Off-site Writing

The only time "cloudiness" was  a positive quality in a glass of red wine.

I have a new review up on www.americanwineryguide.com with a couple of on-site photos of the beautiful Duckhorn Vineyards. Please check it out here, and come back next week for part two of the story in the previous post. 

Folie a Deux Menage a Trois Red 2010, Part I

Since there were no more grapes hanging in the vineyards, you could say that harvest was over.

But harvest wasn't over. We were all still working twelve hour days, and would continue to until Christmas. There were thirty-nine tanks in various stages of fermentation, and it was our job to get the wine in bottles and on shelves by this time next year.

The early ferments were done and we had spent last week pressing the last gritty gallons of wine from their exhausted skins. Now it was time to add the oak chips. I'll never forget the first time an eighteen-wheeler backed up to the winery and delivered twenty pallets, each stacked five feet high with bags and bags of oak chips.

Granted, this was a big winery. But it still blew my mind how many oak chips were delivered each year. They would be dumped into the tanks to release their sawdusty aroma and flavor compounds, and eventually composted.

Obviously buying new barrels would cost more, especially the best French barrels as the dollar endured continued humiliation at the hands of the Euro. But God, there were just so many oak chips!

The bottom line was that they were the only cost-effective way of getting something approximating oak flavor into wine. And oak flavor--well, oak flavor and alcohol--were what kept the cases zooming off the Costco shelves.

Today had been day one of oak chips. Day one of clocking in at dawn, forklifting pallets of chips from the warehouse to the winery, weighing out the quantities, and finally tying the chips up in big muslin steeping bags. I called them Satan's Teabags. I would lug each one--some weighing upwards of thirty pounds--to the top of each tank and heave it into the wine to steep for months and months.

It was 6:45 PM and I was fried. I was the most resilient of the cellarhands--I'm not above saying I was better than they were at ignoring wet clothes, strained ligaments and the occasional chemical burn at the end of the day. Maybe they were a step ahead of me in the morning, but when they were flagging late in the afternoon I was always hitting my stride.

The exception to "always" was today... as always. Three more bags of chips to go. A fierce tiredness was setting in on me.

The worst part was that I should have been done by now. Just after lunch, the main floor drain started backing up. I had wasted two disgusting hours trying to locate and clear the blockage before throwing my hands up and getting back to the chips. Now there was a half-inch of water over most of the floor, and I was definitely not going home until I fixed the drain.

Go, go, go, just go. I grasped for whatever willpower I had left, threw a heavy sack of chips over my shoulder, and ascended the side of a giant Merlot tank with only one hand on the ladder. This was the sort of little danger I had come to accept as part of the job.

I opened the lid and heaved in the bag. The tank was two-thirds full and the chips landed with a satisfying *plunk* that resonated in the empty space. When I'm a head winemaker, I thought to myself, no one's going to throw a bag into my red wine. My red wines are going to luxuriate in new French barrels every year--beautiful Seguin-Moreaus, Sylvains, Dargaud & Jaegles. There would always be money for more new barrels, because I would be able to name any price for the wines.

The primitive, perfect engineering of a barrel never ceased to amaze me. From wood and metal and fire, the most ergonomic, functional way there would ever be to store wine. No one would ever improve on the original design of a barrel. And without barrels, there would never have been a wine industry.

And what were oak chips? Shattered barrels. Maybe not literally, but they were a suggestion of what would happen if you took a sledgehammer to a barrel. A jeering insult to barrels. You are not necessary. You can be broken.

I realized I was going to start looking for a new job in January.

This daydream went on a little longer before I was snapped out of it by the door at the far end of the winery clicking open, then shut. It was far away, but sound traveled through this cold, damp space like electricity through a puddle.

There was no line of sight connecting me to the door--I couldn't see whoever came in and whoever came in couldn't see me. It wasn't the assistant winemaker, who I saw go home two hours ago. It couldn't be Paul, Tony, Ignacio, or any of the other cellarhands--they would have come through the other door.

Footsteps--that sounded like more than two feet--clicked on wet concrete. 

"Come on, this way," someone said. It was Craig, a wiry townie who worked the closing shift in the tasting room three nights a week, usually leaving the actual responsibilities of closing to whomever had the misfortune of sharing the shift. Craig was content to know fuck-all about wine.

