“YOU PROBABLY TELL YOURSELF
FIVE DIFFERENT LIES JUST TO GET
OUT OF BED EVERY MORNING.”
NEBRASKA, CHICAGO, MICHIGAN, CANADA, FINGER LAKES, VERMONT, MAINE, RHODE ISLAND
Right about now you may be thinking, sweet Cheez-its, we’re already halfway through this book and Dan’s only made it to Nebraska. At this rate, we’re going to run out of pages somewhere around Ohio. By now you know I’ve done some terrible things in my life, but please know that despite my copious failings, I would never leave anyone stranded in Ohio. There are some things a man just doesn’t want on his conscience. If we’re going to get through this, you’re going to have to trust me. Coincidentally this is exactly the same phrase that the late great Hunter S. Thompson said to me before we huffed ether and blasted propane canisters with shotguns in his backyard. Based on that experience, the worst that’s going to happen to you is some light scarring and the inability to remember your middle name.
In American Vintage: The Rise of American Wine, Paul Lukacs points out that the wine industry in America as we know it can be traced back to Cincinnati of all places, which is not only where the hot dog was invented and the birthplace of Randy “Macho Man” Savage, but was also the home of Nicholas Longworth, whom many regard as the original American wino.
Before Longworth came along in the early nineteenth century, most Americans had never tasted anything but fortified wine—high-octane juice that wouldn’t spoil and was consumed almost solely for the purpose of getting blotto. Longworth was one of the only people to set his sights on producing table wine with moderate to low alcohol content, like the stuff they make in Italy, France, and Germany. Longworth championed Old World–style wine as a salubrious alternative to the hard liquor that was increasingly regarded as a scourge in America. In fact, he believed wine would be a conduit to a more temperate society. It’s just common sense.
Longworth planted Catawba, a grape that up to that point had been used primarily in the production of jams and jellies. He used it to make sparkling wine. Sparkling wine of such high quality, the great Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was inspired to write a poem about it.
Because of my deep respect for Longworth’s importance to the story of American wine, I felt it would simply be rude for me to even set foot in Ohio on this journey. To quote Wayne Campbell (party on, Wayne), I’m not worthy. It’s hallowed ground. And I’m just an oaf in an FJ Cruiser I named Carl Vehicle. I solemnly promise it has nothing to do with the fact that the fastest way from Michigan to upstate New York is through Canada.
I hope the lovely people of Ohio can forgive me for giving their lovely state a pass. I’ve met more than a few Ohioans with a chip on their shoulder about where they come from, probably because Ohio is the butt of so many jokes. But that’s the deal they made in exchange for getting to decide who the president is. I think it’s fair. I can relate to the defensiveness about where you come from, though. I come from a pretty fucked-up place myself.
I FIRST REALIZED HOW FUCKED up our Philly neighborhood was one night in third grade. I realized it because I was sitting at the kitchen table watching TV in our apartment on Bustleton Avenue and someone came up from behind me and coldcocked me with a frying pan.
I don’t remember what day of the week it was, but I know it happened between 7 and 7:30 P.M., because The Joker’s Wild—the game where knowledge is king and lady luck is queen—was on television. It was my favorite show. Every weeknight at 7 P.M. there I’d be, perched in the same spot, waiting for Jack Barry to shellac some fools. I don’t remember if I was wearing it, but my favorite T-shirt at the time was emblazoned with Barry’s signature catchphrase, “Joker, joker, joker!”
If I was eight, my mother would have been twenty-six. You remember Charlene. Well, there she was. Pretty as anything you want to look at, and sat square in a shitbox walk-up in Northeast Philly, raising a third grader all by her lonesome.
My mother grew up in a run-down row house in a decaying Philly neighborhood called Summerdale, where she and her four siblings were tutored via daily run-ins with the boots, belts, and broomsticks of her mother. Her grandkids called her Nana, but everyone else called her the General, due to her fondness for discipline and nonproportional response. From the time she was a small child into her teens, Charlene was routinely punished by being locked for hours on end in a dark basement closet without food or water.
She was sixteen when she started dating Danny Dunn, a good-looking bad boy four years her senior who grew up fast in a whites-only orphanage. An auto mechanic who did some amateur stock car racing, he was pretty much a real-life James Dean. Except he was also a real-life philanderer, con artist, and nasty, nasty drunk. Even those of you without psychology degrees may be able to figure out why my mother was drawn to him. She was just shy of getting her certificate in beauty culture from Mercy Vocational when she wound up with an Irish Surprise named me. My dad demanded she get an abortion, but my mother wouldn’t do it. Or couldn’t do it—it’s a fine line with Catholics. So he did his best to terminate the pregnancy the old-fashioned way, by beating the ever-loving shit out of her. My dad denies this ever happened. Pure fabrication, he’ll tell you.
“Truth” has always been in quotes in the crazy-quilt assemblage of humans that passes for my family. So who knows? Maybe he socked her in the gut a couple of times while she was pregnant, maybe he didn’t. And that’s the “truth.” One thing’s for sure, though. When he reads the last couple paragraphs, he’ll probably wish he’d put a little more muscle into it when he had the chance.
