BATTLESHIPS & THE MIGHTY CLIO

If Coume del Mas fits the image of a small but perfectly-formed winery looking out over the Mediterranean, Mas Cristine doesn’t…really…fit…at all. The house that is Mas Cristine, with its beautiful rows of vines surrounding it, gives us its grapes and name. Where we make the wine is about three or four kilometres away from that beautiful house, with its beautiful vines. Since we took over the vines, we’ve been making the wine in a corner of the cave co-operative in Argelès. It’s an enormous building, probably about two and a half football pitches in its entirety. And it’s falling to bits. Too many bird nests in the rafters. Built into the structure itself are rows and rows of vast concrete vats for making far more wine than they need to these days, the majority of which have fallen into such disrepair that you wouldn’t consider putting liquid for human consumption into them. My rough arithmetic makes me think that when this place was fully functional you would have as much as five million litres of wine bubbling away in these vats. Nowadays I reckon that the co-op, who only have about four or five of these vessels still functional, make about a tenth of that. Most of their wine ferments in epoxy resin tanks, and quite often there’s an odd odour that emanates from their side of the building.

The co-op looks like an old polaroid. Dust and cobwebs cling to everything, as does the black mould that feeds on alcohol vapour; it adorns the walls and looks like the scorch marks from fire damage. Anything left untouched for more than an hour or two will attract some manner of filth. If it weren’t for the people working, and the odd smell of a bad ferment, you’d think the place was abandoned.

And there we are, in our small corner, squeezing in where we can, making (casting all modesty aside) fantastic wine in spite of it all. I like to think of the Mas Cristine team as the small mammals on a dinosaur carcass in the cold months after the big asteroid hit the Yucatan Peninsula. I love working in Coume del Mas; it’s beautiful, and it seems sometimes that the wines just effortlessly reflect that beauty. At Mas Cristine absolutely nothing is easy. We don’t fit in our space, so there’s a refrigerated storage container for fermenting the whites. Most of the winemaking, the grape processing, takes place outside, because when all the equipment is inside, there’s no room to work. There’s barely room to squeeze from one end to the other. Working in the container, managing the whites and keeping them cold, is also an act of patience, pace and often better suited to a contortionist than a winemaker. We earn the wine made at Mas Cristine. It is all the more extraordinary that it exists than anything else we do; simply that we can keep the winery clean enough to prevent contaminants and the like is a minor miracle.

Please don’t misunderstand me. Making wine at Coume del Mas is very hard, and the wine is rightfully brilliant. But Mas Cristine is like making wine on an obstacle course. And so Andy, Julien and I wear the work we do there as a badge of honour. And we sink a few more beers before clean up as well.

The first year I worked at Mas Cristine, we didn’t have a big, shiny, stainless steel bag press. Nor did we have the traditional basket press, formerly the mainstay of pressing grapes in this region and now often reduced to ornamental status; found usually as decoration in the front of wineries throughout Collioure, Banyuls and the Roussillon. Instead we had a mechanical beast, a horizontal screw press (which is exactly as it sounds – it uses massive screws to slowly smoosh grapes together) painted yellow with burnt red highlights, but pockmarked and blemished with abrasions and patches of rust. The cylinder for the grapes did not have the precision-perforated side for allowing the juice to drip through evenly, but instead used a series of segmented wooden grates. It looked like something salvaged from a shipwreck, or that you’d find on Scrapheap Challenge. I called it the battleship, though I’m not sure why. It was yellow, not grey. Utterly dilapidated, it fitted in with the rest of Mas Cristine perfectly.

However, long after the battleship was replaced with our shiny new bag-press, it stayed there, resting and rusting just outside the doors to the winery. That also fitted perfectly. While other, prettier, less dangerous wineries had an old basket press in the courtyard, often turned into a large flower pot, we, in our crammed back corner of the cave co-op, had a rusting metal hulk decaying slowly among the tall weeds. We didn’t throw it away for some time.

