Just sipping some Monterey Pinot, wishing I’d de facto be sipping it in Monterey. But I’m here right where I need be. Babies upstairs in their dreams. Me with glass left, and thinking about what the wine announces to me. She’s exuberant, evasive and pensive in the sip contact but when glass is down I’m left reciting something to self with which I’m unfamiliar. About wine and my eventual vineyard, Jack and Emma laboring, assisting, with block inspections and sorting, even olfactory consideration when in lab. I look down at the glass and prolong the next kiss. I seek to wait, fancifully I want her to wait. Tonight wine principally and this writer have a discussion about us… our past and future the constant current of thoughtful and philosophy currency with me on this wood plank ground. Wine and I will ne’er be chasm’d, or sent to separate sets. We’re coherently coded and with each other arrested. Effusive ebbs in our sittings, walking around juxtaposed enclaves, France and San Francisco, somewhere in Mendocino, Napa, Santa Barbara, Monterey. This Pinot has me on the beach, there with wife when we’d visit her parents when they there lived. Monterey has always riles and magnified Pinot Noir for me in ways my county cant. Not sure why, if its the vocal raspberry and cherry painting or the terrestrial spice equation. I don’t know. I’m not trying to know. I’m caught and I’m smitten, I’m stolen from where I am on this study floor.
She reminds me to stay in wine’s page and paragraph cascade. I would never use scores, I will never write those flabby flop-drop reviews the “experts” or wine “writers” cook in popular pubs. I’m here, with her, this Pinot as she sways and plays in her versified daze, having me in my analytically excessive maze. This is me, what I write, how I write. Wines like this do just this to me, and I go to sleep seeing my vineyard and the Madigan babies doing something out there, either hounding the rabbits or counting rocks, vines, or looking up at birds above certain clone blocks.
I’m back in Monterey, on sand, sipping this and scribbling something either significant or just for the moment itself and that’s just what wine should be each occasion, each breath and turn of head and looking at rocks, the seals on the Monterey docks.
The wine now mollifies, has an oceanic framing to its recital and prophesying, perambulation. Holding the glass to nose and typing with one hand, right, she instructs me to do just this THIS, for relationship’s sake, for understanding composition. Not just the wine but writing itself. Wine is writing. I’m. Not just writing wine or “about” wine but pushing these keys for the writing act itself. Composition. A 1A class. In seat and reading each line for its meteoric assembly and accentuation. I’m caught, newly coded, shown IT. What all this around is for, and why I’m here, doing what I’m doing with wine and literature…. Exacted in newly vinified habit. Monterey, her Pinot Noir rows, me, words, thoughts, sights of years from now, and now. My newly set Now. Another moving of puddle, she says more, now singing. Rocks and sand, sea Highway 1, Carmel, the tasting room, the first time I went to Bernardus.