When, there’s always a ‘when’ attached to a ‘what’. Why is that? This is wine. It’s supposed to be easy, fun, relaxed. But no. There’s such a mis-measurement with the wine industry. It’s all fun, drinking, leisure. Paid vacation. Today’s a Friday, nothing calm about this shift. And it’s only 11:11. Everyone’s stressed; moving, spilling, reciting. Am I complaining? I guess, maybe, a little. Threats associated with campaigns and sales, goals— Yes, I get the reality, it’s a business, a job. But, if I’m “selling fantasy”, and a “lifestyle”, then any wine industry management should cultivate a mood catapulting that. Everyone sees barrels, vineyards, the tanks, wine being poured. Even the spills on the counter have their certain romantic print. Do consumers need to know this, about this conveniently contorted image? They should, really. For perspective. It’s Human, wine. It’s not about the elements facing everyone around you, in the industry, behind the scenes and what has to be done and put on a spreadsheet or one some goal scoreboard. The wine… that’s what this is about. It’s. About. The. Wine. Well, that’s what one state of mind reads, then the other yells back, “It’s a business.”
Wait, I intrude, “Aren’t both obvious?” When, was I supposed to realize either? And, what does it matter?
The collection and meditation is not comparable, in any slightest consideration. What it has me deliberating and considering for my story, for the collective narrative of my family and everything around me— People ask me what I write about and if I write about wine and I answer yes but it’s more than wine I’m putting to page. It’s each minuscule wind shoe, each cut cane on the ground, each color in the sky, the cloud patterns and shapes, art… my face being gently lipped by the ambient ballet, invisible but definitively tactile, a lover with me that I’ve always known there and she wants me to have more of such intersections….
You don’t have to like everything that’s poured for you, first. And secondly, be open to everything. Even the wines and/or varietals you’re thinking you may not take to. That’s why they call it tasting. And, be gracious to the person pouring. Wine tasting is that glaring— wine, tasting. Taste everything. And if there’s something you don’t dig, be discrete about your affinity lack for that one-and-a-half ounce, or whatever-splash. Fighting the flight isn’t merely telling the person on the other Side of the bar you’d rather taste something else or that you don’t want to do the SB, or the Chard, or the Pinot, or the-whatever. What this note advocates is to try everything.
Where do I start with the latest Devil Proof dissemination…. First word I wrote the other night was “indescribable”. And essentially it is. But I’ll try, remembering not only that initial meteoric octave in the olfactory sway and romance of her smokey, leather-pulsed, and wildly rich tell and grip. But then, everything after that…. I didn’t want to pair it with dinner, but I did, just from my inability to resist her, further, with the poetic molding of my senses to the way she posed in the glass— vampiric hue, simplified and prolix winks and suggestion. Only letting self have a small kiss from bottle, to align with dish, then after consider the enrapturing apparition more closely.
made. “Oh, I did a single vineyard Malbec from Dry Creek…” My reaction is always, “Really.” Why actuate and release such an effort if the thesis isn’t clear, innovative? With this ’15, even more than the last bottle I had, which I think may have been from 2013, has me closer— Listening, writing, seeing it on every table if I could. I sat in a helix of stratospheric interest, love, and a bit of anxiety. Should I just be sipping this Cubist and ravishingly ideological bottle as I am, just sipping and scribbling? Again she told me, “Stop.”
