Have to use restroom quickly but afraid to leave laptop here in conference room.  Ugh…. Feels odd not being at winery… I look at my pictures.  It recounts and re-centers me.  Notifications of cancelled tasting appointments popping up on my phone.  Nothing I can do.  Nothing I really want to do but just keep writing and hit my 3-5k target for day.  Noting what I think I want to do in class… but stop.  Just write, and relax, enjoy the Newness of the story— my Beat-time.  Always on Beat-time, as my friend Paula used to say, says every-so-often when our paths cross, which is hardly ever anymore.

Everyone asking me about “smoke taint” and damage from smoke.  Frankly, tired of being asked that.  I say, embrace it, work with it— then the nihilist says, usually a winemaker, “Oh.. well.. uh.. it’s not that easy…” Yes it is.  It’s in perspective.  It’s in attitude, foresight.  It’s what you see and how you see it.  No, I’m not a winemaker and I never took bloody chemistry, ever, not in high school or college.  But I know about attitude, perspective, and I’m convinced that it determines a lot more than what syllogistic approach will render.

One photo of the vineyard, blurred in background with photo taking center— autumnal shades and palette showing themselves and telling the story of what they’ve been through, how now they get to rest…. I can hear Coltrane and some of his counterparts in that vineyard block even atop what I now listen to.  Can’t rise from this chair.  Just want to look at pictures, pictures I took… think about all the ones I will take.  Staying in the vineyard, and what I’ve captured, what I now look at and examine and write to, makes today one that shifts the story in a beneficial bravado.  What I tell myself now… keep taking pictures, and write to every goddamn shot you stock.  The leaves and the vineyard poles, the dirt, the cluster, the clusters that were left there, just left there to shrivel and away fade.

This one—  Shot weeks before harvest.  Pretty sure a Petit Verdot block that sings with even a slice of a visual visit.  Musical and freeing, encouraging and prominent.  More than the resulting wine.  They’re more than just grapes, more than just wine, or an ag’ product— but stories.  So many stories I don’t have enough life left to research them or become any kind of expert.   And why would I want to be an “expert”?  You don’t develop expertise with what’s in a vineyard.  You establish intimacy.  You establish identity.  An elevated and chord-coded composition.  Tourists, they see something to photograph with their phone, something to “post”, something to send to the people back home to make them jealous, intoning ‘You’re at work ha ha but look where I am!’ I don’t blame them.  At all.  This is ma maison, forever.  It’s a character cast that defies normal physics and perceptive contact.  Layered and loving.