For some reason, I stressed about this sitting, asking myself shit like “What do I write?” And “Where do I start?” Isn’t that the exact thing I advise students against?  Either way, I catapult my intricacies to page, my attention sharp this morning to the coffee’s layered chants and instruction.. winemaking team on other side of wall hosing something down, and me here with the keyboard, with the stack of papers I still have yet to grade, in head.  On drive up here, I thought of the tools at disposal, for me a writer to get to his Road, his travels… see and record the world and everything in it.  And it’s simple— all has to be on blog, and all has to  direct and drip in one angle or way or form reconnect and embrace the material metaphysics of wine.  Both as symbol and actuality.  Picture from yesterday, the Alexander Valley Cab in the glass, a dark, gothic, depth of thought, meditation and form.  Narrative, poetic and musical singing to me and needling me, “STAY HERE.  STAY WITH ME.” She said.  Wine, poetry, music.  Not so much a formula but ingredients and constituents in a much more grand composition for the writer.

Then another idea lands…. My worry about not getting to my vino letter.  Why worry, why fret, why beat myself up, but rather use this sitting as the communication with letters, the NaNoWriMo sprint to not just 50,000 words but a bloody finished manuscript.  Huh, imagine that.  Me, finishing, selling, traveling.  This coffee in its paper cup… what about it.  So much about it.  So much about me and what I want from my “career” as a wild wine writer, or journalist.  All the sounds from the crush pad made specifically for me in this sitting.  Making wine then just staring at it in the glass as I did yesterday when Britt and I had just a micro-microcosm of still, peace, a quiet where we could collect and ask each other, “So what did we have to get done today?” The people just kept coming through the door, which I love, couldn’t get enough of.  The first group being toured around by me, tasting from barrels and walking around the crush pad, me sharing with them the idea that wine is more than just “alive” as so many people say and more than just something to be sipped and hoping for some effect.  It’s a story, a series of efforts and lives coming together to make something that represents time, place, the sounds and smells, feels of the tanks as they cold stabilize something.  All senses and senses that aren’t even recognized or categorized… 6th, 7th, 12th.

3,000 words.  Can I please just reach that today?  With all this wined story around me, if I just stay on task and keep writing throughout the day and between tasks, between moving all those cases into the tax paid and wine club cages, it shouldn’t be much an issue.  So many thing working at a winery is just taking pictures of the vineyards around you and walking around in a haltless gawk, tasting wine all day, chatting with people, then you leave.  Vacation five days a week, forever, that’s your career.  No.  What I’m gaining more of a penchant for is everything antithetical to the perception, to the stereo types.  That’s where the gems are for wine writers… in the sweeping, the cleaning, the inventorying (which I still hate and am forcing self to love for page’s sake)—  Winemaker from other property, Mr. David Drake, Lancaster, coming in to drop off some bottles of sparkling for another employee…. See?  Occurrences just the like are what feed my motor for wined manuscript.  SO, I take a growling chug of coffee, thinking my move next, 08:59.  Oh shit, how?  Time, it doesn’t care.  And you know what, nighter does this writer, not this morrow, not at all.  I’m just typing fire to the image of her dark apparitions and seductive geometry.

Offices were never really for me, till I started having visions of my own, a wine creative/creative marketing/creative writing/creative sales solutions office.  Mine, where other creatives lurk and practice their penning and art, for movements in wine and moving wine’s awareness and principal, material story into more known solar systems.  Oui, wine has me everywhere this morning.  All I want to do is write about her, blog her, every step of her construction and rile, till it’s in a glass, tasted, part of a sipper’s story.  What I sipped last night, the Matanzas Creek SB, showing me I need to stay a student of wine and invite everything.  Write about everything.  Even the BOL I just signed for the three sparkling bottles from Foley Sonoma that were dropped off by Mr. Drake.  Everything is to be written about, the Blanc ordered.  So get to work.  Just write.  Stop thinking so goddamn much!

Nearness in feel, in color, wine and coffee.  Not sure what that understanding conveys, but I see it.  The write toward and into his further pages by both.  These winemaking teams, if they didn’t have coffee…. I don’t know what the result would be.  Don’t want to entertain it, really.  David telling me that not much is in barrel, and that they’ll be pressing a whole slew of tanks this week.  Told him I’d love to come by and see but don’t know when that’ll be, with teaching and the myriad that’s my writing daddy life.  This morning, not going back to sleep but hopping to my Keurig to brew cup 1.  That the Craft I did.  That’s what brought me here, in this chair, at this mock-desk in the middle of the cubicle office, seeing self as a wine writing roué, the fulfillment being in the collaborative act between she and wine, telling these wined stories and oscillating and cementing observations while working at the winery.  There’s too much here, and in the wine scape, sometimes I meditate.  But there’s not.  There’s not too much, there’s not enough, there’s never ‘just’ enough.  There’s the stage, the theatre of wine, I write, the sensual sentences connected to each sound and light, tank, barrel, scent, pour.