“IT’S ONLY GOING TO GET
BETTER WITH AGE.”
I considered many ways to end this book, but I’m going to go with the truth. Which is not to say I don’t regret not using my surprise twist zombie apocalypse ending. That’s the one where Brian, John, Piglet, and the kitten I ran over in South Carolina (I don’t want to talk about it) all reanimate along with Dad’s arm and Dennis’s leg. Only instead of returning as mindless corpses with an insatiable appetite for human flesh, they’d just have an insatiable appetite for tacos and video games. They’d come over to my place every Sunday afternoon to hang out and eat Pacos and play FIFA Soccer. I know, you’re thinking, where’s the twist, but check it out. All we’d drink would be beer, because this is where I’d reveal that I don’t even like wine. I know! Crazy, right? Turns out the real reason I spent three months crisscrossing America was to try to score chicks on Tinder.
Don’t worry; I survive the zombie apocalypse and so do you. Because the undead limit their assault on civilization to grade A assholes who deserve to be gorged upon. Think Wall Street executives and Ted Nugent and that dickcheese who cut you off on the highway last week. And to answer your question, no, Elizabeth is not zombie fodder. Neither is Jack.
Except, last minute super twist! They get Jack after all. It’s really sad, except for the part where he totally deserves it.
Back in reality, though, last I heard Elizabeth and Jack were still together and she’d gotten promoted to executive producer on a network reality TV show. Jack was still bartending, taking acting classes, and waiting for his big break. I hope he gets it too. Preferably a femur, or an ankle. But I’ll take a few ribs if that’s all you have.
It’s tempting to say I’m happy for Elizabeth, but I’m not sure I am. What I am is not unhappy she’s happy. Which is progress. This is a genuinely incredible woman who brought far more light into my life than darkness, and at a time when I needed it most. I can’t imagine how things would have turned out had she not wound up next to me on the flight home from Brian’s funeral. And I’m glad I didn’t have to find out. Dealing with his reanimated corpse at LAX would have been far, far more difficult than it already was.
THREE MONTHS, ONE WEEK, AND two days after I pulled out of Southern California on the road to Nowhere, I passed the historic VENICE sign strung across Windward Avenue at Pacific. I was back. The Eighth Annual Pebble Beach Food & Wine festival was just around the corner, so naturally I began sinking all my time into fretting about screwing up in Pebble Beach. To keep up a head of steam with this I made sure to not actually put any work into figuring out what I was going to say or do during my presentation. If you’re prepared, it’s nearly impossible to fret, and without fretting I’d have entirely too much free time on my hands, and I’d end up a drug addict or a fitness freak or a Scientologist.
As the time got shorter, the situation became ridiculous. Looking back on it, I think I didn’t want to admit that the journey was done. I’d grown attached to being just a little bit outside society. Not having a set daily routine. Waking up to new scenery most days. Pebble Beach had always symbolized the end of it, the point at which I would have to make choices about what was next. Where I would live. Which shitty day job I would have to take to keep myself in Sokol Blosser Pinot (a man has needs). Of course, Pebble Beach wasn’t just a symbol, it was also a practical reality. In a month . . . wait, now it’s a week . . . wait, now it’s a few days . . . I would be getting up in front of what was probably the most wine-educated audience in America. And I was basically just some mook who rode around in Carl Vehicle for a while. I didn’t have a sommelier’s license. Unless you count the one I stole from Daniel Johnnes while he was in the bathroom. (Like he can’t get another one.)
As I mentioned before, virtually everyone I told about my wine expert ambitions had the same basic reaction—what I was doing was awesome. I never got tired of hearing these misinformed plaudits. You know what they say, when life gives you undeserved compliments, let them go to your head and warp your sense of self-worth. Looking back, after they stopped saying nice things about me, those same people usually went on to say something along the lines of “blah blah, filtration blah racking blah blah brett,” and other winemakerish blather. I learned to cherish the time I spent with my eyes glazed over. It was good to get a little me time after all those hours spent alone in my car.
Okay, so I’m exaggerating slightly, but I did start to get a bit paranoid about the fact that out on the road, where no one talked to me for too overly long, many of the people I spoke with had products to promote, and the majority of them displayed the natural politeness found so abundantly outside our major cities, so faking it was a pretty easy proposition. Basically people took me at face value, and no one was probing me for gaps in my wine knowledge. Except during my close encounter while driving past Area 51 in New Mexico (who knew aliens were so into Meritage?). At tastings across the United States, I’d honed a raft of bullshit modifiers like a set of ninja throwing stars, and they sure made it look like I knew what I was talking about: complex, flabby, tight, food friendly, earthy, unctuous, opulent, and suppulescent.