Amid all the “truth” there is one fact I am reasonably certain of: on July 14, 1968, I made it out of Charlene’s guts alive. She was eighteen. He was twenty-two. And I was the seven and a half pounds of floppy-necked millstone forcing them to get married. Ain’t love grand?
Three years flew by, each more filled with magic than the last. If by magic, you mean screaming, punching, and booze. At some point the two of them sobered up long enough to get a quickie divorce. Charlene took a job as a shampoo girl at a small salon on Levick Street near St. Timothy’s. She worked there four years to support herself and her kid and put herself through beautician school. By the time I was seven she had her barber’s license and we moved on to Bustleton Avenue a few neighborhoods over, near Olivieri’s barbershop where she cut enough men’s hair to keep us in soft pretzels and Hamburger Helper.
I WAS FEELING MORE THAN a little lonely as I pulled out of Bayard for the five-hour, three-hundred-mile slog to St. Paul, Nebraska. And not just from the lack of wineries in the gigantic middle of our great nation. I missed my dog. I missed my friends. I missed the beach. I missed not being in the car all the time. I missed sleeping in my own bed. I missed greasy burgers on Sunday afternoons at Hinano Cafe in Venice.
Things weren’t playing out the way I thought they would. Part of the point of this trip was to get over Elizabeth, but I really didn’t feel any different about the situation. I’d promised my sister I’d sprinkle some of Brian’s ashes in Yellowstone National Park, but I forgot. I was supposed to be learning everything there was to know about wine, and somehow I wasn’t doing that, either. I was just a lonely, forgetful phony in a car with an unfortunate name a long way from home.
Wait, scratch that. I lived in Nowhere now. And I was smack-dab in the middle of it out there in central Nebraska.
When the sweet, elderly woman behind the counter at a gas station in Bridgeport asked me how my morning was going, I almost told her everything. Go ahead, just start blubbering right here, I thought to myself, she’ll understand. I figured she’d probably give me a big hug and pat me on the back as I soaked her flowery cardigan in tears as she told me everything is okay and everyone felt this way sometimes and life was the hardest thing about being alive and things would get better. She’d tell me that if I wanted to go back, I could. I had always had the power to do so. All I had to do was close my eyes, tap my heels together three times, and think to myself “there’s no place like home.” Then drive thirteen hundred miles.
“Going great so far.” It’s almost the same thing, right?
“You have a wonderful day, dear,” she replied.
I restrained myself from saying, “Thanks, Mom.”
I walked out to Carl Vehicle and pointed him east. But not before I sprinkled a pinch of Brian’s ashes next to the pump in the gas station parking lot. It wasn’t Old Faithful but, well, Brian had never been to Bridgeport, Nebraska, either.
I drove for about an hour in silence. The first time I’d done so on the trip. When I forgot why I was doing it, I turned on the radio. First song? Simon and Garfunkel’s “Homeward Bound.” Just started. Goddamn if I didn’t crank it up—not a phrase people typically associate with Simon and Garfunkel. I am, if nothing else, an innovator—and start shrieking along.
Midway through the song I passed an old farmer in a pickup truck who looked at me like I had two gay heads. What’s the matter, buddy? Ain’t never seen a grown man in a Japanese-made SUV going eighty-five miles per hour while bawling his eyes out scream-singing Simon and Garfunkel?
Next up—I shit you not—“The Long and Winding Road” by the Beatles. And now I knew I was being fucked with, not by the universe, but some sadistic pansophical programmer at SiriusXM. This wasn’t even the halfway decent version of the goddamn song, the one Paul wanted on the record. No, this was the treacly piece of shit Phil Spector rubbed his sugary taint all over. Fuck you, Phil Spector. And fuck your wig (I’d take a bet that Phil Spector actually did fuck his wig at some point). And your stupid overproduction of the last thing the best band this weird universe ever spit out. I should mention that by this point I was crying like a third grader who just dropped a championship-losing pop fly and looked like I’d been hit in the face with a snot pie.
I could barely get the lyrics out or see the road ahead. Fearing that listening to music in my current state might present a danger to others, and myself, I switched over to talk radio. Howard Stern had just begun an interview with Neil Young. He interviewed Young for more than an hour, during which they touched on just about everything I wanted to know about the man. When asked if he thought music had turned him into a god, Young replied, “Music turned me into myself.” Thanks, Neil. I dialed up Harvest on my phone and disappeared into Nebraska.
As I mentioned earlier, the grand center of this country is a little light on vineyards. They weren’t kidding about those amber waves of grain though. Great for beer. Not so much for wine. Still, I am, as always, a professional. And as a professional, I have notes. Take this entry from October 15, 2014, at the Miletta Vista Winery in St. Paul, Nebraska: “You know how you say a wine has legs? And that sounds like lakes? Lahhkges, right? But they don’t look like lakes at all! They look like rivers. We shouldn’t say a wine has good legs, we should say a wine has good rivers. Because back in France grapes grow by . . . rivers?” Based on this, I’m pretty sure I’m a genius.