You don’t throw much old equipment away. Winemakers are natural hoarders. There’s always the fear that you might need it if something goes wrong. Some new-fangled piece of machinery might bite the dust right in the middle of a press cycle or just while you’re cooling down a ferment, and it’s beyond anyone’s ability to fix it. At Mas Cristine, we stopped using the dangerous old milk tank for five or so years, but we didn’t get rid of it. We stored it on top of the chill container, just in case. And then, one year, when the chill container broke, we got the forklift, brought it down, cleaned it up, plugged it in with crossed fingers, and were amazed that even though we’d left it out in the elements for half a decade, it still worked a charm. And it saved our bacon.

Even at Coume del Mas, there’s the old equipment graveyard. Around the side and in the back of the cave sit old tanks, odd lengths of hose, battered but functional pallets, cooling vats and an array of bits and pieces whose use is known only to Philippe. Every year I come back and half expect it to be cleared out, for there to have been a bit of a tidy in the winter months and all of that crumbling old kit to have been shipped out for scrap. But it isn’t. It’s still there, usually with a few more pieces added to the pile.

When something does go wrong, you try to fix it before phoning an engineer. Winemakers by necessity must be a combination of plumber, electrician and joiner in order to get through vintage. Time is too precious to waste waiting for a professional to get to you, and so very quickly you learn to grab a screwdriver, take whatever’s broken apart, and have a look to see what might be wrong. Most of the time, it’s pretty obvious. You see what’s broken and you fix it, if you can. If it’s beyond repair, you phone the engineer/professional and while you wait for them to show up, you fall back on your makeshift redundancy plan that you’ve figured out in the meantime, because you can’t just stop because something’s broken down. The ‘how do I keep moving?’ plan formulates alongside the ‘what if I can’t fix it?’ plan. You rummage through the old equipment, or notice as Andy or Philippe grab some bit of kit that’s sat unused for so long that you no longer recognised it as anything other than scenery.

I always thought that some day, in the midst of an epic technical failure, we’d be forced to clean up and make ready the old battleship for one last pressing whilst waiting on an obscure spare part to arrive from Italy, home of the shiny new bag-press. It had become as much a part of the scenery as the refrigerated container or the co-op itself.

And so the day that flatbed lorry arrived, complete with crane, was a bit of a shock. It was at the beginning of harvest that they came, and I looked in confusion and no small amount of wonder as the two blokes had a chat with Andy and Julien, and then began strapping up the battleship.

‘I thought we were keeping that in case of emergencies.’

‘What? Are you kidding?’

‘No, really. What happens if the press breaks?’

‘Rich, even if the press broke, we wouldn’t have used that bloody thing. It was rusted on the inside, and the wooden grates were rotting.’

‘Right. So why was it sat there for four years? I thought it was there in case of emergencies.’

‘No, mate, it was there because we couldn’t find anyone to take it away.’

‘Ah.’

The crane lifted the rusting mass high over us and then swung it very slowly to the flatbed. I was sad to see the battleship go. It was a reminder of my start here, and of just what a challenge winemaking in this borrowed corner of the world can be.

The grass where it sat had died; yet another blemish on the landscape behind the large building in Argelès. To this day, when I look at that spot, it seems as though something’s missing.

Sometimes Kirsten brings the boys to the winery. Andy will let Theo sit in the forklift and pretend to drive it. His legs are too short to reach the pedals, but he grips the steering wheel and pretends to honk the horn with glee. Sometimes he doesn’t just pretend to honk the horn. Both he and Angus have big smiles, which makes it quick to forgive them when they get into mischief, which they do with regularity. They are wee boys, after all. Andy will hunt around for a tank that’s still juice (that hasn’t started its ferment) and draw two glasses worth for the boys. Theo, the older one, will make sure his dad’s looking and try to swirl the juice in his glass and make a show of sticking his nose in it and smelling before he takes a sip. Angus, younger, still getting to grips with cups that aren’t sippy, holds the glass by the bowl with both of his hands with Kirsten keeping a watchful eye and a hand close to the base of the glass in case Gus loses his grip. Baby Gus (Angus is not a baby anymore, and quite soon he won’t even be toddler, but I have a feeling the name ‘Baby Gus’ might last a bit longer than its accuracy does – it’s just too much fun to say) takes big sips, and excess juice dribbles down either side of his mouth. Theo holds the glass by the stem, and can wield it somewhat clumsily. Kirsten somehow manages to keep an eye on both of them as they sup down the grape nectar and then hold their glasses outstretched for more.