I made that last one up, by the way, and I encourage you to use it. I tried to throw it in at as many tastings as I could. And you know what? Over my entire trip, only Chris Brundrett of William Chris Winery called me on it and then only because he grew up on a cattle farm in Texas and knows bullshit when he smells it. All of which is to say that it really doesn’t matter what you say when you taste wine. Unctuous is not made up, but it might as well be. On Robert Parker’s website, he says the word is appropriate to describe “rich, lush, intense wines with layers of concentrated, soft, velvety fruit.” Sounds pretty tasty, but that definition only shares a single word with the original meaning, which is rich or fatty, and has since become a negative way to describe an ingratiating, overflattering person (i.e., that the person themselves is greasy or oily). So when you say a wine is “unctuous,” you could mean it’s rich and has a viscous mouthfeel, or you could mean that it’s too eager to please (like those big jammy Zinfandels that go down real easy, but lack true complexity). I heard it used so many times on the road that it essentially lost all meaning. It became oddly comforting to me, though. One of the few constants in my peripatetic existence. It became something of a mantra for me. When I was having a tough time on a drive, I’d just start saying it on loop and make my own EDM track.
In any case, even though it started out as a joke, I don’t see any reason suppulescent couldn’t be the next unctuous if we all get out there and start using it. Hell, it actually means more to me than unctuous at this point. (Unctuous unctuous unctuous unctuous unctuous unctuous unctuous unctuous unctuous unctuous unctuous unctuous unctuous unctuous unctuous unctuous unctuous unctuous unctuous unctuous unctuous unctuous. You feeling that molly, yet?)
If you haven’t already guessed, I spent almost the entirety of the time between the end of my trip and the start of my seminar at Pebble Beach musing on things like unctuous and suppulescent while doing what I do best: talking about knowing how to talk about the fine art of talking about talking about wine.
My anxiety mounted in inverse proportion to the amount of time I had left to prepare. I was paralyzed by what felt like an inevitable mortifying failure. At Pebble Beach it would be difficult, if not impossible, to camouflage my deficiencies as a wine authority with verbal legerdemain (see also: this entire book) or by using the strategy that had served me so well throughout my travels whenever someone was on to me: jumping in Carl Vehicle and driving away. I was going to be the one that everyone in the room was looking to for enlightenment. They were coming to hear things. Smart things I was supposed to say and know about wine. Whereas people expected me to be full of knowledge, the only thing I am absolutely certain I’m full of is shit. Why else would I become a writer? As the great Aristotle himself observed in Poetics, writing is the art of sticking your head up your own ass, sucking up all the shit that’s in there, chewing on it for a while, then going to the bar. It’s possible I don’t have that quote precisely correct.
The seminar I was scheduled to deliver had been dubbed “Dan Dunn’s American Wino.” The title was not my idea. I think it sounds like I’m going to be showing off some hapless soul I picked up down on Skid Row and paid twenty bucks to do unspeakable things to me onstage. But the festival organizers pushed hard for it, and by the time I’d finished arguing with them, the programs had been printed. Feel free to call it whatever you want, they said. Everyone at the festival will know its real title. I’m not sure what their problem was with the original title I offered: “Titman’s Winetastic Revenge.” You wanna talk gratuitous? Changing the name of someone’s seminar. That’s gratuitous. In the end, I adopted a Shakespearean outlook—what’s in a name? That which we call a Rosé by any other name will still taste great in a spritzer on a hot day in July. So Dan Dunn’s American Wino it was. I didn’t even ask them to put an “an” in the middle.
A couple days before leaving L.A. for Pebble Beach, I started pecking at a draft of what I wanted to say. I arrived at the festival’s headquarters, the Inn at Spanish Bay, two days before my event and spent much of the time holed up in my hotel room anxiously tweaking it. And masturbating. I tend to do that a lot when I’m nervous or stressed out or fatigued or awake.
When I wasn’t beating myself up/off in my room, I walked around the resort. The festival had taken over the place, and therefore I viewed everyone I encountered as a potential future inflictor of ridicule.