But please don’t interpret my distractibility as a knock on Miletta Vista. Mick and Loretta McDowell, the proprietors of the place, are fine people and are at the forefront of Nebraska winemaking. Cynics might equate that to being valedictorian at summer school, but I’ve tried their wine and can attest it’s the real McCoy (or, rather, the real McDowell). Miletta Vista has garnered numerous prestigious awards around the country, most notably for their Brianna—a Muscat hybrid that can withstand the harshest of winters. It won “Best of Show White Wine” at the 2012 U.S. National Competition in Sonoma, California, where renowned sommelier Chris Sawyer declared it one of the more interesting American wines he’s tasted in years. And when Chris Sawyer says a wine is interesting, it’s in your best interest to listen.
Speaking of interesting, let’s talk for a second about all the great wines from Iowa and western Illinois.
Okay, second’s up. Great job everyone.
I’m going to be honest with you folks; I drank wine in these states and they were made by wonderful salt-of-the-earth people. And I’m not going to tell you their names or their wineries because, while I tried to like the wine out there, it’s not an easy task. In fact it was a terrible task. And I was terrible at it. In that spirit, I’d like to present some of the more terrible things that can happen to wine between the ground and your mouth.
BUZZKILL: A GLOSSARY OF WINE NIGHTMARES
BRETTANOMYCES (BRETT)
A spoilage yeast that causes barnyard aromas and flavors in wine. Often referred to as Brett, which means, statistically, it has a 90 percent likelihood to share either the name of your freshman year RA or that dick from high school who stole your girlfriend.
VOLATILE ACIDITY (VA)
An undesirable amount of acidity that gives a wine a sour, vinegary edge. The Brother Theodore of winemaking.
CORKED
When a tainted stopper causes wine to taste like Phil Spector has been rubbing it with his taint.
PHYLLOXERA
If vineyards were network TV shows, then the Phylloxera bug would be Matthew Perry. If it gets into your vineyard, it will inevitably kill it.
PIERCE’S DISEASE
If vineyards were L.A. comedy clubs, Pierce’s disease would be Dane Cook. It just shows up sometimes out of the blue, it’s incredibly hard to stop, and there’s nothing funny about it.
BERRY ROT
This is what happens when the berries . . . you got this one, right?
OXIDIZED
When wine has been exposed too long to air and taken on a brownish color, lost its freshness, and begun to smell of rotten fruit. See also: David Lee Roth.
BOTTLE SHOCK
A condition that can occur just after bottling or due to bad handling. Also a forgettable 2008 flick about the time Alan Rickman saved America from the French. Thanks, Alan Rickman!
MERCAPTANS
Volatile sulfur compounds that can occur in wine. Imagine a skunk ate another skunk then took a dump in your wine. It’s worse than that.
I NEEDED A BREATHER, SO I headed from western Illinois to Chicago. Hey, you know what’s good in Chicago? Whiskey. I spent the better part of two days there hunkered down on a stool at Delilah’s, arguably the finest no-frills whiskey wonderland in these United States. Delilah’s boasts an amazing and expansive selection of single malts and bourbons, and owner Mike Miller is as knowledgeable a whiskey-phile as they come. If I hadn’t had two more months and many thousands of miles’ worth of wine research ahead of me, I’d likely still be at Delilah’s sipping Highland Park Single Cask, making lists of things I was fucking up on this trip, and rocking out to Bad Brains. Don’t judge me. I needed this.
Ultimately, however, duty called, and I couldn’t let it go to voicemail anymore. If I really wanted to become the best there is at talking about learning to be the best there is, I had to keep popping corks and paying tolls across this Land of Freedom. So I said good-bye to Chi-town and pointed Carl Vehicle in the general direction of the Atlantic Ocean.
Do they make wine in Michigan? You bet your sweet bippy they do. They just don’t make it from grapes. The foremost U.S. producers of nongrape wine, Michiganders make it from cranberries, apples, oranges. Basically whatever they can get their hands on that they can turn into booze. Because if they don’t, that old bastard Winter wins.
The sour cherry wine produced at places such as Good Harbor Vineyards on the Leelanau Peninsula is said to be the best of its kind. Of course, the only people saying that are the ones who regularly consume wine made from cherries. It’s like asking the Taco Bell Chihuahua where you might find a great burrito.
And of course they have grapes too. Now that I have finally explored the Wolverine State, I can attest with some authority that they make damn good ice wine in the Traverse City area. Ice wine is sweet wine made from grapes that freeze on the vine. Canada and Germany have long been the world’s leading producers of this niche product, which is difficult and expensive to produce. But all of a sudden, Michigan winemakers be like, yo, we chillin’! A fact I include solely for the way it sounds when said in a Canadian-tinged midwestern accent.
Chateau Chantal and Brys Estate both make excellent ice wines. The Vidal Blanc from the Paw Paw region ain’t too shabby either, with standouts like Warner Vineyards and Cody Kresta. The Vidal grape, incidentally, is a hybrid of Ugni Blanc and Rayon d’Or, both of which are commonly used to make ice wine.
