“SNAKE PLISSKEN MAKES
A DAMN GOOD PINOT NOIR.”
Santa Barbara County seemed as good a place as any to begin my nationwide oenophilic odyssey. For starters, it’s the closest winemaking region to where I live. Or, rather, lived. Past tense. Using part of the security deposit I’d gotten back from my landlord, I bought some camping equipment, a bottle of MD 20/20, and a mason jar. Time for Brian to upgrade from the Ziploc bag. If only to reduce the chances of anyone else trying to snort him.
I couldn’t not bring Brian along. My brother loved to travel. Rather, he loved the idea of traveling. He had a long list of places he was planning to visit someday. Seriously, he kept an actual list on a yellow legal pad. Called it “Places to See.” I found it when we cleaned out his apartment. There were twenty-three entries on the list, all over the map. The first was “Ireland—Dublin, Blarney Stone, Jameson, etc.” Then came “Honolulu, Pro Bowl.” The most recent addition to the list was Palm Springs. Palm Springs? Hell, that’s only a two-hour drive from L.A. Hard to believe he’d never been there. I made a mental note to swing by on the way back.
After smashing the bottle of Mad Dog on the front bumper of my SUV to christen my journey and popping Brian into the cup holder, I officially joined the ranks of America’s homeless population.
Besides proximity to the place I didn’t live, I began my journey in Santa Barbara County because I know a guy who makes wine thereabouts. And that guy is named Kurt Russell. As in Hollywood legend Kurt Russell. As in Escape from New York, Big Trouble in Little China, Captain Ron, Overboard. So yeah, no big deal. (In other news, I am really unsubtle at this whole name-dropping thing.) And though it sounds insane, it turns out Snake Plissken makes a damn good Pinot Noir. I first tried it in 2012 when I interviewed Kurt on my radio show, Dan Dunn’s Happy Hour, and the two of us kept in touch. (What’s that? You’ve never heard of Dan Dunn’s Happy Hour? For shame! It ran on SiriusXM for almost six entire MONTHS!) I figured if anyone could bridge the gap between me and wine, it would be the star of Death Proof.
On the drive I called Kurt to confirm our plans, which were to meet at the winery, then head over to the wine saloon in the historic 1880 Union Hotel, where they feature Kurt’s wines as well as several produced under a label owned by his daughter, Kate Hudson, and her former beau Matthew Bellamy, the lead singer of Muse. As you may know, Hudson isn’t genetically Kurt’s daughter, but he raised her and thinks of her as his flesh and blood. I think he’s trying to balance out my relationship with my mom. She’s been known to tell people I’m someone else’s son.
“Okay, buddy, can’t wait to see you,” Kurt chirped before we hung up. And though he seemed to genuinely mean it, I didn’t think it could possibly be true. I mean, this is a Hollywood heavyweight who nabbed Goldie Hawn (Got. Damn. Goldie. Hawn.) and starred in Miracle. The biggest miracle I’d ever pulled off was to convince a Playboy Playmate to sleep with me one time back in 1998. And she cried so much afterward that it didn’t even seem worth it.
AS A WRITER WHOSE FOCUS is adult beverages, I attend a fair share of wine tastings where I routinely encounter pompous schmucks who believe they possess God’s own palate. Sometimes, they do. I’ve seen guys narrow the origins of a grape down to a five-mile radius. Though somehow this does nothing to reduce either their pomposity or their schmuckiness. Most of the time, though, these guys are doing what we in the trade call Speaking from the Rectum.
Which is not to say I haven’t learned anything from attending these chichi events. First I’ve learned that wine snobs are singularly annoying pieces of tweed lint. Second I learned that while most people don’t go to tastings to compete, some assholes really, really do. Finally, I learned that said assholes will use any and all opportunities to make you look an unsophisticated lout. They typically do this to improve their chances of picking up the cute waitress in the black dress who is inevitably being paid to linger nearby. And if you don’t fight fire with fire, they actually stand a chance.