“Hey, how’s it going?” someone asked.
“You mean, besides the fact that I have no idea what kind of cheese to pair with Sancerre?” I snapped.
“Well, you could try a . . .”
“GET OFF MY FUCKING BACK, MAN!!!”
I’m sure Robert Parker has forgiven me by now. He knows how stressed out I get.
The day before the presentation, I decided it might help if I went to check out some of the other presentations. This turned out to be the worst idea I’ve had in years. And I used to be into competitive sauna. “The Nose Knows” not only featured a dizzying dissection of the olfactory system and its importance in tasting wine that I didn’t fully understand, I couldn’t even keep up with the questions from the audience. The leader had apparently run afoul of some controversial issue regarding how long you should rest your nasal cavities before tasting wine after a nasal endoscopy. I wasn’t quite sure why they were angry, but it was clear that whatever he had said had chummed the water, activating the crowd’s bloodlust. Which, it bears pointing out, was mainly expressed through polite disagreements and lots of troubled “hmmmm . . .”s. Still, their fury was palpable. And as he wrapped up, the speaker was doing the verbal equivalent of the hunched run someone makes to the last helicopter out of a war zone. I consoled myself with thoughts that these guys were heavy hitters. I’m a lightweight. People probably wouldn’t be interested in my session.
Leaving the seminar I ran into Dave Bernahl, the founder of Pebble Beach Food & Wine. He asked if I was excited about tomorrow. When I said I was, he said I should be because my event had sold out. “No pressure!” he joked. To which I said nothing, but internally, I did something very important. I resisted vomiting all over one of the most important people in the wine industry.
The morning of my presentation I woke up at 5 A.M. and couldn’t go back to bed. The placid churning of the surf coming from ocean was the background radiation of the universe turned up to 11 and boring its way into my skull. Is 5 A.M. too early to crack a bottle of wine? What if I pretended I was still up from the night before?
After a few more hours of self-recrimination (Why didn’t I take that sommelier class before I left?) and prayer (Dear Elvis, I know I skipped Graceland when I came through Tennessee, but hear me out . . .), it was time to head to the Inn at Spanish Bay. My OK Corral. My Waterloo. My Rumble in the Jungle (except for the fact that I had no claim to a title, was surrounded almost entirely by white folk, and was facing no opponent other than my own laziness and low self-esteem). Luckily, there was still time to jump in Carl Vehicle and drive away. And then suddenly there wasn’t time to jump in Carl Vehicle and drive away. It. Was. Starting.
And it went really well.
Seriously, weirdly well. It felt like it was over in a not-unpleasant flash. The crowd was lively. I got laughs where I was supposed to, which is to say whenever I needed to distract from the fact that I am not a walking font of wine wisdom. Which is to say, most of my talk. I even managed to incorporate some actual interesting information. And suddenly, America’s leading expert on talking about talking about becoming a wine expert had done just that (though I’m still not entirely clear on what that is). And the audience, I’m relieved to say, drank it up (along with several cases of happy juice from select producers around the country). Afterward, Dave Bernahl approached me and said he couldn’t be happier with how everything had gone. He even invited me to reprise the Wino seminar at a companion festival he was producing a few months later in Los Angeles.
“Sure,” I said. “Why not?”
“Great!” he said. “Let’s make it happen!”
It didn’t. But for no apparent reason other than neither Dave nor I ever bothered to follow up.
It turned out that doing it once was enough for me. For well over a year, my entire being had revolved around getting to Pebble Beach and delivering the greatest wine-soaked soliloquy in human history. So much had gone into it—mapping out the route, arranging three months’ worth of lodging and winery visits and interviews, getting rid of my apartment, packing up my stuff, securing dog care, driving across the whole goddamn country and back again, all the note-taking and soul-searching and ass-aching. All the book writing.
And after all that, the thing I had been working toward lasted from 3:45 to 4:45 P.M. on a Saturday afternoon in April 2014. Do you remember where you were at 3:45 on April 11? Of course you don’t. Nobody does, including the people who were there (I had to look up the date and time when writing this).
Don’t get me wrong. I’m thrilled the seminar went off without a hitch. I put a lot of work into it, and people paid good money to attend. Several winemakers I’d met on the road came a long way on their own dimes just to be there, and I would have hated for them to be disappointed. And the audience genuinely seemed to dig it. It was a lot of fun talking through what had turned out to be one of my life’s great adventures.
