09:00. Exactly thirty minutes to meditate, writing, write something I can either post or sell or…. Why not just write. Don’t worry about the end-game, any end at all. This morning I find myself at an intersection of decisions, coming closer to 39. Simplify. Less. I’m expanding from and in and toward the meta of all things, all places. Me. Walking into the Windsor Starbucks to get coffee, thinking to self and posting somewhere that “…it’s literally that simple, that fancy.” A winery person, me, on the way to the winery thinking down the Road, down my wine business and industry path, as so many of us in the industry do. Want a shop, of course… my retail business, and here at Roth I learn more than I ever have at any winery.
The wine industry is a template, a “platform” as much I hate that word from its recent and still overuse, and ground of training and practice, creative experimentation. Co-worker walks in and trots to her desk, and I look at phone, wife messaging me to see if drop-off went okay with babies. Before I can answer her, I think ‘career’. A career in the wine industry and how so many want one, and how few think about planning before going into it. What do you want your focus to be? Sales? Winemaking? Hospitality? Just some of the thoughts in my head this morning. No mood, just meditation. Not trying to be aesopian, just everywhere in the morning and what a winery day wants me to do. I’m going to taste through the wines as I always do, but take no notes, unless I perfectly have to.
Wine industry, me…. What do I want? Well…. Lots of layers to that answer. Much of what I want I already do, have, here at this winery. But, money’s a concern. Not so much a concern, really, I just want more of it, as so many do. So, rather than listing problems, let’s catalogue solutions. Start with self, with where you are, the “meta” as I noted, but more than that. With the crush pad and the barrels they have out on the flat, the bottles behind the bar, any appointments we have, the people in those appointments, what they ask and what they want…. Wine, bringing us all together and rowing us closer to a fine collectedness. I see wine with a poet’s lens, the literary retinae. Here, in the office where I can see no vines or bottles but if I go downstairs I can see everything. Music in every image and promise from the winery.
Before coming here to Roth to help manage, Dad said “Make it yours.” What I need do more. Do… don’t just primrose and vow. So, like now, I’m in the chair looking at my friend’s bag on the ground, she’s in her cube doing I don’t know what. Doesn’t matter but it does, but it doesn’t to what I want to write about wine— the floors of the tasting room, the windows, the Bison on the hill, there’s something strange about that but then oddly romantic. Words in my skin, fingernails and in each sip of the 4-shot mocha I bought a few miles away. Chalk Hill Road, music all the turns and other contours to the Road which would make the car-sick car-sick. But me, I sway, fly, lean and enjoy the wind of the cement, how my vehicle moves with its driver encouraged and emboldened by the vines’ image.
If in the industry, make it yours. Don’t let a thing discourage or down or sink you. You and you, and you are wine. It’s more than a matter of making it your own, or “yours”, but giving your story to wine’s story. Having them blend. It’s business, it’s an industry, but not at all…. It’s you. Speaking the language and syncopation of each offering, each bottle, the voice and decision of you and the wine, the decisions you make together. What you say to those people that walk into the tasting room…. A room of tasting and of life, of discover and music, poetry and realization that wine is much more than a business or industry, or even You. It’s all of us… the clock and life, the clock reminding us that we only have so much life. Wine musings from me, writing freely before my day starts, yes, as well as a promise even though I said I would write any in this chair, this morning. I’m going outside any and all containments, boxes with these next eight or so hours.
There should never be a loss for me, of what to paginate, when writing about wine at a winery. Even over this music in my ears, I can hear the crush pad bangs and crashed, barrels being tossed one way or the other even drowning out co-worker running down those outside steel or metal, loud stairs to do something. Here at a winery, me, a day, not a shift but a peripatetic pulse and sprint through images all. I can see the clock from my eye’s corner. I try to ignore it, the little bastard, but I can’t really. I know I have to clock in soon and it’s not something I dread but something I very much anticipate with fervent eagerness.