See, I’m learning things! There’s hope. Next I plan to move on to learning useful things.
I left pastoral northern Michigan for not-pastoral-in-the-least Detroit. Travel advisory: I firmly believe that a tribe of radical hipster communitarians will one day make Detroit over as a Utopia of free expression and social justice (and Robocops). Until then, I suggest you stay the fuck out of Detroit. If you stop for gas, directions, food, or human kindness, something terrible will happen to you, probably involving child gangs, wild dogs, or both. Take it from a guy who knows a thing or two about terrible things.
I DON’T KNOW HOW MUCH my mom made cutting hair at Olivieri’s, but it can’t have been much. Olivieri’s was a no-frills place with a blue-collar clientele; a haircut couldn’t have earned her more than a couple bucks. Every Wednesday we took the bus to the welfare office. I remember because I always got excited when it came time to pull the cord to let the driver know we wanted off at the next stop. Pulling the cord was important. You controlled the whole goddamn bus, if only for a minute or two. And let me tell you, I was really good at pulling that cord. Figured I might go pro one day. But that dream fizzled when my mom got an old beater of a station wagon and we stopped taking buses everywhere.
About three weeks after we got the station wagon, someone smashed out the rear windshield to get at the precious bounty inside—a carton of Kools. We had that car two more years, but my mother never replaced the rear window or stopped bitching about losing those cigarettes. But silver lining alert! By taking out our rear window, the Kools thief transformed our piece of shit wagon into a piece of shit winter wonderland. At least from January to March. Sure, Joey McGill said my mom was so poor she went to Kentucky Fried Chicken to lick other people’s fingers and that little bastard Al Rossi said she married young just to get the free rice. But for me a little ridicule was a small price to pay for being able to build snowmen in the back of the car while rolling down I-95.
As I mentioned before, Nana’s nickname was the General. She had a nickname for my mother and me as well. She called us “the wards of the state.” Because that’s the supportive thing to do when your daughter is on welfare and food stamps. She relentlessly chided my mother for “wasting” what little money we had on Catholic school rather than sending me to public school for free. But Charlene wasn’t hearing it. The way she saw it, public schools were breeding grounds for degenerates and criminals. Catholic school meant I had a chance. A job that didn’t involve mopping up floors or driving a truck like my bum of a father. Maybe even college. “Look at John F. Kennedy!” my mother always used to say. Because this is America, goddamnit, and no matter who you are, if you work hard, you’ve got a chance to become successful enough that someone wants to splat your brains all over the back of a Lincoln convertible. For years she harbored a dream that I would pursue a career as a mortician. When I asked why, she said, “Because people never stop dying.”
Practical woman, my mother.
As poor as we were back then, somehow we wound up having an old-fashioned player piano in our apartment for a while. One day I came home from school and there it was, a big wooden thing standing in the small windowless space that passed for a living room. When I asked where it came from, my mom said it was a gift in a tone that told me to drop it. Charlene has never been a big fan of prolonged lines of questioning. A lot of people came and went at our apartment in those days, most of them men, many of them with gifts. Best I can figure, one of them must have really liked my mother and just so happened to have a piano in his pocket (in addition to being happy to see her).
It wasn’t anything fancy and it had a few broken keys, but it was in tune and the player mechanism worked fine. We only had the piano roll that was already inside it, of course, which meant we were stuck with just this one song. For months we had no idea what song it even was. One day though, Joe Ferrand, a neighborhood old-timer who used to look after me, came over. He immediately IDed it as a Tin Pan Alley number called “Hard Hearted Hannah (the Vamp of Savannah).” He even taught me the lyrics . . .
Leather is tough, but Hannah’s heart is tougher,
She’s a gal who loves to see men suffer.
Those Tin Pan Alley guys didn’t mess around.
Joe also taught me how to play “Chopsticks” and a simple version of “The Entertainer.” In reality, my piano playing skills never progressed beyond rudimentary. But in my imagination, I was a virtuoso. Having a player piano at my disposal helped with this illusion. Now that my dreams of a career pulling the cord on the bus were dead, I was looking for a new career anyway. I was certain my lively, note-perfect rendition of “Hard Hearted Hannah” (nailed it . . . again!) was going to take me places. Maybe even one day, dare to dream, to Canada.
WHICH BRINGS ME TO THE most shameful episode in this book. Detroit shook me up pretty bad, left me doubting everything I ever knew . . . like the fact that Paul Masson would never ever sell a wine before its time. I was weak, America. So weak I . . . I cheated on you. With my Canadian girlfriend, Canada. The first time I entered her was right after leaving Detroit.
I swear it only lasted a day or two. I don’t know what to tell you. She made me feel wanted. Seriously, I have never felt more like a walking mug shot than I have during my time among the sunny folk of Ontario. I was convinced that every hearty “Hello there!” would be followed by a swift call to the RCMP. Still, I never got arrested, or even hassled in the slightest while I was inside my Canadian girlfriend, Canada. And that means one of two things. Either I was wrong, and Canadians truly are the nicest people on the planet, or I managed to outwit the Mounties at the ice wine vineyards by cleverly blending in as a scarecrow.