And while I had no interest in becoming a glass-swishing, wine-slurping, varietal-name-checking terroir-ist, I also didn’t want to lose my shot at the waitresses, so long before I took off across America to study wine, I developed a strategy that I outlined in my previous book, Living Loaded. (See Jonah Lehrer? It’s okay to steal from yourself, you just have to attribute. It’s like Bob Dylan said: “Dan Dunn’s the greatest guy I ever kneeeeeeew.”) The key is to know enough about wine so you’re perceived as an urbane sophisticate, but not so much that you become an insufferable bore who spends all his time reading oenology journals (or worse, pretends to). To wit, there are six rules that will allow you to Speak from the Rectum about wine without looking like you just matriculated at UID (University of Insufferable Dickwads).
The first rule is to know your go-to modifiers. I don’t care what anyone says; figuring out what’s happening flavor-wise in any given vintage is a crapshoot for all but the most refined palates. Luckily, even when you’re at a loss to pinpoint precisely what it is you think you’re tasting, there are five simple words that can be used indiscriminately and interchangeably such that no wine snob will ever look at you sideways. They are complex, balanced, layered, intense, and well-rounded. Wine prognosticators who use these words are like psychics who sense concern over affairs of the heart, money, or health (How did they know?). In other words, it’s bulletproof, never-fail bullshit. Deploy one or more of these terms, and it’s hard to go wrong no matter what you say next. Trust me, you could follow up by proclaiming you detect hints of yak breath or banana oil in a Pinot Gris, and everyone else around will start nodding knowingly.
Second, you might think that original ideas would be embraced in a room full of intelligent, curious people of the type that attend wine tastings. And you would be wrong. Dare to utter something like “What the hell does Robert Parker know anyway?” and they very well may stone you to death. Instead, stick with safe, unoriginal bromides such as “wine is made in the vineyard, not the winery” or “the scoring system employed by the mainstream wine media is bogus” or better yet, “oak has no place in a decent Chardonnay.” That last one’s got the added advantage of being true.
The third thing you ought to do is memorize the triple crown of vintages. The mere mention of the following three years and regions at a wine tasting is like shouting “Hey, look, it’s LeBron James!” in a room full of NBA fans; it’s a guaranteed way to stop everyone in their tracks while you make a swift escape. The winning trifecta is: 1947 Bordeaux, 1996 Champagne, and 1970 Northern California. Once you’ve won everyone’s undying awe and respect by citing said vintages, use it as a springboard into subject matter you’re more familiar with. For example, “Yeah, that ’70 Mayacamas is a real killer. Did you know that Black Sabbath released their debut album on Friday the thirteenth that same year?”
Fourth, have at least one area of serious knowledge to brush back a know-it-all when he tries to hijack the conversation and mess with your game. In my case, I became obnoxiously informed about corks. No shit. I know all about straight corks, diamond corks, and nova corks. Plus, I have an almost autistic level of knowledge about the chemical scourge of vintners everywhere: 2,4,6-trichloroanisole (TCA for short), the naturally occurring fungi that makes good wines go bad. I’m also well versed in the relative merits of cork alternatives—screwcaps, agglomerates, vino-seal, and their ilk. Carefully deployed, such knowledge can make you look like a badass without pushing you over the line into blowhard territory. The key is to drop some obscure nuggets of wisdom—say, “Hmm, these look like high-tech, cork-based closures made up of cork granules that have undergone CO2 saturation”—that the snob has to sheepishly ask you to explain. Boom, you’re in the clear.
The only problem with rule number 4 is the temptation to overdo it. But if you do, rule 5 is the antidote. Rule number 5 is “embrace the value play.” Nothing gets the snob-stink off you faster than talking smack about the expensive stuff. Learn a few excellent bottles in the $10 to $15 range so you can drop statements like “I’d put a $10 Hardys Nottage Hill Pinot Noir up against a $100 Sea Smoke any day of the week.” When the snobs tut and fuss, just say “No, really, with the money I save I can afford bleacher tickets for the Dodgers.” If you want to get an even bigger rise out of them, follow that up with “I like to smuggle in a Nottage Hill in my pants and chug it during the seventh-inning stretch.” Then leave them there, scratching their heads over whether you’re being serious, or just a classless idiot, while you make some better friends at the other end of the bar.
The final rule is don’t slurp, spit, or use the phrase “nice legs.” I think these speak for themselves. It’s a wine tasting, not a construction site. No matter how much you use the word umami.