Want words…. Words from people, people visiting for the first time. And yes, from pour to pour they’ll say something that’ll make me or myself and someone behind the bar avec moi laugh, sometimes visibly. But that’s what I can use… that’s what will be, I don’t know, entertaining? Educational? Don’t need to know, now. I need to get to work. To work, writing. Capturing everything I see here, at a winery. I’m not just another winery worker, or tasting room what-have…. I’m recording, trapping, studying what I see for me and anyone else in the industry… hmmm…. And, those wanting into the industry.
(2/13/18)
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.”
11:18. Been a day so far but finally I can sit, go through the few pictures I was able to pocket and store earlier from a vineyard off Guerneville Road. Sometimes you need to take yourself out of the picture to understand it better. That’s where my head is, presently. Could have woke just before 5 this morning but didn’t. No dwelling, just staring. At my pictures… the one of the leaf, the one of that wheel or jagged pulley. Wish I could have stayed out there all day. Wish the whole day could have been out there then it wouldn’t have been as it was.
just write. Refusing to be pinned and penned in that shared adjunct office I come here to the conference room. Have thirty minutes to write, and I have no idea about what. Today has shown me a harsh side to days, principally. But I’ll write through it. Out of it. What if I gave the best lectures of my career over the next few hours? I could do that, right? I will. Just talking to them. Will be in Room in 27 minutes. Which means logically I have 17 to write. But write about what. I’m an adjunct instructor of English here in the conference room of the English department fulfilling no part of my contractual duties. Should be grading, but no. Why. Want to feel free. Free from the day. Just for a minute. I know… this isn’t very wine writer-y of me. Not sure I care or even want to talk about that dimension of my direction, if it’s a direction.
I’ll slightly edit and post shots later. Right now I need a meditation. A separation. Not so much a release, but reason, reasoning. Getting distracted by life and bills, obligations, appointments, and all compounded by certain ingredients since the fires. Nothing I can do now, and why get annoyed with what you see on the drive up ‘SM’, then on Coffey? Just drive, keep going. Focus on the vineyards as you did this morning. Look through my old photos for something of focus. And I find something… leaf during fall transformation. Need a walk, now… well, you’re going to get one. Across campus. To class. My mood falls, tailspins, just want the day to walk vineyards in France, Spain, Portugal, anywhere but here— Not right what I’m feeling but it’s what I’m ping-ponging, tirelessly back and forth in my total totality.
Had a tasting today, unexpected a bit, that shifted my view on wine, surprisingly. Two SB’s, two Chards, two reds, and I’m sitting here on the floor of the home office knowing something seismic is about to realize. Just finished a glass of from a Cab bottle in my cellar I was convinced would be shit however it decided to be defiant. And I loved, love, it. It professes structure and sense, architecture and an autonomous varietal lecture. I’m in that HST wine-writing fashion— not caring about the destination but only the ride— remembering and intimately recalling what I hated at Chalk Hill, from the two SB’s to the Chards, reds…. I’m reborn in a sort of perceptive ports.. here in a meditative selectivity, measuring my Personhood from where I am and what I did only ours ago at that Chalk Hill rung.
tout and flout how rebellious I am, calls me out, tell me I need further go. There I was, and here I am, thinking about what I saw and tasted in that hidden facet of wine idolatry. I walked around, just staring at the hills, even while I was poured the 4 whites, 2 reds, noting in my head and in my inner-tablet what to do next with what I was experiencing. A new Roman Candle, the counter, that hall, that balcony, the pours and I mean all of them in how they uniquely translated varieties while purposing something for consumers like me— I had more than a tasting, today. My oenological conception is re-shaped, definitively. And it goes beyond whites and reds, it’s realizing timing. Chalk Hill instructed a reiteration of intention, an observed statement— There is always something to be learned, and what more advantageous instrument for such than wine? I’m with new intention and thesis about everything.. new Dharma, new path, new Roads— a renewed Beatnik, me. Solitary poetry, stalking only my electric syllabary.