If you’re ever up that way, the booming wine region around the charming town of Niagara-on-the-Lake will make you wish you were nice enough to be Canadian. It doesn’t hurt that Inniskillin, Trius, Stratus, and Kittling Ridge make the best ice wine in North America. Don’t hold being Canadian against them. If you squint when you look at the map, you can convince yourself that Ontario is our fifty-first state. Plus you can see the Falls while you’re up there. I can say with certainty that they’re especially awe-inspiring when you’re ripped to the tits on ice wine.
WHEN I REENTERED THE UNITED STATES in New York State, I was riddled with guilt. The United States gave me everything and I go parading around with some two-bit hussy with a prime minister and a funny accent? What kind of man was I? I stopped feeling bad almost immediately, however, once I realized I was headed through the toll-rich byways of the great Northeast. Drop some coin, apparently, and all is forgiven.
The only thing worse than the ridiculous amount of tolls up and down the East Coast is actually having to stop and pay at each one. Electronic tolling lets you roll through those things like a hot bowling ball through pins made of butter. I asked the guy at the first tollbooth I hit if he knew how I might go about getting an E-Z Pass transponder.
“No idea,” the toll collector said. I got the sense he was being brutally honest with me.
“You have no idea how to get an E-Z Pass?” I said, with what I would characterize as an appropriate amount of incredulity.
“Nah,” he said, his brow showing the ease of a man who has given his last shit.
“Any idea where I might find someone who would know?”
He wore an unmistakable moue of world weariness as he took a gander at the line of cars behind me. Then he heaved a sigh of exasperation before making a big production of searching for something beneath the register.
“Here,” he sniffed, tossing an E-Z Pass brochure through my open window.
I guess I couldn’t blame him. I’d basically pulled up and said, Is there a way I could never, ever deal with someone like you again? Oh, and would you mind if I also put you out of a job?
Then again, we were in New York. A state whose people don’t have the best reputation for being hospitable. At least where I come from, when you ask where something is, people have the decency to say “Up your ass!”
It dawns on me that on the American Wino book tour, I may have to do some damage control before paying visits to Ohio or New York. And basically every other state I visited. And Canada.
Some people believe that the wines being made near the Finger Lakes in New York rival the very best juice from Napa and Sonoma. Some people also believe the Jets will win the Super Bowl again one day and that paying $3,500 a month to live in a Manhattan closet is reasonable. Silly New Yorkers! Still, I go into everything with an open mind and to my delight discovered some truly lip-smacking Riesling produced around Seneca Lake, the so-called middle finger of the region. Standouts include the 2013 Reserve Dry Riesling from Hermann J. Wiemer, Wagner’s 2012 Semi-Dry Riesling, and the 2012 Select Harvest Riesling from Glenora. They make delicious ice wine there too. Check out the Vidal Ice from Standing Stone Vineyards, produced at an exceptional vineyard site first planted by wine legends Charles Fournier and Guy Deveaux in 1975.
If you’re looking to party hearty in Finger Lakes wine country, the place to be is Hazlitt 1852 Vineyards in Hector, New York, on the east side of Seneca Lake, where the rock and roll is played at high volume and twenty bucks gets you not one, but two bottles of Red Cat. Red Cat is the Red Bull and vodka of crushed grape juice. Not that there’s actually vodka or energy drink in the wine, but it somehow effects the same delirious buzz, which goes a long way toward explaining why Hazlitt is one of the liveliest tasting rooms in the United States. Have dinner afterward down the street at Stonecat Café—what is it with the cats, guys?—for the best cornmeal-crusted catfish east of the Mississippi.
Should you decide to tour any New York State wineries, you may want to put Manischewitz on your list. They’ve been making sweet concord wine in Canandaigua, New York, since 1927. Feel free to ask them about their famous kosher liquid, but know that any questions about the Dead Milkmen (whose song “I Dream of Jesus,” from the album Not Richard, But Dick, tells the story of a family that finds Jesus Christ in a bottle of Manischewitz) may fall on deaf ears.
The state’s other major kosher winemaker is Mogen David, known better by its initials, MD. As in MD 20/20. Though no longer sold in twenty-ounce bottles containing 20 percent alcohol (Fun fact? FUN FACT), it should be noted that at today’s prices a bottle of Mad Dog costs more than that three buck chuck down at Trader Joe’s. Guess it’s time to recalibrate that Classy-O-Meter, friends. Alas, I was unable to convince anyone from the Wine Group (current owners of Mogen David, and producers of Cupcake Vodka among other tooth-rotting delights) to comment on the record about the fine art of selling $5 wine that tastes like Jolly Ranchers.
I’m actually pretty bummed I didn’t get a chance to talk to them. No sense of adventure, these people! This is a book on American wine, and what’s more American than someone saying “Sugar plus alcohol equals wine? Okay, fuck it! Here’s sugar plus alcohol. It’s wine, I swear. That’ll be $5.95, please.”
I can take a hint, New York. Besides, I got plenty of other states to talk to. The eastern seaboard is the geographical equivalent of a singles bar. Let’s see, who’s close? How you doing, Vermont?