Plus, who wouldn’t relish the opportunity to stand up in front of a room full of his fellow citizens and sing the praises of the greatest country on earth? (Put your hand down, Noam Chomsky.) My heart swelled with actual pride as I traced the connection between the early pioneers who headed west in covered wagons in search of a better life, and modern-day farmers in West Texas ripping up their cotton fields and planting Sangiovese and Aglianico in the hopes of someday competing with the best stuff from Italy. And sure, there’s no real reason to believe we’re ever going to make better wine than the Italians. But that can’t stop us from saying we make the best wine in the world. Just ask the guys running our flawless, world-leading health-care and education systems. If America has a superpower, it is radical self-delusion. And without it we would never have achieved any of the monumental feats this country has accomplished over the years. Winning World War II. Pioneering the atom bomb and nuclear power. The wit and wisdom of Larry the Cable Guy.
We might be crass, we might be crude. We might rank in the low 30s on many important metrics of civilization. But dammit, we’ve got pluck. On the can-do spirit scale, we’re still Number One. And we like to get tanked. Put those two things together and you’ve got yourself a recipe for success. Or at least great wine. Sure, Vermont doesn’t have the cachet of California, but there’s good stuff happening up there. And just like vineyards take ten years or so to really establish themselves and start producing top-quality grapes (actually precisely like that; actually precisely because of that), in ten years, I predict that the domestic wine landscape in this country will look radically different from what you see today.
There are cynics who’ll say this country is in decline (and not just because Fox News is paying them to say that), but tell that to Greg Kempel who started Maple River Winery in Casselton, North Dakota. He’s making wine with whatever fruit he can get his freezing cold hands on, from chokecherries to gooseberries. You think Greg Kempel gives a crap about what’s happening over in Bordeaux? Hell, he’ll probably kick your ass for even suggesting he knows where Bordeaux is.
When it comes to wine in this country, a lot of people put a lot of stock in what Robert Parker has to say. But I prefer to listen to the other great Parker this country produced. One Mr. Trey Parker. I think he spoke for everyone, especially all the American winemakers across the land, when he wrote the following words in the modern classic Team America, World Police: “America. Fuck yeah!”
THE WINO COUNTDOWN
The time has come to conclude the informative and actionable wine-centric sidebars you’ve come to know and either love, resent, or ignore. I hope they’ve been halfway informative. When they weren’t, I hope they were funny. And when they weren’t either, I hope they were short. Here are, in my entirely subjective opinion, some of the coolest wineries I visited on my trek across the USA.
MCRITCHIE WINERY & CIDERWORKS (THURMOND, NC)
Sean McRitchie cut his teeth in the vineyards of Oregon’s lush Willamette Valley, but claims he didn’t truly come into his own as a winemaker until he relocated to the rugged foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. “I thought I was this tough guy having worked in Oregon,” he said, “but the weather here is humbling. It’s tough to farm in North Carolina.” Tough indeed, which is all the more reason to be impressed by the delicious wine and hard cider produced at this family owned and operated winery in the Yadkin Valley.
ST. JULIAN WINERY (PAW PAW, MI)
One of Michigan’s oldest and best wineries was started back in 1921 by an Italian immigrant named Mariano Meconi. Today St. Julian produces everything from raspberry wine to apple cider, but their most felicitous offerings are part of the Braganini Reserve Collection. I was particularly impressed with the Meritage, Riesling, and Porpetto, an iced Traminette with an aromatic bouquet of peaches, mangos, and lemon zest that has a long fruity finish, not unlike the end of “Wake Me Up Before You Go Go.”
CHIMNEY ROCK (STAGS LEAP DISTRICT, NAPA VALLEY)
Winemaker Elizabeth Vianna told me “there is no better place to be on earth than a winery at harvest.” Wise words, Ms. Vianna. Elizabeth Vianna also showed me the difference between a block of Sauvignon Gris grapes fermented with X5 yeast (funky grapefruit) versus CY3079 yeast (thicker mouthfeel, sweeter), which was a turning point in my understanding just how complex the business of making excellent wine is.