She tells Andy about one afternoon at home, while he and I were at the winery, Theo got very business-like, or as business-like as a three-and-a-half-year old can get. He grabbed his beach bucket and walked around the kitchen, picking up every corkscrew he could find and putting it into the bucket. Kirsten watched until he strolled over to the kitchen door and made to climb down the stairs. ‘Theo, what are you doing?’ she asked. ‘I’m going to go to work with Daddy and Big Rich,’ he replied.

We’ll have a beer or a glass of wine during these visits. They’re a welcome pause in the day, though when they finish it’s like recess coming to an end at school. It’s harder to settle in and slip back into routine when it’s over.

 

Mas Cristine isn’t just a strange place to make wine, but Argelès is kind of a strange town to be in to make wine.

Argelès boasts the best beaches along this stretch of coast. The stretches of sand in Banyuls and Collioure are more small pebbles than sand, and can be brutal on bare feet if they’re not used to it. And just on the other side of the autoroute from Argelès, you have the foothills and forests; some truly stunning scenery. You’re never very far from somewhere beautiful; romantic, even. As far as spots boasting scenes of spectacular natural beauty goes, the back entrance of the cave co-op, where we make Mas Cristine, ranks quite low in this part of the world. The building itself is a bit of a shambles: the dirt drive is pockmarked with craters and potholes, what greenery there is is the sort of scraggly underbrush you’d expect from somewhere more abandoned than this. Opposite the entrance and drive is a storm drain that curls underneath the raised train tracks that run parallel to the winery. Next to those tracks is a large, corrugated metal shed that holds various bits of disused winery equipment. And, of course, there’s the large, ancient and battered refrigerated storage container that we cool the whites in during harvest.

And yet the drive outside our entrance sees its fair share of traffic. More than it deserves. Folks walk their dogs. There’s an old drunk who hides his stash of terrible wine on a shelf, outside of the back of the container, where the controls for the refrigerator are. He rides his bike for his morning visits to the stash. He wears thick, grandpa-style glasses and pale blue shorts, and later in the afternoon he’ll be pushing his bike along, leaning it up against the wall of the winery, too tipsy to ride it. He has wispy white and grey hair and a salt and pepper moustache that curls slightly, but isn’t waxed, at the ends. Greetings are usually just a wave or a brief bonjour. There’s a house next to the winery that has a fig tree. A few of its branches reach over their high wall and often the old drunk will pluck the low-hanging figs for an afternoon snack, having finished his tipple. If there are no figs, sometimes he’ll show his disapproval at this lack of figs by pissing against the wall. Then he’ll push his bike away home up the road.

The old drunk used to have a dreadful tumour on his nose. The effect made it look elephantine, and magnified the cracked red broken veins brought on by the cheap wine kept in a plastic water bottle by the container. Kiwi Johnny remarked on its anatomical resemblance, and thus dubbed the old drunk ‘ball sack nose’.

A few years ago, however, the old drunk had an operation to remove the growth and fix his nose, and so, whilst the nickname lasts amid the giggles of winemakers and pickers who see him stagger past, it’s no longer relevant.

Sometimes he’ll stop and taste a grape or two. Sometimes we’ll give him a taste of wine. He gets more surly with each visit and has been known, in the late afternoon, to push his bike past us with stagger, swearing at us under his breath. It’s the sort of muttering anger of a paranoid drunk thinking that the world is laughing at him. To be fair, we’ve had a chuckle or two at his stagger home, though I doubt he’s aware of it. There’s a sadness to it all, which gives the chuckles a hollow echo. But if you couldn’t laugh about it, you’d soon be looking for a place to hide your own bottle, somewhere a bike ride away.