Turns out rather well. Thanks to Ken Albert and other plucky sons of bitches like him.
Ken Albert is a problem solver. Before opening his winery in Shelburne, Ken worked for thirty-three years as an engineer at IBM. Which made him just the sort of man to figure out how to make high-quality wine in a cold region not particularly suited to doing so. One varietal in particular intrigued him—Marquette, a cousin of Frontenac and grandson of Pinot Noir that was developed at the University of Minnesota and introduced in 2006.
Shelburne Vineyard 2012 Marquette Reserve is not only the tastiest Vermont wine I sampled, it’s the best wine I came across in all of New England. And while that may sound like the equivalent of being the toughest kid in glee club, these days you make fun of glee club at your peril. There is nothing quite so soul shattering as getting your ass kicked by a six-foot-two Sasquatch while he sings a pitch-perfect rendition of Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now” backed up in a five-part harmony by a squad of music savants who’ve seen West Side Story one too many times. And right now, California is cruising for a glee club bruising. Sure, it played underdog to Europe for decades, but ever since it was validated as a legitimate competitor in the 1970s, it’s been shoving states like Vermont into lockers and taking their lunch money. A word to the wise, Napa: glee club never sleeps.
Shelburne’s Marquette Reserve is medium bodied, with lots of vibrant fruit and a hint of spice, and it can hold its own against reds from the most prominent AVAs in America. Just another sign that we are living through the most important and transformative era in American winemaking. And that Americans, when their backs are against the wall, will find a way to make booze anywhere.
From Vermont it was on to Portland, Maine, where I attended Harvest on the Harbor, billed as the city’s premier food and wine festival. I was excited to check out the many wines from Maine I assumed would be poured there, but failed to find even one. There was, however, plenty of delightful Maine-made craft beer on hand (Allagash Black!). And I would be remiss if I didn’t single out the potato donuts (potato donuts!) from the Holy Donut as the single most appetizing gluten-free food that has ever been created. But locally produced wine, not so much. An old pal (and I mean, the guy is ancient) of mine lives in Portland, so I used the city as a brief respite from the road. Over the course of several days in Maine’s most populous city, and numerous visits to its restaurants and wine bars, not a single one carried wine made in-state.
Come on, guys. I have a book premise to pay off. Can you pretend you’re trying?
Still, I couldn’t help thinking that given this is a state whose main exports are giant edible sea insects (lobster), an unshakable sense of creeping dread (Stephen King), and flinty resolve (every person who has survived a Maine winter), maybe it’s for the best I didn’t encounter any fruit of its native product. I don’t want to end up in some story where a giant vengeful bottle of wine chases me across a craggy, unforgiving shoreline, hell-bent on using its “human key” on my head. My head’s been through enough.
SPEAKING OF MY HEAD . . . I guess it’s time to finish telling you about my attack in our apartment in Philly (I know you’ve been wondering). Like I said, I was in third grade. It must have been a particularly long day of slinging haircuts, because when my mother got home, she seemed more agitated than usual. I could usually gauge my mother’s mood by the condition of her hair. The curlier her coif, the more flustered she tended to be. On this particular night, she was rocking some Robert-Plant-level frizz.
My mother was in the kitchen, and my back was to her. I heard her retrieve a pan from the cabinet beneath the sink, put it on the stove, and light the burner. I asked what we were having for dinner. We generally rotated between hot dogs, Kraft dinner, Elio’s frozen pizza, and ground beef, rice, and gravy. On special occasions (or when my mother was just too beat down tired to cook), I got a Big Mac, fries, and chocolate shake from McDonald’s. Those were good nights.
This being a regular night, though, in a regular year in my regular third grade, it was regular 7 P.M. and time for regular Jack Barry and Joker’s Wild, along with regular ground beef, rice, and gravy. I had a complex, nuanced set of feelings about that night’s gustatory fare, which I expressed with four well-chosen words. “Aw, come on . . . again?” before turning back to face the TV.
Then I woke up.
At first I couldn’t figure out why I was on the floor. The chair I’d been sitting on was lying on its side next to me. Something hurt. A lot. And my hearing was all ringy and tinny and flanged-out like I was in a tunnel or a giant seashell. Then I saw my mom, a hazy silhouette hovering over me. As my vision cleared, her face came into focus. She was upset. Her lips were moving in slow motion, shouting. I couldn’t tell if she was scared or hurt. Someone was in the apartment, no question. And they had snuck up and clobbered me? That must be why I was on the floor. Some uninvited asshole—my dad? Drunk? Probably—had shown up, angry and incoherent and laid into me without warning. She would have tried to protect me, but what could she do? The guy was bigger than her. She was probably just thinking about getting us out of there. Maybe it wasn’t my dad. Maybe it was the guy with the long hair and the lazy eye who’d been hanging around lately. Ray. That was his name. Creepy goddamn Ray. He was a few years younger than my mother. Something wasn’t right about him. I knew when I first saw him you couldn’t trust that sidewinding fuck. What kind of sick lunatic would kill his girlfriend’s kid and then torture her to death? A sick lunatic like Ray is who.
