, that I’m just a sipping wine-loving-writer-wandered, shamed, and humbled, and taught. And maybe that’s why he gave me the bottle, my new friend Michael, to teach me something; about wine and about Pinot and about me, my unionization of wine and Literature and about everything, some Postmodern pondering. For what? That’s the point: no “point”. Just the moment, the capturing of it in my wine journal, this dream, this new bottle Beat in Pinot’s pervasive pulse– cherishing the trenchant charm of what this is; wine and love and Art, all in Pinot, from a lagniappe, a chorded exhortation and discourse; a class, a notestream, and lecture and story and containing instructional and ambrosial hilarity. A wine that teaches and so much else in its verses, and that’s what I should have been writing about this entire oration; the musical tide of this RRV Pinot’s voice. It was like Michael told me, about the river of Life, riding it and seeing where it takes you, and at times it’s trying and turbulent, but the reward’s there. And I sipped one of them last night and this eve. So I’m sent, taught, reconciled.
Vino. And Literature. Like I’ve always lauded.

MM97

(5/17/15)