’17 Voice Cuvée

Writing with vineyards around me.  I’ve always said that if you want to be in the wine industry, or do something with wine, at all, you need to be in the vineyard.  At least some days.  Today, raining in Dry Creek, and I have no problem walking the rows and getting my work shoes dirty.  My thoughts on wine this new year are again enlivened, again brought to an expository surface.  Where it’s my only topic but not–  where I’m learning again about my presence in wine’s business, in these vineyards, where the vines around me and the little drops that hold to the cordons tell me to not care so much, to get disconnected, to not have such a mission and just explore.  “Look at where you work, live, write,” the Cabernet vines state, “do you know how many wish they had this, dream about this and only experience this in some dim- witted publication or on some website?” I slow down and listen but keep walking, taking pictures of the vines, the mud to the right of me.  Life will be more lively, more of a life if I take the wine’s counsel and casual advice, let go and just allow myself or some sense of sense or self, in this new year as I do nothing but age, and just wine-live. Stop overthinking.  Be in the vineyard.  Be in the moment.  Be me with the wine.  Be more like the wine and less a writer, less a mortal monkey, less one with a job or even career.

The vineyards are “around” me, but now my language.  This is what many in the industry fail to do.  They view their presence in wine’s world and industry is just a job, a “career”, some lifestyle to tout and sell.  It’s more than even ‘a life’.  Certainly beyond ‘life-style’. Wine this new year becomes all senses.  The sixth, seventh, tenth…  new dimensions and deliveries of ideas in the vineyard block I currently meander about and when I get back in my car, listening the the clouds above Dry Creek Road throw their voice at my Passat’s shell, windshield.

Not sure what possessed me this morning about wine.  Could have been the reality of rain, thinking of last night’s Pinot with its phantasmic texture and tones, or just what the vineyard wants.  Every vineyard I’ve ever walked, now speaking to me and telling me to write differently–  Always come back to wine.  Think of everything that wine’s dimension and vast existential layer has done to you, to your senses and language and Personhood.  I started in ’09 blogging about wine at the recommendation of my sister-in-law.  My first instinct was to dismiss her, but I posted here and there, abbreviated blurbs on Zin, or Merlot, my sister’s winery.  That was my singular stride.  But I strayed, I separated from her counsel.  I come back now.  2017, where I care but not too much, just throw my self and sense of any sense to wine’s aggregate story.  Before getting back in my soaked carriage, I look again, listen, see if the blocks have any further insistence.

(1/3/17)