6/9/19
Starting bills, with day, or day with bills. Budgeting the winery in my head. Am I getting serious about this, about having my own little label, or wine shop, selling and talking about wine, writing about the Road there. Yes. No need for question marks. Question rhetorical, or if not rhetorical then antagonizing.
Paid credit card, which is all but done. Money aside for tasting room, the Merlot I want to make this vintage…. Two barrels of Merlot, same everything, just to show how each barrel is its own life, voice, world, “ecosystem”. Its own beat. And what better than with Merlot.
Pinot from last night, still some left. Thinking about bringing in, but would rather keep here for my own experiment to see how it lives, survives the 24 hour rest, any oxygen sneaking in through sides of cork and bottle’s neck’s inner face. That’s what I’ll do.
Getting in shower in a bit, then up to Jimtown to write, walk a vineyard…. Start my wined day. Take notes for meeting tomorrow with sales exec guy.
Back to money doc…. How money just flies away, as Dad joked with me long ago. Joked but wasn’t joking. Have always seen my dad as sort of a money master, and he’s proven to be such, as long as I’ve known him. Wanted to move us to San Carlos, build house, he did. The Sunriver home, made happen. I’m 40 now, time to be more stringent and lone with money, singular projects. Why not just have one, be lone. With my wine Room…. Thoughts and thoughts, watching my babies on the couch watching Sandlot, a film that rewinds my mind so many years it makes me harshly realize where I am, at fucking 40.
Wine gives me a second start, a re-start. Focus on her, what she wants, what she’s drawing, what light she discloses and words put to page. Nothing can hurt you with her songs playing, with her scenes queued.
Something I’m working on…
…not just about wine, but this, life, what I’m to do and how to be a more consistent and found character for my family. Family… this is all for them. Not for me, at all. Sure I enjoy wine and writing about it, but it’s more than that. Like the time when my friend Chris and I went to John Ash and had each a red, he a Cab I think and me the MacPhail Pinot. We tasted back and forth, shared, discussed and deconstructed as Chris at the time was the Lab Lead at Roth, while I was the tasting room narrator helping manage the room and just selling. Titles didn’t matter, we didn’t try to eclipse the other. We spoke, we listened. We lived in that moment at that table with people around us, pairing what we ordered with wine with our small bites. I see that happening in my Room, the tasting room I eventually have. People in, talking, about wine or not. As long as there’s life present, there, to its own music and beat.
No new wine, last night. St. Francis Cab, I think the ’16. Need to be better about noting vintage, I know. The wine was more gripping and seemingly aggressive and with its own loving growl and scratch. The oak and “varietal” character didn’t and still don’t matter to me. IT was the wine and me there in the kitchen, again, like the Chardonnay the night before. I saw the wine and felt her walk, communication and order. Cabernet conversation, from the pen and paper, the walls and counter. Everything was where it should be. Like the piece I wrote yesterday on Dave, I was just thankful to be alive, there, in the kitchen with the Sonoma Cabernet realizing I’m alive and that I’m sipping that with intention. The story clearer to me as a writer of wine and nothing else. Wine is the definition from denotative and connotative peaks for me and my Now.
Something I’m working on…
…like, “chocolate” for a Cabernet, and “wild berry” for a Sonoma Valley Zin but I thought it sounded so lazy and effortless, like I didn’t care about the wines I was tasting. Like the wine deserved more than that. And she did, does. I do, too. If I were a wine right now, I’d be not exactly engaging, inspiring, or even drinkable. So I continue to play the game, first changing the music I’m listening to, some Lo-Fi Hip-Hop instrumentals on Spotify, some playlist I found. Actually I think it’s more trip-hop, or ambi-hop. I don’t know, but it’s not helping my temperament. Ugh, neither is this new track.
There. Thievery Corporation. Much better. What I see playing in my eventual wine room, MY tasting room, pouring MY wines. So… the descriptions, I’m still there, wanting to play with them, yes play the game but be more playful and not in any dote predictable with what I write about wines I’m tasting. The other day actually tasted a bottle of DuMol Pinot that a girl I work with at Lancaster brought in from the night before, an even she worked at the Mayacama club or whatever. The wine was realized in its identity, with busybody cherry and berry layers, promises of cherry and mint, some rich and compact rain-told soil. Not like “forest floor” as so many of these rusty bot wine “writers” put to page about Pinot, but with a nearly palatable terrestrial seduction to her. The DuMol reminded me what I need to be doing, and differently that all these others assembling paragraphs about wine. If you could call them paragraphs. If you could call them assembled or coherent, convincing or even alive.
I have been advised, told, suggested, even taunted to write about wine. Only wine.
Wine… what do I do
with her, now. What do I write, narrate. Rather than think about it, I just summon stories from the tasting room, and then think of all the vineyard walks I’ve taken self on. Then how I need a new wine to write, tonight. Not the same wines I’ve been drinking, lately. All the St. Francis bottles. Something new, something I’ve never known. That Howell Mountain Cabernet from Robert Craig. Maybe. Too early in the day to think about that. So I draw my tasting room, the one I own. My crush pad, the barrels, how I’ll narrate my story, how it all started with the idea of wine and literature and the literary, narrative qualities and reality of wine.
She’s a whole question, worldly inquiry that I can only blindly follow and chase. Wine. She always introduces something beyond what’s sipped. It’s so much beyond what you see, and what think of, what you want from wine. Abundance, thought, life, the reality reminded that you’ll be gone one day. Everything around you is temporary. You, are temporary. So the story need be lived wildly, madly.
Much why I woke as early as I did this morning, and why last night while having that last sip of Sauvignon Blanc all fear and anxiety I had from days recent just flew away from me like it was bored with me. I had nothing more to offer in terms of victim, victimhood. It was done, because I was done. She elevated me, again. Again. She always does. With her visual, with her movement and music, all of it. More than nuance, or some flavor suggestion, but helix of ideology and possibility, dreaming and the dream bowing to a created, composed reality.
I’m being taught again, all over again about wine and what she really means. She reminds me, again, that I am only to write her, to her and from her. I will. (6/5/19)
Self note ….
You have to write more today.
The last few days’ count is UNACCEPTABLE.
5/25/19
Each step.
Know your steps and know
your Now.