Having these weapons in my arsenal has enabled me to emerge from most wine tastings unscarred by anything your garden-variety wine snob can dish out. But that’s bush league. I’ve always known feigning sophistication will only get me so far in the company of the truly oenologically learned. Like the ones I was sure to encounter at Pebble Beach Food & Wine. To hold my own there, I was going to have to come in packing an authentic, encyclopedic knowledge of the fermented grape juice business along with a fully developed palate.
And the time had come to get serious about accumulating it. No more faking the funk, I thought. Then I realized that I was driving a Toyota FJ Cruiser across the northwest tip of Santa Barbara County. In some circles (at least the ones George Clinton traveled in), I might, at this moment based on my location, ride, and goal, be considered a deeply unfunky person. Unfunkable, if you will. I suppressed a sudden urge to punch myself in the face and turn back. Instead I calmly told myself it was okay to not be funky for a little while. (I’m sorry, George. Please forgive me.) Wine people aren’t the funkiest, after all, and I was trying to assimilate. Then I punched myself in the face, just to be on the safe side.
The soothing computer-generated voice of my GPS system—I call her Poo Pants, as I am a very mature person—informed me of an approaching turnoff. Three miles to Los Alamos. Almost there. I could kind of use a glass of wine right now.
IN AN INDUSTRIAL PARK KNOWN as the Lompoc Wine Ghetto, the barrel room for Ampelos Cellars sits inside a large steel hangar with harsh fluorescent lighting, a cold concrete floor, and a single bathroom that’s missing a door. Picture, if you will, one of those impossibly charming, fairy-tale-looking medieval châteaux that Bordeaux is so famous for. Now picture the exact opposite of that. The Ampelos Cellars barrel room feels like something Andy Warhol would have dreamed up to torture Robin Leach, and it is as utilitarian a space as you’re likely to encounter at any winemaking operation anywhere in the world (even the ones in West Virginia have doors on their “terlits”). This is where Kurt Russell hangs out for fun. And I was twenty-five minutes late.
It is probably worth noting at this point that I don’t really know Kurt Russell. I mean it’s fun to drop his name in my book and make it sound like I was swinging by to see him for our regular weekly wine hang before going out to wrestle bears and fight crime, but in all truth, my being here was due to a long and improbable chain of accidents and depended not a little on the fact that both times I had reached out to him—for my radio show two years earlier and now for this book—that I had a legitimate way to promote a product he was associated with. So let’s not pretend. I mean, the guy has been one of my idols for three decades. He was doing me a hellacious solid. This was not what you’d call a “peer” relationship. And yet . . .
“There he is, right on time!” Russell thundered as he materialized from behind a barrel row with a bottle of wine and a couple of glasses. “My man!” Reflexively, I glanced behind me. Nobody there. He was talking to me. Enthusiastically. I was halfway between crapping my pants in fear and having the biggest bro-gasm of my life.
Kurt Russell is in his midsixties, but he looks my age. Unless, of course, I look his age. Which is possible. (Did I mention that it had been a rough year?) He was wearing jeans, a flannel shirt, and a weathered Carhartt jacket. He’s rugged. Like actually rugged, not ersatz Hollywood well-lit rugged . . . though the leading man mug doesn’t hurt. Jesus Christ, I thought, Kurt Russell might just turn me gay today.
I extended my hand and barely got “great to see you again, Kurt” out before he brushed it aside, going in for a hearty bro-hug. Jesus, he even smelled like a leading man.
“How have you been?” I managed to ask. You know, since that one and only time we met two years ago for an hour.
“I’m fantastic, buddy. Really am. How ’bout you? You look good. You lose some weight?”
I gave myself a quick once-over. Hey, maybe I had lost some weight.
“I guess so,” I said, trying for a wry smile. “The heartbreak diet.”
He laughed. A big booming laugh. Then he pulled a wine key from his pocket and plunged it into the cork of a bottle of 2011 GoGi, the Pinot Noir that bears his childhood nickname. “I’ve been on that diet,” he confided. “Sucks. One good thing about it though . . . you get to drink all the wine you want. You ready to do this?”