The folks who live in the house don’t like us very much. We turn the dirt track outside their drive into a potholed swamp six days a week for eight or so weeks a year. Nowadays we give them a case or two of wine to placate them, but still there’s rarely a smile or a wave when they’re coming or going. I always hold my breath a bit when I see them arrive home from work, slowly bouncing through puddles and potholes, gritting my teeth and hoping they don’t scrape their undercarriage against the road. Feeling that at any moment, they’ll lose it and unleash a barrage of Gallic and Catalan vitriol and bile in my direction. Still, they did decide to build their house next to both a train line and a massive winery. I’m not sure what else they were expecting.

While over the course of harvest the faces of those who walk and drive by the winery become familiar, there’s another group of visitors that go unseen, but not unnoticed. Andy and I only know they exist because of what they leave behind. It turns out that our ugly little corner of Argelès is quite a popular location for the odd romantic liaison. For years we’ve found the remains of such encounters in the form of condom wrappers and, unfortunately, the used contents of said wrapper. These discoveries tend to result in a conversation that goes something like this:

Me: ‘Dude, the most romantic person in the world took his date to an industrial wasteland again.’

Andy: ‘He really knows how to show her a good time, I wonder if they had a drive-through at McDonald’s before they had sex against a storage container.’

Me: ‘I wonder if they even got out of the car.’

Andy: ‘Taking a leaf out of your book, eh Rich?’

Me: ‘I taught him everything I know.’

By this point I would have thought of a better response to Andy’s ribbing, too late for it to be a proper retort. Instead I’ll just shake my head and laugh. Andy will probably do the same. And then we’ll wander away in disbelief, not wanting to dwell too much on our discovery and yet still mystified as to what manner of circumstance would bring someone here, of all places, for a shag.

One morning during a recent harvest I was driving into Mas Cristine for the day’s work. Elysia was with me, a skilled and experienced winemaker from Western Australia with a superb nose and palate for detecting faults during ferment but a somewhat spotty memory for remembering which tank needed to be racked into which other tank (with often hilarious, though problematic, results, one of which lead to the creation of a new, one-off, and not terribly legal rosé). As I pulled the Mighty Clio into the drive outside Mas Cristine I noticed an old VW Polo parked beside the corrugated shed. The light was on in the car and as I parked, turned off my engine, and exchanged a ‘what the fuck?’ with Elysia, its engine creaked into life and it was off like a shot.

I felt slightly awkward that I’d interrupted something, but at the same time annoyed that that something was taking place at my winery. Elysia wasn’t quite sure what was going on. I was fairly sure, and hoped that I was wrong. But it was only later in the day, when the sun was up and the press was running, that I found myself in the general area where the Polo was parked. And there I saw on the ground both a shiny, and empty, Durex wrapper and, about a car’s width away a discarded, quite obviously used, condom. 

More head shaking. They’re all quite odd in the Roussillon.

One year, a bunch of us stayed in a house up in the hills behind Banyuls, just before you get to the wilderness. It was a nice place, with a patio, one of those brilliant barbecue chimneys that you find in gardens in the Med, and a big, tiled outdoor table. In the evenings, over a beer or a glass of wine, we’d sit at the table and play cards by the outside light. Sometimes we’d invite Olivier and Adele over, a couple who had worked both at Coume del Mas and Mas Cristine, and fire up the grill, cooking loads of spicy merguez sausages and the strange pork cuts that the French insist on calling bacon. They all smoked, as the French seem to do. Our chat was in pidgin French and pidgin English. Adele was adamant that I learn some French, and she was right to do so. She was patient though, they all were. Sometimes the conversation got quite serious and philosophical. They asked me about Obama and crime and Scotland and the wines that I’d tried. We spoke about all things, really. I was the oldest, and in many ways the most experienced, and yet I felt like a novice, held back a few years due to poor language skills.