We needed to get out. Fast.
Still groggy, I lifted my head to look for Ray, but couldn’t see him. Coward too. Come out, you scared piece of shit. My mom was still screaming, and my hearing was coming back now. She was repeating the same thing over and over again. I could just make it out through my confusion.
“Joker, joker, joker!” Jack Barry’s signature line.
Jesus Christ, Ma, now? I mean I love Jackie B as much as the next guy, but . . .
“Joker, joker, joker, fucker . . .”
My head was clearing and I could make out the words now.
“. . . motherfucker. You little motherfucker. You little . . .”
I looked at her again, her face trembling, contorted and grotesque. She looked like a Maurice Sendak Wild Thing, shaking the pan at me as tears soaked the front of her dark blouse. My mother always wore dark blouses to work. Said it hid the hair better.
Every bit of energy my mother had was going into screaming. And all I wanted, curled there in a ball on the floor, was for her to keep it up—whether “joker, joker, joker” or “you little motherfucker.” As long as she was screaming like that, she couldn’t swing the pan again.
It was the first moment in my entire life that I wished my dad would show up. Even drunk. That wouldn’t matter, right? If he found Charlene beating his only son with a frying pan, he’d intervene. Grab her by the arms. Shake her. Make her calm down. Even drunk dads do that, right?
Of course at that moment my dad was probably holed up at P&Js Tavern trying to finally get Janice the “pretty” bartender to seal the deal in the men’s room through the pungent odor of five-day-old piss. But it didn’t end up mattering. My mother only hit me with the frying pan the once. Which is plenty when it’s cast iron and in the head. Within a few minutes, everything was quiet again. The ringing in my ears settled and her sudden ferocity bottled itself up as quickly as it had exploded. She went back to the stove, put the pan on it, and made ground beef, rice, and gravy. Then she set it down in front of me and went straight into her bedroom and shut the door. She didn’t come back out until the next morning. She took a look at the overripe eggplant that was the right side of my head and told me not to go to school. I got a whole day of Newhart, Mary Tyler Moore, and the king, Bob Motherfucking Barker, and I didn’t even have to fake being sick. Score one for the millstone.
When she got home that night, Charlene’s hair was straighter. She brought McDonald’s. With an extralarge shake. She said that if anyone asked the next day why my ear was the size of a grapefruit, I should tell them I got hurt playing football with some kids back in our old neighborhood. It was a relief to have a story, for both of us. “Even though it was an accident,” my mother said, “people could get the wrong idea.”
She was right. Them getting the wrong idea would be awful. But so would them getting the right idea. Which was that she had acute bipolar disorder with psychotic features. Still, neither of us was ready for that information yet. And it’s not like she killed me or anything. And if she had, well then, she probably would have had her reasons. Or at least the voices in her head would have.
In the end, though, the cover story didn’t matter because I never told it. Nobody asked. The ’70s were hilarious that way.
After my run-in with the business end of our frying pan, I told myself I would learn as many songs as there were to play on that old piano. Joe Ferrand didn’t know very many, he confessed, but he said he knew a guy who would teach me for free if I promised to practice.
Then one day, about a week later I came home from school and the piano was gone. I asked my mother where it was, and she said, “They took it back.” I knew better than to ask who “they” were. Accept these things. The piano is gone. You will not play your way out of that apartment, and you will not pull the cord for a living. You got a problem? Talk to Hard Hearted Hannah about it.
Start pourin’ water on a drownin’ man
She’s hard hearted Hannah
The vamp of Savannah, GA
Ooh! She’s sweet as sour milk!
The stranger who broke into our apartment and clocked me with a frying pan came back every so often. And no matter how many times she did, she never stopped being a stranger. Every time is as scary as the first. And every time I hold out hope I’ll never see her again. Just like every year I hope the Eagles win the Super Bowl. It’s what people do where I come from.
WHEN I MAPPED OUT THE trip, I made it a point to include a stop in Rhode Island because I am an idiot. Rhode Island isn’t anything but adorable, mind, but Li’l Rhody is where Elizabeth is from. I think I planned it this way out of some kind of wishful thinking that by this point the two of us would be back together. It’s like they always say: the first step to rekindling romance is to take off on a three-month wine-centric road trip across the country and only get in touch via hostile/creepy text messages. Where did my brilliant plan go wrong?
I kept telling myself I had two legitimate, nothing-to-do-with-Elizabeth reasons to be here. First off, I wanted to see Rich and Mia, two pals from Providence. Second, I thought, since I’m writing a wine book and all (See? Nothing to do with Elizabeth!), it’d be a good idea to drop by New England’s largest grower of wine grapes, Newport Vineyards in Middletown.
Want to take a guess who grew up in Middletown? It rhymes with Belizabeth.
Total coincidence. (Is too. Shut up. God!)
The day started off fine. Rich came along to check out the juice with me and our first stop was Carolyn’s Sakonnet Vineyard in Little Compton, Rhode Island.
