me wine

I’m always telling my students, “Make the topic your own.” I need punctuate the same mentality in my wine industry life, I’ll admit.  When some times I get discouraged, or embittered.  Why?  I have to ask myself, “What the fuck are you getting so moody for? It’s the WINE industry!  Make it your own!” This morning, and now, now at 11:40, I force myself to see my wine shop, my wined travels, wined notes… to make everything around me WINE.  The other instructors here, in this department that walk in and out of this conference room, back and forth from their either shared offices or their own, interrupting my types but only ‘cause I let them… see them as consumers and producers, creators like me but I want to be the most noted producer of ideas.  Think of those collective tasting room with like severn or eight producers in the walls, or those one-story buildings with like five or six sovereign tasting rooms on their parcel.  I want to be the producer of idea producers in this department.  I start taking notes for today’s meetings, English 5 first—  “So?” I write at the top of the little page.  Wonder what this will encourage, discussion-wise.

Old wine writings, where I tried to be a critic, I guess you could say, to others which were just rants about the industry and about people that come into the tasting room.  There should never be the nay on a wine blog, or in any shape, style, tilt or tell of wine writing.  It’s wine, ‘get a grip’ I say to the old self in these old writings.  Wine… wish I had a glass now.  Seriously, why not.  When Alice and I did the whole Napa Wine Train thing, I had a glass of that Syrah at 10-something.  So why not now, at 11:46.  Well, I have no wine on me, for one.  And 2, I urge and surge, hurt to write.  I want to pile these wined thoughts so high, past any fucking ceiling or cloud cover.  Wine and I have a career to build… books to write… some re-writing and reconsideration to lament, cement.  Time to make a dent.

I thought about where I was earlier this morning, five years ago.  Haven’t gone on the blog yet to see what I was writing, but I know I wasn’t as content as I could be.  Or content at all, working under a tyrannical manager at a winery which was less a winery and more a wine factory, purchased recently by a big corp, and utterly surrendering its identity and integral narrative.  Antithetical to what I think of when I think “wine country”, or “going wine tasting”…. Here I am, now, nearly 39.  Might as well be 40.  Might as well be 80, or past that.  Time just keeps with its talk and sprint.  It doesn’t wait for us, wine reminds.  The other day talking with those two ladies in the reserve room, while pouring wine and talking the wines’ languages, discussing what brings people together and how the clock is a cruel reminder and insignificant, concurrently.  Still with those thoughts, still having that conversation only now with Self.  Making my wine life so my own that I’ll be envied, even by other frames of Me, my mind and meditative dimensions…

(4/11/18)