Justin usually won those card games. An oenology student about to enter his final year at Toulouse, Philippe brought him in to pretty much run the winemaking at Coume del Mas so that he, Philippe, could spend more time in the vines with the pickers. Justin arrived for harvest with both his girlfriend and his brother. His brother only stayed with us for a short while, but on the odd day would help out a bit in the winery. Justin spoke better English than I did French, having worked vintage in California the year before. He made serious Cabernet for someone out in Napa and, as such, returned to France with a disdain for the both the coffee and the bacon in his homeland.

For most of the harvest, it was the two stagaires and me in that house on the edge of the wilderness. We looked over a valley to the hills that I’m fairly sure were in Spain. In the mornings before the sun rose, you could wander across the narrow road in front of the house and stare out there thinking that you were the only person in the world. It was a steep, zig-zagged, downhill walk into town for a beer. Along the way, you passed both a museum dedicated to the ancient wines of Banyuls, and the massive head office of the Cellier des Templiers Caves Co-Operative, the largest co-op in the appellation.

Mornings fell into routine quickly at the cottage. I woke first, just after five, to get to the toilet before the others. There wasn’t much chat. Just the barest of ‘bonjours’ between us, with perhaps the occasional ‘ça va?’, but the latter was unnecessary. We were all the same: tired and sore and not wanting to speak. We brewed a pot of coffee (terrible, terrible coffee) and put together breakfast. A bowl of cereal each and toast and preserves and sometimes fruit as well. We each had a glass of juice and a glass of water. French breakfast cereal became one of my cultural stumbling blocks. All of it seemed to have chocolate in it. The selection of cereals without chocolate would, in total, take up only about three or four rows on the shelves in the local Carrefour, if such a selection were set aside in its own right. It wasn’t, and so I would spend hopeless moments looking like the most indecisive breakfast shopper in the world, looking for a box of healthy muesli that didn’t undermine its goodness by having a large Toblerone’s worth of chocolate in it. Soon it became apparent that it wasn’t worth it, and my strategy changed. I went from seeking the cereal without chocolate to seeking the cereal with the most fucking chocolate imaginable. But not just some junk food crap; cereal that otherwise would have been considered healthy, but for its cocoa-based payload. That’s what made me shake my head. It was like serving whipped cream with quinoa, or wrapping broccoli in strawberry Twizzlers. Eventually I settled on Carrefour’s pure grain Alpine Muesli (no added sugar) with triple chocolate chunks. In fairness, it wasn’t Cocoa Pops, it was proper dark chocolate. I remember seeing Kirsten later in the harvest for a catch up, and asked what cereal she bought.

‘It’s so hard to buy it in France; it’s all just full of fucking chocolate.’

So she gets friends to bring her Crunchy Nut Cornflakes whenever they visit. It’s not much healthier, if at all, but at least it’s a little more breakfast-like.

We ate in silence, chewing and slurping and blowing on our coffee to cool it down enough to make it drinkable. The food was communal, but there was one of us who kept aside his own little brioche buns. After the rest of us had finished, he would remove one of the buns from its individual wrapping, butter it, and add some manner of jam. He bit into it slowly, and ate as we cleared the table. It seemed a little like an act of defiance. A relic of routine from a time before harvest that he insisted on maintaining, regardless of time constraints and the demands of the day ahead. Or the need to clear the table.

