In the Middle of the Night, Thinking of Wine

I was awoken in the middle of the night last night by a vision of the life I live — one that is beholden to the fates of Nature and tied to the search for Beauty. I realized this morning that I had written about this in my first book, Lineage: Life and Love and Six Generations in California Wine, and I thought I would share an excerpt that describes my waking dream.

There is something sacred to the act of tasting wine like we get to do. Tasting wine is different than drinking. Not for the obvious: we spit when we taste, and we are thinking deeply about how that particular wine helps to finish the picture in our heads that is the combination of disparate parts and the culmination of years of effort.

The pearls are the single tasks of this year, joined. Those same pearls are the single years that go to make a career just as they are the countless winemakers and the countless wines and wineries, unnumbered and unnamed, that have worked to draw out beauty from unruly Nature.

When we are drinking, we are coming out of ourselves and sharing that social part of ourselves with the others in our group; the wine is sometimes superfluous to the connections we long to make, even if we don’t know it at the time. When we are tasting in the service of making, we are connecting the most intimate bits of our profession into a cohesive picture that becomes a cohesive story at the end. If we have succeeded.

And it is not that our story spans only a year. Each act we perform, the harvest, the pressing, the blending, the bottling, is connected to each other like pearls on a string, but tied together with all the other times we, ourselves, have done these things, linked, also, to every other time these things have ever been done.

To drink of the effort and the management of fear and the quest for oneness and the quest for excellence and the blind hope and the fatalistic acceptance with comity and empathy is to stand on that one threshold together with all those other winemakers, together and brothers, in one never-ending chain.

The pearls are the single tasks of this year, joined. Those same pearls are the single years that go to make a career just as they are the countless winemakers and the countless wines and wineries, unnumbered and unnamed, that have worked to draw out beauty from unruly Nature. To truly taste a wine is to taste the dust of the past, the failed blends and faulty visions; it is to sip from bitter vials and know the ache of the black and ruined season, the fires that ravish the hillsides, feeding off the ancient trees, bringing smoke and ruination to the vintage; to feel the wind driven forth by the advancing storm and to see in the blackening light of the onrushing clouds, the rain and the hard hail that chops through leaves and fruit like a hatchet. To taste truly, as one node on a giant esthetic network, is not only to gather deeply what has been offered but also to commune with those brothers who despair at the loss of a vintage as we celebrate those who’ve made their best wines. To drink of the effort and the management of fear and the quest for oneness and the quest for excellence and the blind hope and the fatalistic acceptance with comity and empathy is to stand on that one threshold together with all those other winemakers, together and brothers, in one never-ending chain.