"It's freezing in here," whispered a girl's voice. 

I decided I would wait on the ladder.

I had this Folie a Deux Menage A Trois Red 2010 at a party, but according to wine-searcher.com it retails for an average of $10 and is widely available.

A Feature Article I Wrote For Honest Cooking

If you are part of the iPad set, please use it to grab this free download of Honest Cooking’s inaugural feature-length magazine and check out my article on dining at a North Korean restaurant. It may or may not be viewable on other platforms.

Cave Saint Cyr Beaujolais 2010

Abbé Bertillon could smell a fierce fire.

It was far away, maybe even in Chambolle, but he was not mistaken. His sense of smell was his greatest physical gift. It was the reason his abbey never had a barrel of wine go sour, the reason they never sold a wine too early or too late, and the reason that they only acquired perfect vineyard parcels--Abbé Bertillon simply needed to put his nose to the earth and breathe deeply to know everything about the wine that would eventually come out of it.

Now he smelled a fierce fire, fed by wood and cloth and leather and other things that homes were made of.

It was the last week of June, 1790. May been rainy and humid, and fruit set was uneven in the easternmost rows of Pinot Noir.  If the summer continued like this, Abbé Bertillon knew rot would be a severe problem at harvest time.

His brother in Reims had written to him two weeks earlier, telling of riots in Paris that were spilling into the countryside. Peasants were smashing shop windows and burning anything that stank of nobility. Priests and even nuns had been threatened, but not harmed--as far as anyone knew.

Georges, to the chagrin of their parents, had not entered the priesthood but Abbé Bertillon knew he was still a more devout Catholic than most of the clergy. He said a short prayer for the safety of his brother's family, then put on his boots and went outside.

Today was one of the first beautifully clear days of the summer. As Abbé Bertillon walked the rows of vines behind the abbey, he brushed his increasingly unsteady fingers against the bark of the thick trunks. These vines were getting too old, the yields would be unacceptably low in just a few years.

Two decades earlier he had planted many of them himself and now he thought of how difficult--physically difficult--it would be to pull them out. He mumbled I Corinthians 4:12:

And we labour, working with our own hands: we are reviled, and we bless; we are persecuted, and we suffer it.

Georges in his letter had called the Abbé Sieyes a traitor and a heretic for siding with the revolutionaries. Abbé Bertillon was not so sure. He found it harder to think ideas through to their conclusions as he approached seventy.

He still believed the King ruled by the grace of God, but he did not believe that fact would save Louis from the grace of the guillotine. Maybe not this year, maybe not next, but it would happen. Abbé Bertillon was no politician and certainly no revolutionary, but he could smell the desire for regicide in the pages of the newspapers describing the growing chaos--the same way he could smell what a wine, or a vineyard would become long before it became that thing.

He kept this to himself, despite his certainty.

Down the slight grade that ended at the road to Dijon, he came to some younger vines. Two rows of Gamay, his secret. He was sneaking the grapes in with the Pinot Noir at crush, and once the wine was made it was it was indistinguishable to anyone but him.

Abbé Bertillon had a special affinity for Gamay--he suspected that it could be as good, or nearly as good as Pinot Noir could be if planted in exactly the right place and handled exactly the right way. He had no doubt that this was exactly the right place, where it smelled like moss and wind and water and something else no one, not even he, could describe. With a few more rows of it he could bottle a 100% Gamay and show everyone the truth.

And maybe soon he could have a few more rows of it. Duke Philip the Bold had called Gamay "vile and disloyal" nearly four hundred years earlier and that was that, the end of Gamay in Burgundy.

But now that every French ideal of "loyalty" was being immolated, revolutionaries were killing revolutionaries for not being revolutionary enough, and the Dukes were lucky if their property was the only thing they lost, maybe the decrees against Gamay were also running out of time.

The fire smelled stronger now. Was the revolution in Burgundy already? There were enough intellectuals and brutes in Dijon to do serious damage. Abbé Bertillon decided that if they came for him, he would simply ask them to spare the vineyards. He touched a little unripe green berry and said Hebrews 6:10 to it:

God is not unjust; he will not forget your work and the love you have shown him as you have helped his people and continue to help them.

