vinward jot (no edits)

Giving self only ten minutes more to write about wine and what wine is to me, and I see this — this writer’s aim and hopes to understand wine as she wants to be understood, some mythological myriad, question mark constant right in front of me telling all writers to write about her more, and more thoughtfully rather than just shoot out a couple descriptors and attach some bumble-ass-headed score.  Wine is music, wine is light, wine thought, a realization that life is short, shorter than short, and that we in this life the only life we have need not and should never settle for a thing.  Just create what we like, go for our visions and the portrait painted in our heads.  My students this last semester, notably in the ‘5’ class, taught me to just leap, go, go further into what I want.  To be an instructor and cheerer of self, just as I am with them.  Last night sipping the last of the Viogner, and Cabernet from Napa Valley, I know so much more about my place in wine’s parade.  Write it all… the offices to the side of the crush pad where the wine is made, where I now write to the crush pad itself and what happens down there— new barrels and the lab where the writing occurs, the story of the vineyard and the weather of year, the sky, trees, little creeks that are sometimes just walked past, not acknowledged, but only paid attention to when the nearest varietal’s sipped but they don’t know what’s happening.

In my journal today, notes every hour, several if I can… time stamping them all to log and inventory what wine teaches me.  I’m getting older, and like wine that ages the sorting conditions, of the cellar or wherever you have it, should be given prime attention and priority.  Today I’m will be an outlaw, a deserter of sorts, distancing myself from wine’s industry but NOT, ever, wine.  She needs me to do what they, these airy and knotted, lazy critics and “journalists” and “writers” of wine self-knight that they do.  They live in falsehood, as does the industry, much of it, forgetting about wine and realizing only facets to the industry dimension hoping only for profitable province and not wine’s form.

09:20.  Don’t want to open registers, check calendar, unlock cages.  Tasting through the wines isn’t anything with which I have qualm, but even that this morning electrifies me not.  I want to be in the vineyard, in Burgundy with my family, writing at some table in that little cabin.  Need the Road, wine on the Road, stories of everywhere and with everything, everyone in wine’s tory.  

Around me, now, in this office, receipts and cords, a water jug, a phone that I’m sure doesn’t work, the cubicle walls.  This is not my wine story.  Need short stories, articles, sketches of some French hill, a set of small rows for one wine.  Flipping through journal, coming to Kant quote on all knowledge coming from experience.  What am I experiencing in the industry?  Not enough.  But with wine, with travel, noting in the vineyard and in new tasting rooms, on unfamiliar crush pads, nearly and excess.