GLENORA WINE CELLARS (DUNDEE, NY)
New York’s Finger Lakes region poses a host of challenges to winemaking, from moist humid days in summer to the occasional deep freeze in the springtime. And while diseases such as powdery mildew and petritis are “happy” there, according to Glenora’s winemaker Steve DiFrancesco, there’s no place else he’d rather ply his craft. “There’s viticultural diversity here you won’t find anywhere else,” he said, before ticking off a list of vinifera, hybrids, and native grapes that thrive in the vineyards around Seneca Lake. DiFrancesco’s Pinot Blanc is a triple threat, composed of juice fermented in three types of vessels: a concrete egg, delicately flavored oak barrels, and a stainless steel tank.
DUCHMAN FAMILY WINERY (DRIFTWOOD, TX)
Just one of many fantastic wineries I was amazed to find scattered across Texas. Duchman winemaker Dave Reilly is convinced that the sky’s the limit for Italian varietals in the Lone Star State, and after tasting his award-winning Montepulciano and Aglianico, I’m inclined to believe him. As an added bonus, Duchman is located just minutes away from one of the world’s great BBQ meccas, The Salt Lick. I think I know where I’m going to retire.
I DID HAVE ONE UNEXPECTED moment in the middle of my talk, when we’d gotten around to Texas. I told the story of going to visit Buddy Holly’s grave at the municipal cemetery in Lubbock. How I’d arrived there in the middle of a sunny Sunday afternoon and been struck by the fact that there wasn’t another living soul around. I get that Holly had been dead for fifty-five years, and Lubbock isn’t Grand Central Station, but still, not one other person?
I hadn’t planned to get into it, but somehow it just came out. I told the audience that my brother had died unexpectedly and that I’d taken a mason jar filled with his ashes along with me on the trip. I also told them about how I laid the jar with Brian’s ashes right next to Buddy Holly’s gravestone—which is engraved with the rocker’s actual surname, “Holley”—and that while snapping pictures I found myself humming “Oh Boy!” And that I sprinkled more of his ashes on that spot than I had anywhere else along the way. I realized too late that I had ventured into shaky territory here. I could feel the emotion rising in me, the walls closing in just the tiniest bit, the yawning maw of the universe opening under my feet. So I moved on to Shelburne Vineyard, which makes an incredible Marquette Reserve, and, hey, let’s uncork some of this stuff, huh?
What I didn’t tell them about was the conversation Brian and I had there. You’re used to this kind of thing by now. I was worried it was going to be a little much for the uninitiated.
Brian told me that he hadn’t seen Buddy Holly in the afterlife. In fact, in all the time he’d been dead he hadn’t met a single celebrity. I guess things there are pretty similar to the way they are here. Somehow the famous people are always hanging out someplace just slightly cooler than you are.
“What about limbs?” I asked.
“Limbs?”
“Yeah, you know . . . Dad’s arm, Dennis’s leg, whatever body part the drummer from Def Leppard is missing. Have you encountered any expired limbs?”
“You’re fucking weird, dude,” Brian said.
“You mean weird like ‘standing over Buddy Holly’s grave talking to a jar of dirt’ weird?”
“I’m a whole person, asshole!”
“You were a whole person,” I corrected him.
“Whatever. I don’t know where the limbs go. Someplace else. I’m not in fuckin’ charge.”
I started humming “Peggy Sue.” Or maybe Brian did.
“If you could have done one thing before you died, what would it have been?”
“Not jumped off that pier,” he replied immediately. “Idiot.”
“No, I mean, if you were going to die no matter what, but you got to do one last thing. What would it be?”
“Oh, right,” Brian said. “Bucket list do-over. Hmmmm . . .” While he gave it some thought I hummed a few bars of “La Bamba” by Holly’s ill-fated traveling companion Richie Valens.
“Well,” he said, “if I could have done one last thing I guess I would have told you guys—you know, our family—how much I love you. Called or texted or something. Does that count? It’s technically more than one thing.”
“Yeah, man,” I said. “It counts.”
“Oh, and I would have had a karaoke showdown with Bill Murray.”
“That’s two things.”
“Why you gotta be so stingy with the do-overs?”
“You have to limit it somehow, right? That’s how life works.”
“Is it?” he replied. And I didn’t have a good answer.
That was the last time we spoke on the trip. Or since.