As long as his head was on his shoulders, Abbé Bertillon would continue to help.

I bought this Cave Saint Cyr Beaujolais 2010 at Falletti Foods in San Francisco for $18.99. The importer is The Sorting Table in Napa. 

State of the Status

Hi Friends,

Thanks for following what goes on here and tolerating the inconsistent updates.

I hope you will continue to stop in, especially now that I will be posting weekly short personal essays and fiction pieces inspired by the wines that I encounter.

Also, I'm reviewing California tasting rooms over at American Winery Guide, a startup site recently named "Best New Mash-up" by Programmableweb. Recently I've reviewed Trefethen and Robert Mondavi. Check 'em out!

The Winemaker, Part IV

Earlier entries in this series:

Part I
Part II
Part III


"Let's talk about this tomorrow, huh?" said The Winemaker. "We got a lot of shoveling to do here, not to mention fourteen tanks of wine that are still fermenting and going to go to shit if they aren't pumped over in about two hours."

"Get the fuck outta here and don't come back," said The Owner.

The Winemaker flinched and broke eye contact. So this was for real. He had it coming for destroying product and then lying about it--the original sin of fireable offenses in any winery--but to be so close to getting away with it and then blowing it like this was already stinging badly.

"Think hard about what you're doing here," said The Winemaker. The Owner stood still and stared at him.

The Winemaker opened his mouth to say something else, then didn't, then did.

"Have fun with this." He went outside and got into his truck. He lit an American Spirit from the crumpled pack in the cupholder. In the rearview, he saw The Owner waddling back to the office.

The Winemaker had never been fired from any job--virtually everywhere he had worked, he was the best guy in the cellar. The fastest forklifter, the most thorough tank cleaner, the best on-the-spot repairman.

But it was all at once clear to him how much he disliked working here. Even having complete control over winemaking operations wasn't worth being stuck with inferior terroir--waterlogged soil, erratic August weather, not a single south-facing hillside anywhere.

What an accomplishment for someone of his talents to deal with this for so long, and to do it while reporting to a lunatic with an eighth grade education who demanded 95-pointers that would never happen...

Call it career suicide-by-cop.

He sucked the cigarette down quickly and went back inside. Agustino and Juan Luis were shoveling again. One of them should be the next winemaker, he thought. The Assistant was an effete city boy who had great instincts about wine but was not suited for this sort of work, and would certainly bail soon to become a sommelier in some hipster restaurant.

But these guys... dedicated, strong, resilient, much smarter than anyone gave them credit for... they could make wine here.

Not that it would ever happen under this Owner, a racist through and through.

Anyway it wasn't The Winemaker's problem anymore. It was time to go. He went to the lab and took the pH meter, which was his to begin with. He decided to leave the Ziploc of pot under the sink for The Assistant.

There was one more thing to deal with. He found a long thick chain and attached one end of it to the temperature probe inside The Tank, the cause of all this. There was a hook on the other end that he attached to the forklift. He pulled open the wide loading door at the back of the winery and considered it for a moment, making some quick calculations of angles and momentum, then started the lift truck.

The Tank's legs buckled easily as he rolled towards the door. Agustino was grinning, watching its metal belly kick up beautiful sparks as it dragged against the concrete floor. Juan Luis stared dumbly, then made a fast move towards the door when it became apparent The Tank wasn't going to clear it.

"No tocha! No tocha!" yelled The Winemaker.  He threw the forklift into reverse and backed into the nose of The Tank, pivoting it fifteen degrees. He continued forward and it barely cleared the opening.

The paving outside was rough brick, and the noise of The Tank dragging on it was absolutely gruesome--it reminded The Winemaker of the beginning of a Sonic Youth song. He could feel that the forklift was at its limit of towing capacity, strong as it was. But it kept going.

The tasting room and office building was two hundred yards down a small hill, and beyond that was a tourist-dense state highway.

It was Friday, the dreary morning had given way to a beautiful afternoon, and the crowds were beginning to arrive.  There was already a big bus with tinted windows in the lot, attractive young people filing out and into the tasting room like ants towards a discarded popsicle stick.