Sleep is precious. That year in the Banyuls cottage, it didn’t come easily. My bed was a mattress on the floor in the sitting room. It lay perpendicular to the bed that was being used by the only stagaire I’ve met in my time there that never really seemed to get it. The brioche bun-eater. At night, when it was time for bed, he would phone his girlfriend and whisper to her for what seemed like hours. His tone was different on the phone, and he sounded too much like a bad, and somewhat whiney, Serge Gainsbourg tribute act on those calls for me to be touched by the romance of it all. Instead I would lie there, staring at the ceiling, waiting for the conversation to end before I could fall asleep. As the weeks of harvest drew on, I became more and more incensed by the routine, and my roommate’s inability to do the courteous thing and maybe have the chat in the kitchen with the door shut, so that I could fall asleep. But I let it slide, at first because I thought maybe I was being a little judgemental. Later, it was because he’d proved himself to be such a galactic level asshole that I feared if I lost my temper about anything with him I might wind up killing him. It turned out that I was not the only one.

He studied in Bordeaux, and was from there. He spoke down about the Roussillon and its wines, and had a stereotypical Bordelais arrogance that seemed better suited for a comic book or a 50s English farce rather than an actual human person. Pretty much everyone I’ve met in the years I’ve worked in France has made me very fond of the French. They’ve been welcoming, generous, kind, helpful and very patient with my total inability to learn their language, even though I still dream in it (I had a French nanny in my youth, and was, according to my parents, pretty much bilingual until the age of about three and a half – since then trying to re-learn it to any useful degree has been fruitless, and I have tried). Having worked in the wine trade for well over a decade, I love the French. I love their wine, their food, their country. I even like their surliness. So coming face-to-face with someone who seemed to go out of their way to show off all of the worst of their reputation was a shock at first. I kept quiet about it to start with, but I thought the guy was a total dickhead.

I puzzled about this. We’d never had a total dickhead on the team. We’d had drunks on the team; drunks that needed to be sent home before they hurt themselves and others; people far gone in their life to a tragic level who needed help that we couldn’t provide. So we put them on a train or a plane and sent them on their way. Vintage had to take priority.

We’d had English gap year kids who thought they would pick grapes for a couple of hours in the morning and then go lay on the beach and drink loads of wine for the rest of the day. They were lazy, but pretty honest about it. We put them on a train too.

But how do you deal with someone who just isn’t a very nice person? Who abandons their colleagues in the middle of important work to go wander the winery, because they’ve become bored. Who seemingly takes everything you learned that you must do to make harvest work and just says, ‘fuck that, I’m not doing it’.

I didn’t have to work with him much. The first time we were paired up was on the bottling line. I folded boxes, he put the bottles in the box. It took us both awhile to get the pace right. Once we did, he just buggered off. He muttered something and I assumed he was just going to the toilet or something like that. It was only about 30 minutes later, as I poured with sweat and had managed to both fold and fill, that I realised he hadn’t intended on coming back. This was early on, and I thought he may have been given another job and forgotten to come back to finish this one, or whoever was meant to help me out after he left was waylaid by some other disaster. I gave many benefits of the doubt. It was only later in harvest that Andy told me that he’d found him just wandering one of the alleys in the winery, nosing about as though there wasn’t any work to be done. Andy, of course, gave him a bollocking and a different job, with him and José coming to help me out on the line.

As the vintage progressed, it turned out it wasn’t just me that noticed the tendency to be work-shy and unpleasant in our colleague. Justin told me he’d do as little as possible, apart from drive the forklift at Coume del Mas like a rally car. At one point, he knocked a stack of comportes filled with grapes down the side of the hill. Having spent the morning letting Justin do all the work himself, he then begged for some help cleaning up the mess he made. Justin told him to fuck off and do it himself.

One day he went out with the pickers to do the porteur’s job whilst they harvested the Macabeu for Mas Cristine Blanc. It’s a big vineyard, the Macabeu vineyard, and it’s brutal to pick. He did a dreadful job and offered no apology. When encouraged to pick up the pace a bit, he threw a tantrum, and started screaming and swearing that it didn’t matter, it was all pointless, as all the wine in the Roussillon was shit anyway.

He finished early that year, and drove back to Bordeaux before anyone else finished. We weren’t sorry to see him go. The cottage felt a little bigger once he left. The mornings were still quiet, but perhaps with a couple more smiles and an extra cup of coffee. Julien, José and Vincent will still, with a shake of their heads and a roll of their eyes, chuckle about his tantrum in the Macabeu vines.