FIFTEEN MINUTES AFTER THE TRIUMPHANT conclusion of “Dan Dunn’s American Wino” (Pro tip: When in doubt, always close with free booze), I was outside on the patio at Spanish Bay enjoying a stunning view, a glass of fine bubbly, and the company of a delightful woman I met that weekend. She remained on my mind for quite some time afterward, but I hardly gave the seminar another thought until it came time to draft this chapter. And though I may have had a Texas-sized panic attack beforehand, the truth is, whatever happened there, even if it had gone horribly, mortifyingly off the rails, nothing could diminish the transformative experience I had getting there. Ralph Waldo Emerson said life is a journey, not a destination but, man, destinations can sure come in handy when you’re out of your mind with loss and don’t know where to put your feelings. When it comes to these matters, I prefer a quote by a young fellow named Dan Dunn: “Don’t Stop Believing” is a Journey not a Bon Jovi. Which is to say, nothing sticks to you when you’re flying down the highway at eighty miles an hour listening to rock and roll.
Can I honestly say there isn’t a single soul on earth who knows more about American wine than I do? Hell no. But in all honesty, I don’t want to be that guy (no offense, guy). This trip taught me that I am most definitely not the sharpest somm in the snootytorium. My nose routinely fails to detect the overtones of cat piss and lilac that seem obvious to others. And my bottle memory is terrible. I had an awful time keeping names, vintages, grapes, and such straight.
On the other hand if I need to know that name of the cashier I talked to in Pawley’s Island, South Carolina, it’s right there. (Imogene, if you must know.) I’m shit at remembering wines, but I’m great at remembering people. And I’m okay with that. In fact, understanding it led to me identifying the one signature skill I did develop over the course of my journey. And I think I might just be best in the world at this one: personality-based wine assessment. Or wine-based personality assessment. I swear, this is not a case of JAATOOHAAW (Just Another Asshole Talking Out Of His Ass About Wine). I’m looking into starting a life-coach business, using this as my primary psychological modality. I believe that, by finding the kind of wine a person should be drinking then comparing it to the wine they are drinking, you can find a way to charge people hundreds of dollars an hour to get drunk with them. It’s important work.
And it helped me figure out where the hell I’m supposed to live now. A couple seconds of thought will tell you that the only town where this concept has a chance in hell of succeeding in is L.A., where you can set up shop at the corner of Crazy, Wealthy, and Shit-Hot California Wine. Livingston, Montana, remains one of the favorite places I visited on my trip, but its combination of self-reliant, nonneurotic folk, and terrible local wine would be poison for my new business. So I won’t be moving there. Same goes for Oregon. Sure, they’ve got the wine for it, but trying to tell a hipster what kind of wine they should be drinking is a losing proposition.
I’m still working out the nitty-gritty of my theory, but essentially I classify wines like I classify people. Every bottle is a mixed bag, just like every person. I started practicing my technique way back in Santa Barbara with Kurt Russell (who is a 2002 Kistler Pinot Noir all the way). It took me a day and a half to figure him out. Now, minutes after meeting someone, I have them pegged for a producer and a bottle.
Me? I’m a Blenheim Vineyards Rosé. Tart, refreshing, and a damn good value. As I mentioned earlier, Blenheim is in Charlottesville, Virginia, and is owned by Dave Matthews of all people. I didn’t get to meet Dave, but that fits my profile as well. I get to all the right places, but my timing is usually a little off.
My mother is the Brianna at Miletta Vista Winery in St. Paul, Nebraska. Those grapes had a hell of a time developing in extremely harsh conditions. But somehow, against the odds, they made it. The white wine they yielded is the ultimate underdog. It doesn’t have the pedigree or breeding of a Pinot Grigio from California or even a Viognier from Virginia. I regularly talk to wine industry people who have never even heard of the varietal. But that didn’t stop that Little Wine That Shouldn’t Have Been Able To from being named “Best of Show” at the 2012 U.S. National Competition, held in the epicenter of American wine, Sonoma, California. The Brianna beat the odds and somehow got Miletta Vista out of St. Paul and to a place it could thrive. Not unlike what Mom did for me.
When I was up in the Oakville District of Napa Valley, my winemaker pal Chris Carpenter gave me a bottle of 2011 Cardinale Cabernet Sauvignon. “It’s a little tight,” he told me. “Hold on to it a while. It’s only going to get better with age.” That wine, to me, is Elizabeth. Or, rather, my memory of her. When I hit the road, I was pretty tight about that memory. But it’s gotten better with time. Hell, give it another twenty years and I’m sure I could write a book about how she went on to build an incredible life for herself, filled with purpose, love, and satisfaction. It’s clear to me now that these qualities are probably best pursued somewhere away from me.