After half a bottle of Pinot, we got down to business. The first thing Kurt told me about was the process he used for selecting clones. Though I’d only just begun my educational tour, I was aware that a clone is a grapevine replicated from a particular “mother vine.” Basically, a twig of a vine with a bud is cut from the mother vine and then either planted directly into the ground to sprout its own roots or, more commonly, grafted onto a specific rootstock. The newly planted or grafted vine is an exact replica of the mother vine. This cloning of vines accounts for a great deal of the spread of wine varietals from one place to another—mainly, from the Old World to everyplace else.
Individual grape varietals—Pinot Noir, for instance—are prized for particular attributes, such as crop size, specific aromas or tannins, time of ripening, low or high sugars or acidity, and sensibility to disease. You might think of them as the different colors of paint that make up a work of art, or the various singing styles that form a choir. Or, in the case of shitty wine, the films that constitute Adam Sandler’s oeuvre. At one point Kurt mentioned that he and Goldie had sold their thirteen-thousand-square-foot Pacific Palisades mansion to Sandler, which I took as a sign from the writing gods that I should take a quick, gratuitous shit on mister wackyface. Just a little payback for the six hours of my life I lost to Jack and Jill, Grown Ups, and I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry. Get some new material or quit hogging the multiplex, you wildly successful, happily married sonofabitch I keep subsidizing!
FIVE TASTES, ONE WINE: A MOUTH EXPERIMENT
There are five basic tastes: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami. (Six if you count shit, which I’ve personally had to eat on more than one occasion.) I sat down with winemaker Molly Hill of Napa’s Sequoia Grove and executive chef Yousef Ghalaini of FIG Restaurant in Santa Monica for a demonstration on how Cabernet Sauvignon interacts with the five basic tastes. I suggest you try this at home. You’ll need a decent Cab (May I suggest Sequoia Grove? he subtly slipped in, gracefully greasing the expert who so graciously told him about important things he has no idea about), green apple, lemon, sea salt, burrata cheese, and sharp cheese. You don’t need to get any shit, because, frankly it tastes like Boone’s Farm . . . and Boone’s Farm has no place in a highfalutin wine tome such as this.
SWEETNESS
Take a small sip of wine. Then take a small bite from a green apple. Sip the wine again. You’ll find it tastes sour. Aggressively so.
VERDICT: Sweetness and Cabernet Sauvignon go together like Ike and Tina Turner.
SOURNESS
Sip the wine. Take a small nibble on a lemon wedge. Have more wine. The lemon smoothes it out, and gives the wine a velvety texture.
VERDICT: There is no such thing as sour grapes, just bad food pairing.
SALTINESS
Wine. Pinch of sea salt. Wine again. These two play well together, the salt enhancing the tannic kick, heightening the intensity.
VERDICT: Pass the salt, please.
BITTERNESS
Pour wine down your gullet. Eat some burrata cheese. More wine down gullet. To be honest, I don’t know why Molly and Yousef chose burrata to demonstrate bitterness. It’s a sweet cheese. But they were giving me free food and drink, so who am I to question their methods.
VERDICT: The burrata made the wine bitterer than the average Fox News viewer.
UMAMI
Same drink-eat-drink routine, using sharp cheese. The acidity in the cheese is highly compatible with the wine.
VERDICT: Umami is far better as a thing to pair with wine than it is as a thing to say to women passing by a construction site.
I have to admit, I was pretty pumped that of all the elements of viticulture Kurt could have chosen to discuss, most of which I knew little to nothing about, he led with something that I actually understood and could halfway talk about. The key word there being could. Instead, I decided to lead with this . . .
“I read somewhere that you turned down the role of Luke Skywalker in Star Wars. Is that true?”
Kurt looked up from the beaker in which he was mixing wine made from various clones. A 777 with a 115, if memory serves. Clones, like prison inmates and racecars, have numbers instead of names.
“I’m sorry, what?”
“I said I read somewhere that you turned down the role of Luke Skywalker in Star Wars. Is that true?”
“Star Wars?”
“Yeah. You mentioned clones and that made me think about the Clone Wars. And then I remembered the thing I read somewhere about you turning down the part of Luke Skywalker back in the ’70s.”
Kurt just stared at me, the expression on his face a mixture of bemusement and what looked an awful lot like pity.
“I’m kind of a Star Wars geek,” I added sheepishly.