 

It was my fault. The Mighty Clio, the rancid and filthy vineyard car that becomes mine during vintage, needed its French equivalent of an MOT, and I left the keys to the caravan (that vintage I lived in a caravan on a campsite in Argelès) in the driver’s door pocket.

I don’t know how the Mighty Clio passes that test every year. One of the doors doesn’t work, the power steering’s gone, the suspension seems filled with old sponge rather than hydraulics, and the brakes only respond once the driver’s grim look of terror reaches the apex of contortion and his (my) knuckles are totally bloodless, braced for impact on the steering wheel.

Not content with being unfit for the road, the Mighty Clio smells. It reeks of sulphur products and guano so thoroughly that driving with the windows open in a 50-mile-per-hour wind (also around the Mighty Clio’s top speed) cannot fully dissipate the stench. On those days where it’s left in the sun and some numpty (me) forgets to leave the windows open at least a crack, climbing into the car is much like entering a poisoned sauna.

It’s because of these things that it’s the perfect vineyard car, and I’m really quite fond of it, from its bare, hubcap-less wheels to the mystery that surrounds whether you’ve put it into first gear or third, there’s something brilliant about a car that you have to manhandle in order to drive. And you can throw it around as much as you want. You have to – some of the roads up in the vines count very much as ‘off’-roading, and would shatter the wheelbase of many a better car.

Not so the Mighty Clio.

So this stalwart vehicle of the vines was sent, complete with our housekeys, to the mechanic, for what may well have been its final inspection before the car gods finally recalled it to the great scrapheap in the sky. I realised my mistake too late, and so my fellow stagaire, Elysia, and I were homeless for an evening. It wasn’t all bad.

Andy and Kirsten kindly let us stay the night. We ordered pizza and sat up late drinking a nice Meursault. It was a premier Cru Genevrières from a chap named Francois Mikulsky. I’d bought it in Toulouse. Andy and Kirsten’s flat has an art gallery on the ground floor; an atelier that Kirsten manages and hangs her art as well as that of a few other artists. That’s where we sat while we drank and chatted and listened to music. We spoke about everything over the course of an hour or more, and often spoke about the wine. It changed through the night. Sometimes we talked about the art around us, sometimes the music, sometimes the liquid in the glass, usually after a lingering sip that showed something that hadn’t been tasted before; a new flavour or feel. The wine opened up as the evening went on, as did the discussion. Andy selected a new playlist from iTunes and Elysia spoke of the huge wineries she’d worked in Australia; of 60,000 litre tanks exploding and the weirdness of night shifts during harvest (the heat in Australia makes night-harvesting a regular practice, and night-harvesting means night-winemaking). Kirsten spoke about her paintings and the herding of cats that is managing a gallery of artists and their egos. About the browsers who seem keen, and promise to come back with their chequebooks, never to be seen again. Folks who feel they’re being polite, but are really just getting an artist’s hopes up and letting them down just to save face; to make themselves feel better. It would be so much easier if they just browsed, smiled, said thank you, and left. Kirsten has a lot of cats to herd, between her artists, her two boys and Andy.

My turn came, but I didn’t talk about baseball, because the Sox were having a wretched season. I don’t know what I talked about; Andy either. I reckon Andy probably mentioned music, and I stuck to wine. I was thinking about other things, but probably stuck to wine.

We sipped all the way through, and as we crept towards the ends of our glasses we got quieter. It was late; later than any of us tend to stay up at vintage. Half the gallery sat in darkness. There’s always a whiff of oil paint in the gallery. It’s good. It reminds you that something’s made there. I swirled my glass again. I only had a sip left. I shoved my nose in the glass and raised my eyes at the others and smiled. They finished their glasses and I took my last sip as we all headed towards the stairs. I held it my mouth for a moment, tasting everything I could. The last sip is always the best.