The Winemaker reached the hill and turned to look at The Tank. Driving the forklift on a grade wasn't easy, but he was excellent--better than excellent--at this sort of thing. The tricky part was going to be staying in front of The Tank and accelerating immediately if gravity started to take over.

Of course, he lined it up perfectly and maintained total control. He was going to miss this forklift.

Three confident-looking guys in turtlenecks got off the bus but didn't follow the rest of the group inside. One drank from a tallboy in a paper bag, and another took out a pack of Marlboro Lights and passed it around. They smoked and had a conversation where every statement or question was met with an incredulous reaction.

Then one saw The Winemaker and The Tank coming towards them. His cigarette fell from his lips.

"HIT THE DECK BRO!!!" he roared, then for emphasis tackled one of his friends onto the grass.

The Winemaker turned to see the incredulous faces gathering against the windows of the tasting room as he crossed the lot. He hoped The Owner was watching, though he realized it would be just as good if someone had to run into his office and tell him.

The side of The Tank dragged along the side of the bus, scraping off most of the lettering in "SPRING BREAK WINE COUNTRY TOURS". A silver Cadillac turning into the lot from the road swerved onto the picnic lawn to avoid it.

"HEY!!" There was The Owner now, running, as fast as his eight decade-old legs could, out the tasting room door.

"HEY!!!" replied The Winemaker, "I'M NOT COMING BACK!!"

He reached the road and signaled a right turn with his extended arm. Just as he turned onto the shoulder, he realized he left his wallet and driver's license in his truck, which meant he probably was coming back.

Or not. He'd worry about it later.


The End

The Winemaker, Part III

Earlier entries in this series:

Part I
Part II



The Owner had made his fortune three decades ago by aggressively securing every portable toilet service contract in the county and the one next to it. Soon after he drove out the last competitor, there was a suburban development boom. Every worksite had at least one overburdened Sani-John, and he was a local tycoon by the following Christmas.

He broke ground on "The Winery Construction Worker Shit Built" (The Winemaker's term) after he divorced his second wife and decided he was going to use the money the bitch didn't get away with to expand into real estate. By then he had a cellar full of Opus One and Cain Five, and saw no reason he shouldn't have his name on a bottle just as heavy and valuable.

People would try to tell him about terroir and the differences between his land and Oakville, and he would wave them off. Ya can grow grapes in yer yard!

The Winemaker was the fourth winemaker in eleven years, and by far the longest-running. The second  had quit after four months when The Owner, six Johnnie Walkers in at the holiday party, pushed him to the floor and brandished the roast beef carving knife in his face, threatening to cut his balls off if he didn't deliver a "Parka 95" within two vintages.

The Winemaker's longevity was due to his having figured out gradually--well, quickly--how to deal with this sort of volatility, which was compounding as the old man endured bullishly into his 80s. The key was making it very clear to everyone that The Owner knew nothing about making wine and that every time he tried to make suggestions about the process, the operation lost money.

The Winemaker's experience and many degrees gave him the needed credibility, even though The Owner thought formal higher education was a Johnson-era liberal scam. The final ingredient was to be fearless about giving the old man a long, cold stare whenever necessary, perhaps accompanied by a "Can you please let me do my fucking job?" 

Following this protocol, he had carved out enough space to get the work done.

But it probably wouldn't get him out of this major screw-up. A lot of product was gone and there would be clear financial consequences to the business. The Winemaker didn't indulge in fear much anymore, but he allowed himself a quick instant of it before exiting the lab.

The Owner was standing in the middle of the winery now, squinting at the pile of grapes. Agustino and Juan Luis were leaning on their shovels in no ingles mode.

Juice was still audibly trickling down the drain.

"How much of my money is in the drain right now?" The Owner said, turning to The Winemaker.

Good question thought The Winemaker. He realized he needed to start talking; taking too long to respond could put him in a bad spot. He pointed at the rotor tank.

"Do you remember when I told you that was a bad investment? That it was going to end up being a liability for you?"

"How much of my fucking money is in the drain right now?" 