Jack, on the other hand, is like the Merlot from Newport Vineyards in Rhode Island. First, it occasionally gets swallowed in Elizabeth’s hometown (I think they go back there for the holidays), it’s wimpy and thin, and no matter how much time goes by I doubt I’m ever going to like it. No offense, motherfucker.
My dad was always beer, not wine. And now he’s in AA, so he’s neither. He is, however, the strongest cup of coffee I ever had.
Clothilde reminds me of the Domaine Pinot Noir from King Estate in Eugene, Oregon, in that I swore I was gonna go back there and get some, but I never did.
To me there’s not a wine made in America that compares to Daniel Johnnes. And even if there were, I wouldn’t dare mention it. He might bludgeon me with a bottle of 1999 Le Tertre Roteboeuf. And that would be a terrible way to treat a bottle of that magnitude.
My cousin Dennis doesn’t remind me of a specific wine so much as he does wine tastings. Years ago when you’d go to a wine event, you’d often encounter formally attired men and women who’d swirl their wine and examine the “tears” that flow down the inside of the glass. Back then, the myth of those droplets indicating a wine’s quality still persisted. Today, though, you rarely hear anyone say “nice legs” about a wine. Or about Dennis. “Nice leg” just doesn’t have the same ring to it. And if we’re being honest, his has never been all that great.
Brian is the 2010 Screaming Eagle that someone gave me as a gift a few years ago. More than any other wine in my modest collection, that’s the bottle I’ve been holding on to for a special occasion. There have been a few significant causes for celebration over the past few years that almost rose to its level, yet I held on to it. The 2010 vintage was supremely popular, and they didn’t make much of it. An American cult wine if ever there was one. I was determined that when the time came to pop that cork, it had to be to commemorate one of the most important things that ever happened to me. I’ve found, however, that identifying those is more than a little tricky.
And one day, a few weeks after Pebble Beach ended, I stopped seeing the point in waiting. I’m opening this bastard today, I thought to myself. Because fuck it. Every day’s important.
I stuck it in my bag and headed to the beach in Venice. Which is where I’m living again, by the way. Couldn’t very well remain a citizen of Nowhere forever. Makes laundry a total pain in the ass.
I’ve talked about two songs that remind me of Brian, “Nightswimming” and “Never Going Back Again.” The third is “Learning to Fly” by Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers. Specifically the version off The Live Anthology. I had it on my headphones as I walked across the sand to my usual spot. It was a warm spring day that already felt like summertime. I sat, cracked open the Screaming Eagle, and poured myself a slug. Took a sip. Well shit, this really is an incredible wine. To describe it in a word, flawless. In three words, best wine ever. Seriously, I cannot recall ever having tasted anything quite as satisfying as that wine. And the fact that I could confidently identify the elements that made it so powerful and distinctive—the hint of crushed rocks, the highly concentrated black fruit flavor, the unobtrusive yet integral trace of oak—well, that made it just that much more special.
Along with the Screaming Eagle, I’d brought a book with me, Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Scott recommended it. I can’t imagine why he thought I’d relate to it. It’s about a hapless hero who, after losing his cat, goes on a strange, hallucinatory adventure, which deals with a wide spectrum of heavy subjects along the way. It’s the kind of book that makes you believe that everything is possible. Not anything. Everything.
So when I looked up and saw Brian about a half mile away, standing on top of the Venice Pier, giant grin on his face and fixing to jump, I was only a little surprised. This time it wasn’t 2 A.M. and the sea wasn’t angry and I wasn’t at home in bed asleep. And Brian knew exactly what he was doing. He looked over to make sure I was watching, and then he waved and shouted “Later!” before turning to face the sea and executing a perfect swan dive. Only instead of plummeting into the ocean, after a small drop, he swooped out over the water, fingertips skimming the foam, the breeze blowing back his hair, cackling like a madman. Learning to fly.
A showoff might have taken a lap over the beach, peacocked for the hardbodies, and blown the hippies’ minds. Not Brian’s thing. He headed straight out to sea, swooping and gliding on the shimmering air, until he was just a dot. Then a speck. Then he was gone.
“Cheers,” I said, raising my red solo cup.
What kind of asshole brings glass to the beach?