With his gaze still fixed on me, he picked up his glass and took a long deliberate sip of wine. Instinctively, I followed suit. In my defense, it was just after 11 A.M., and we were on our second bottle. Either I was going to have to learn how to pace myself on this trip, or I might very well wind up in rehab before I got out of California.
Finally he spoke. “When do you have to deliver this seminar at Pebble Beach?”
“April eleventh.”
“Hmm,” he said. That’s it, just “hmm.” He refilled our glasses and went back to mixing clones. Without saying anything at all, Snake Plissken had just told me I didn’t have a chance in hell among the wine-swilling elite. I silently decided to hold the rest of the questions I’d had about some of his most iconic roles, like: Who had better hair, Tango or Cash? Did Captain Ron actually hold a license to operate a vessel for hire in the Caribbean or was he openly flouting international maritime law? What was it like doing that goofy romcom with Meryl Streep?
WHILE KURT WENT ABOUT HIS business, I tried to picture him forty years younger, decked out in the tuniclike garb of Tatooine. He probably would have made a fine Luke Skywalker—he certainly had the hair for it. Then I realized I’m glad Kurt Russell didn’t get the leading role in the most significant motion picture of my formative years.
For millions of fans around the world, Luke Skywalker can only be Mark Hamill. More important, however, Mark Hamill will only ever be Luke Skywalker. This is no small feat, mind you. Think about it, Hamill played one of the most famous characters in film history in the biggest movie franchise of all time and somehow managed to not land another leading role ever again. (Don’t you dare get smart and mention Corvette Summer. Corvette Summer never happened. Never. Happened.) Though he’s had some bit parts in movies and TV and continues to do a ton of voiceover work (mostly for cartoons) in the nearly forty years since Star Wars was released, Mark Hamill has never been able to escape the long shadow of Luke Skywalker.
The simple truth is that Mark Hamill is not a movie star. He’s a character actor, and a very specialized one at that, because there’s only one character anyone is interested in seeing him play. He’s part of a select group of legendary, successful one-hit wonders that includes the likes of Robert Englund (Freddy Krueger), Ralph Macchio (The Karate Kid), Michael Richards (Kramer), and Linda Blair (The Exorcist) to name a few. Hamill’s Star Wars buddy Harrison Ford, on the other hand, was destined to become a movie star, which was evident from the moment he first appeared on-screen in the Mos Eisley Cantina on Tatooine (“You’ve never heard of the Millennium Falcon? It’s the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs.”) Hell, I was only eight years old and even I knew Ford was the film’s breakout star.
In 1977 when Star Wars opened, Kurt Russell was a young actor with potential who was trying to shed a “lightweight” screen image—the result of appearing in several Disney comedies in the ’60s and early ’70s. So while Hamill was becoming a global phenomenon as the fresh-faced hero called to adventure in outer space, Russell made the gutsy decision to play against type as an unscrupulous salesman who will stop at nothing to rip off his customers and crush the competition in the lowbrow R-rated comedy Used Cars. It’s one of the funniest flicks hardly anyone’s ever seen, and with his wickedly subversive turn as Rudy Russo, Kurt crushed up his wholesome image and spit on it for good measure. Then, to the surprise of many Hollywood observers, he used a B-movie role as a launching pad toward the A-list, as the aforementioned rough-hewn antihero Snake Plissken in John Carpenter’s 1981 classic Escape from New York. You can read the rest on IMDB. Make sure you hit up Wikipedia too for the details of his highly successful minor-league baseball career that was cut short by injury. Guy had a .563 average for crissakes. I’m beginning to think maybe he’s the clone.
All of which is to say, I’m glad Kurt Russell didn’t play Luke Skywalker. It would have upset the whole cosmic order of things.
AS HE FINISHED WITH MIXING his clones, Kurt poured the contents of the beaker into a glass and handed it to me. “Here, try this,” he said. It was the blend for Jillybean, a wine he named after one of his sisters.
“That’s amazing,” I said, and he flashed that movie star smile of his.
“I was never offered a role in Star Wars,” he said.
“Hmm,” I replied, taking a big swig of the Jillybean. I had assimilated my first actionable piece of wisdom. When you’re uncomfortable and someone says something provocative, fuck your modifiers. Just say “Hmm.”