The Owner was an excellent businessman, no one begrudged him that. And he was on a dangerous sort of autopilot right now. He despised waste of any kind--even going so far as trying to limit any tasting of wines from tank or barrel by The Winemaker or The Assistant to once a month.

"Fifteen grand maybe? All covered by your insurance."

The insurance part was somewhat true, the fifteen grand part was completely false. The Winemaker had lost control of the exchange and lying was a way of taking a little of it back.

"So this is what I pay ya for? Spilling my grapes?"

The Winemaker jabbed his finger at the rotor again.

"I told you not to buy that thing. The internal processor malfunctioned overnight and made it start spinning with a hose still attached to it. Ripped the valve off with no one here. Shit was made in China."

It was made in Italy, but that was the sort of claim The Owner would buy sight unseen. At age 17 he had drawn up a fake birth certificate in order to enlist in the Marines three days after Pearl Harbor.

"It what?"

"It ripped... the valve... off!" The Winemaker pantomimed ripping something apart.

"Whaddaya mean by that??" This was a favorite phrase of The Owner's when he needed to buy time in an argument.

"I mean this thing is a piece of shit, just like I said, and you should get on the phone to that Chazz asshole who sold it to you and let him know what his product ended up being worth to you!"

Suddenly The Owner's Jitterbug phone rang once, twice. He glared at The Winemaker for one more ring, then opened it and answered the call by stating his last name.

"Yeah... yeah... huh?... yeah... listen, I gotta call you back. I'm at my winery with a pile-a grapes the size of Kilimenjerro on the floor!"

The Owner went to Africa every two years to shoot large animals--on his desk was a priapic rhino horn he had sawed off himself in Botswana.

He hung up. The Winemaker felt the situation was partially defused and that his window out of it was open wide.

"Can you just let me handle this now? We'll get it cleaned up, I'll get a report into your office by lunch so you can collect the insurance, and we can get on with making your wines. We don't even need to haul this tank out of here until after harvest."

"I still wanna know more about what happened here... that tank was sposta be a great investment!"

"Yeah... You thought hiring your granddaughter to run the tasting room was a great investment too."

The Winemaker's heart skipped, he knew immediately he had pushed his luck. A fury far beyond anything The Owner had directed at the grape spill began to well behind the old man's thick glasses and narrow eyes.

Three years earlier, The Owner had installed his twenty-four year-old granddaughter as tasting room manager. She and her mom, his daughter, had convinced him to do so on the basis of her extensive partying experience and three abandoned semesters of a Publicity and Communications major at the local junior college.

Once hired she began to purchase things like blacklights, velvet ropes and fog machines. She often didn't show up until four or five in the afternoon and kept the doors open until midnight or later--sometimes forgetting to lock them after everyone was gone. ID-checking became sporadic.

She also bought three Jagermeister chillers, assuming that if the tasting room could serve wine, they could serve Jagerbombs too. When she learned otherwise, she just unplugged them and left them on the bar.

For some reason, she instantly hated The Winemaker, even though he initially made an attempt to be her friend. Perhaps she saw in him the sort of cerebral, workaholic, aesthetically average male she  avoided at all times and demeaned when possible. A obvious beta male posing as an alpha, or, in her terminology, a "creepster".

So he left it alone and kept making the wine, detaching himself from whatever nasty cocktail it might end up in after it left the winery.

Crowds increased in the tasting room, but not enough. Since age sixteen, The Granddaughter never settled for throwing anything less than the most epic parties anyone had seen--since her last one. So she contracted a party promotions company that was also known for supplying bulk quantities of ultra-premium Ecstasy and Ketamine to all their clients' events.

When the police finally traced a fatal drunk driving accident to the tasting room/nightclub and busted "DJ WWJD" for interstate trafficking, it cost The Owner over $150,000 in legal fees to keep the tasting room open and keep himself and The Granddaughter out of jail. Not to mention $35,000 settling private lawsuits. The responsible local family man who had been bumped out of management to make room for her came back, and the incident was eventually forgotten.

But The Owner protected his family like an underfed Doberman. It was understood that you could get away with just about anything once you were on his payroll, except talking shit about any of his blood relatives. The Winemaker knew this, and knew that in his nervousness he had just crossed the line.

The Owner clapped his phone shut.

"You're fired."