Now I understand that visiting a winery in Compton might spook a lot of people. But I lived in L.A. for ten years. I knew what was up, yo (this “yo” is brought to you by the letter “white” and the number “asshole”). Turns out, however, that Little Compton is a far less intimidating place to visit than Big Motherfucking Compton back in L.A. As for the wines, well, there’s no comparison. Seriously, do not ever, ever, EVER, compare the wines. You start throwing modifiers around, before you know it you got some kind of East Coast versus West Coast beef cooking—which would probably pair wonderfully with a 1977 Paul Masson Blush—and someone ends up getting drowned in a spit bucket.
We crossed the Sakonnet River Bridge from the mainland to Aquidneck, the largest island in Narragansett Bay and the flat-out weirdest name I saw on the entire trip. We drove south through Portsmouth to Middletown, whose only significance for me is the fact that it contains New England’s biggest grape grower. (Lalalalalalalala. I can’t hear you.)
A Tip for the Wise Wine Traveler: if your heart is on the mend following a devastating breakup, I strongly advise you to not visit a winery located in the hometown of the individual who was the cause of said heartbreak. Particularly not if you do not have a residence other than your car and are in the middle of some sort of infernal never-ending wine bender you can’t even remember how you got yourself into and have no idea when it will end.
The publicist from Newport Vineyards was kind enough to set us up with a complimentary tasting. As we sipped our way through the portfolio, which included homegrown Chardonnay and Pinot Noir among other varietals, Rich must have sensed something was wrong. The profuse sweating and difficulty breathing might have been a giveaway.
He asked if he should get help, and I said no. He asked if maybe we just needed to leave.
“We should finish the tasting,” I whispered. “I feel bad just splitting.”
“What, you haven’t drunk enough wine by this point?”
He had a point. “I just don’t understand why I’m feeling this anxious,” I said.
“Look,” Rich said, “you and Elizabeth were together a long time. It’s totally understandable that coming back to her hometown would be upsetting.”
I reminded Rich that it was not a return visit.
“Okay, well, I’m sure there’s a good reason she never brought you back here,” he said.
There wasn’t, I assured him.
“Maybe that’s what’s upsetting you. Maybe you’re understanding that if you two never made it here during the many years the two of you were together, you can’t have meant very much to her.”
I thanked Rich for the finely crafted anvil he had dropped on my head. He signaled to the crane operator to start hoisting it up again (“Let’s reset, people!”).
“You’re not going to get over this until you really understand why you broke up, you know.”
Thanks, Oprah.
“You ever think maybe your relationship didn’t go as deep as you thought it did?”
“You’re saying I don’t know how I actually feel about Elizabeth.”
“I’m saying half of our lives are fantasy fucking island. You probably tell yourself five different lies just to get out of bed every morning.”
That was probably an optimistic estimate. And lucky me, Rich was on a roll.
“Come on, man, you’ve had a lot of time to think about this. Is it really fair to lay all of this on Elizabeth? It’s not like you grew up seeing a bunch of healthy relationships.”
I didn’t have anything approaching a valid response. It felt like Rich was one of those Maine wine monsters opening up my head and having a poke around.
“I’ve known you a long time. You weren’t ready for something this heavy when you met her. You were writing for Playboy and fucking everything with a pulse. Being with someone for the long haul is a skill. It’s something you have to learn. And, no offense, but you knew dick going into this one.”
One thing. I wanted him to be wrong about just one, little thing. Just to take the edge off.
“You know how many times you told me your relationship was perfect?” he continued. “That is the number one sign you’re deluding yourself. Perfect relationships don’t exist. If you’re not struggling, you’re not really in it. And that means you’re not giving her all of yourself. Until you do that, even if you’re technically in a relationship, you’re really just alone.”
The tasting room manager taking us through the tasting cleared her throat. “You guys okay? Because we can take a break if . . .”
“Which of these pairs best with a panic attack?” I asked feebly.
“Listen, it’s none of my business,” she replied, “but he’s right.”
Great. Rich had a therapy buddy.
“I was in four different long-term relationships before I met my husband,” she went on. “It’s his third marriage. Shit happens. All you can do is all you can do. The only way you really screw up is if you don’t learn from it when things go wrong. Here, try the Gemini Red. I think you’ll find it has a peppery finish and a hint of oak.”
I’ve never been more grateful to someone for changing the conversation to wine. Luckily Rich was there to keep my head under water.
“Don’t get the wrong idea here,” Rich said. “I’m proud of you.”
Could have fooled me.
“You came here. You faced your demons. This is the belly of the beast! It’s actually really impressive.”
I wondered aloud if he’d still feel proud if I puked all over the tasting room. It felt like my emotional upset was even affecting the way I experienced the wine. I’d had plenty of shit vino thus far on the trip, but this was different. It was like drinking misery. The wines we were sampling couldn’t be that bad, I reasoned, forcing down a sip of Gewürztraminer. It was those stupid demons of mine wreaking havoc on my palate.
“It’s not you,” Rich said, placing his hand on my shoulder and giving it a gentle squeeze. “This wine sucks. Now let’s get the hell outta here.”
Sorry, Newport Vineyards, but it’s not going to work out between us.