Song of the Vine

Just after 10:00pm on a Sunday night here in SoCal, and I am ruminating on an excellent weekend. It was an extremely difficult week at the Buffalo Center, and they just seem to keep coming. We have two more weeks until commencement, and things should begin to settle down for me the. I am on an eleven-month contract, but as anyone knows, summer is a special time of year at a university, especially one, like mine, that does not have a summer term. Life moves much more slowly, albeit less interestingly because students are not around. I may just make it for two more weeks, especially if I can have a day like today now and then.

Today was set up by yesterday and the day before. I had dinner Friday night with Weg Hagen, the Vineyardist and Winemaker at Clos Pepe Vineyards in the Santa Rita Hills near Santa Barbara, California. Wes makes mostly Pinot Noir, and if you have seen the film Sideways, you should know that Wes was making Pinot before the film made it popular to drink. I sat along with some twenty local vintners and listened to Wes expound on the glories of wine. He is one of the most interesting cats I have met in this most interesting place, and I wish I had a video of him standing at the table explaining everything from the biology to the mythology of wine. It helps that he is a born teacher, fueled with passion for his craft and able to talk eloquently about any aspect of it. By the end of the evening, Wes had the good sense to stop talking because we all had experienced the “transcendence of the grape,” as he likes to call it, and no one was able to listen any more. Instead, we spoke loudly and passionately of our own theories of the universe, and the vintners tried to explain to me what oxidation was. Two of them even got in an argument about it, and I thought I was going to have to separate them.

Yesterday Wes was at the Buffalo Center to do a lesson in wine-tasting for the senior buffaloes, who graduate a week from Saturday. Once again, it was an outstanding lesson in wine, this time for neophytes like myself whose palate is able to tell Diet Pepsi from Diet Coke but not much else. We learned to detect various elements of wine, such as fruits, oaks, acids, and tannins. Then we brought out the second “flight” (aptly named), and learned to distinguish structure, bouquet, and (my favorite) “the somewhereness” of the wine, by which is meant the transparency afforded to the region of the grape wherein local elements such as soil and water come to foreground and fruits and acids fade into the background. Flight three was about heat (the alcohol level), entry, mid-palate, and finish. If this language sounds odd or even pretentious, it is, a bit, but Wes is good-natured enough to know that and to deconstruct himself even as he employs it. After the last flight, the buffaloes did their best to articulate their tasting experience, speaking well of finish, structure, bouquet, and acidity. Feeling a bit transcendent, I spoke thusly when asked about the third flight of wine that day: “I find number one the most seductive because she tells me that I can have her but I have to earn her.” Everyone fell silent for a moment then burst into laughter. There was a brief exchange about the “hotness” of Wilma Flintstone, initiated by me as I recall, during which I made some comment about her earrings being the element that distinguished her from Betty Rubble and indeed all other animated femme fatales. Needless to say, there was no fourth flight of tasting that day or we would have all been on the floor, but a good time was had by all.

I went home afterwards and finished Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which is so good I will have to make a separate post on it. It was 10:30pm, and I was just ready to go to bed when Vivian texted me and asked me to join her and her parents at a local club. I had left her recital Friday night to go to the wine dinner, and Vivian had her parents in for it. She was glorious, as usual, and stunned everyone with her performance. I debated on whether or not to go and almost decided not to when I said, out loud, “Screw it. I’m going.” I walked downtown and found Vivien and her parents Al and Heather seated at a table in a bar that I had been in before but hardly recognized because it was now so full and loud. That is because it was karaoke night! Eventually, Monique showed up as well because where Vivian is, Monique is, and we all sat and enjoyed some beers on a Saturday night in Coolville. Vivian’s father told me he had lived in Alabama for ten years. “So did I,” I said, and I wondered about our experiences: a white college professor and an African American veteran in a state where the past hangs on everything like dampness. Vivian and her mother Heather said that they had sung karaoke earlier and that Al and I should do it. Once Vivian sets her mind to something, there is no point arguing, even though I have never sung in public before and karaoke would not be my choice of a debut. So I resigned myself to the fact that I was going to have to embarrass myself in a bar in Coolville, where I live. I looked at Al and said, “There’s only one song we can sing together.” “What’s that?” he asked. “Sweet Home Alabama,” I said smiling. The irony was too delicious, and Vivien jumped up and gave the DJ our names and the song. It took a long time for our turn to arrive, but when it did, we were ready. I took my Blue Moon and my new friend Al to the stage, and we belted out the song to the delight of the room. I even put in the extemporaneous phrase “Turn it up” that appears in the recorded version.

I have to say it was a blast. The crowd, made up of thirty-something Californians mostly, stood up at the opening rifts of the song. When Al and I started in with “Big wheels keep on turnin,” they were dancing and did not sit down until the end. I looked up at one point and saw one of the buffaloes looking at me from the bar. She had come in after me and didn’t know I was there, but her mouth dropped as she saw her director singing a Lynyrd Skynyrd song in a bar on a Saturday night. We finished up and the crowd roared its approval as Al and I went to our seats. Vivien, Monique, and Heather clapped us to the table, and my surprised student came up to me and hugged me in front of everyone. “That was awesome,” she said. “Well, at least it was loud,” I replied. Later Monique and Vivien would do Stevie Wonder’s “Sir Duke,” and everyone fell in love with them. It was a great ending to a wonderful day.

I slept until noon today, the first time I have done so since my twenties, and it felt wonderful. I did nothing but work on a web site for St. Mary of Virginia, read the LA Times, and watch Reno 911. Later Monique and Vivien came over, and we scrounged through my refrigerator to see what we could cook. I whipped up some linguini with sausage that was to die for, the first time I have really cooked in months, and we all had a bottle of Pinot Noir in honor of Wes and the weekend. We watched Broken English with Parker Posey and now they are reading while I write about my excellent day.

I will go back to work tomorrow, and the same problems and joys will be there. I will be exhausted by the end of the week, and I will long for some time just to myself, and I will not be able to have it because the next two weeks are insane and packed from morning until evening. Even so, when I have a moment between meetings or crises, I will stop and think of the glories of Pinot Noir, the hotness of Wilma Flintstone, and the simple pleasures of food, wine, and friends on a spring evening. And it will be enough to get me through.