
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.