Sitting in my usual. Corner seat before barrels tasting day 2. Only have twenty minutes to collect so I put myself in the poet’s chair, in the student’s seat. Using every breath and thought optimally before seeing more of the wavy verses, people who’ve been to too many spots. But before addressing that, I explore the why. Didn’t find a definite answer or understanding yesterday, with the first day. Tasting from the Roth barrels and me behind the bar, seeing people only want more wine, but what I did see was the appreciation of occasion. No, they didn’t take tasting wine from barrel with as much astuteness or attention as I would, or as I hoped they might. But the why entails a love for the moment. A direction to the wined direction. I love wine just for this just for what I saw yesterday, even the over-sippers, and there were a few— more than I anticipated there’d be, truthfully. The why professes in the tasting room, at the barrel, in wine’s magnetism to bring people somewhere. How much they sip and how seriously they take it is irrelevant, frankly. Wine tells people to go somewhere, and the people go to be around other characters similar. That’s poetic, that’s musical, theatrical and animated. The why in wine, in barrel tasting, is in the walk up that walkway, the first barrel from which you taste. No matter your age, college kid obnoxious or older collector serious, you’re all there concurrently. To taste, yes. But more so to experience. To live, to spend that part of your life right there at that time, taste wine and do what you will with it.
Today I measure will be even more traffic-trounced than yesterday. And yesterday was quite manageable. Some complain about how crazy it gets and about the drunk people, the college kids and whomever else isn’t working and enjoying their day. Not me. As a writer, I take it all in and inventory and deconstruct the stage. People all around me at one point, and person working bar with me left to do something, I think clean up broken glass in women’s salle de bains. I stood. I poured. I talked to everyone, this one kid in particular that wanted to get something sweet for his girlfriend. I told him we didn’t have any sweet wine. He then posed what I thought was the sweetest tasting. Said the Pinot Gris. He agreed. He bought and thanked me for my time, and for being so patient with him when it was him moving in patient perambulation with me. I could tell he was affected by the juice, but I didn’t act any differently or ask if he was okay, or offer him water which I probably should have, back-looking.
Before Day 2 launches, and I’m here and there and everywhere with a bottle in my hand, surveying the people on counter’s opposing terrain, I look out the window at my right, see rain, and breathe. Today will test me, all of us. But I take it in differently being the wine journalist, writer, diarist. I’m in the wine industry, for my thirteenth year, and still see Newness from how people drink to how they talk before and after having too much, to what I say to myself while talking to them. Having the dualistic dialogue. All around wine. The wine is the why. Wine is its own poetic aesthetic, but as well its own psychoanalytic momentum. College English, Literature Instructor in wine’s rooms, noting everything. That’s my why, blended with wine’s.
(3/3/18)