(fiction story about wine tasting. one of the reincarnations of this piece.)
“So where are we going?”
“Wine tasting in Sonoma.” My friend Shane considered himself a classy guy. He had money from his parents and he liked to throw it around on things he considered fancy.
We were crawling along the Golden Gate in morning traffic. I started to sing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” because of my running joke about his car and the hue of red he chose, but stopped when he turned the volume up on the morning talk show that was on.
“Why wine tasting?” I said. He called this my birthday gift, but I think he just wanted to go tasting and my birthday was a convenient excuse. He liked doing fancy things, just never alone.
“Why all the questions?”
We finally got across the bridge and continued on the 101. I closed my eyes, but woke up fifteen minutes later when Shane swerved around something in the road. My head smacked off of the window.
We drove past plenty of wineries. Once we got out of the urban sprawl and the bleeding ends of the extending city, that’s all there seemed to be. This Family’s Winery butting up against That Family’s Winery.
“These are all wineries, you know,” I said, flicking the radio to try and find something that wasn’t country or classical. Shane said his CDs were in the trunk, but wouldn’t pull over so I could get them. We need to be on time, he had said.
I wanted to hit him, but he would, as he called it, try and make us mashed potatoes, he’d run us into something along the side of the road—a tree, a building, whatever he could find. He’d done it before, one time when we were going to his parents’ house down around Santa Cruz. We hit a duck-shaped mailbox. He kept a wing as a souvenir; it’s in his glove compartment. His car was so old he didn’t care about new scratches or dents, he still doesn’t. There were no mailboxes around us either now, just redwoods.
“What made you do this, Shane?”
“What does it matter? This is your birthday, and your gift, and you can’t say shit. You don’t want to be an Indian giver, do you?”
“I hate wineries.”
“No you don’t. You’re just saying that because you hate it when we do something I want to do.”
“No, no. I do. Really. I hate wineries.” I made sure to elongate each word, trying to drive home my point. “Plus,” I said, “The only people that go there are old. Yeah, they’re going to be real great conversation.” I lifted my nose towards the car roof and tried to make my voice nasally, failing, mostly. “My word, this chardonnay is exquisite.”
My parents had taken me to so many vineyards when I was kid that I felt like heavy oatmeal formed inside me and stuck to all my insides whenever I had to go to one. I always hoped the concrete would make me move slower, hopefully help me to never get to the winery, but it never worked. Instead, as a kid
We drove in silence, except for the hip-hop radio, for another twenty minutes. Everything looked exactly the same as it had when we first entered Sonoma. Even the sun had seemed to pause, caught in midflight towards the top of the sky, ready to burn and turn dead vines brittle.
“Toto, I don’t think we’re in Sonoma anymore,” I said.
**
I had been to over fifty wineries by the time I was ten. There was the great Midwestern Winery tour ’96—The Grape Debacle ’96, I came to calling it—where we hit eleven wineries in two weeks. My parents are the type of people who are dedicated to things they love.
It was pouring and the radio had been telling us about tornado warnings all morning. We had gone to a museum my dad and I made myself seem mildly interested in. I’ll admit the blue whale hanging from the ceiling was cool, but the recreations of French circus setups? Not so much. Flimsy, tinky music and too many lights. The museum wasn’t the kind of place for children, really. The gift shop had nothing of interest to a ten-year-old. Who wants faux-ebony carvings or thin-pressed metal figurines. They would break or bend and be useless after one action figure war. Hell, army men that you got in bags were more dependable than the figurines ever could be. After the tour and tromp, where I saw more flashes from my dad’s camera than I heard words from the tour guide, we piled back into the car, my parents, aunt and I and were on the road again.
I had had a headache all morning and by this point in the day felt like shit. It felt like someone was trying to turn my head into an elastic band ball. The heat from the car didn’t help either. It made me even more nauseas. I found respite in the cool windowpane, but only for moments at a time. My head would inevitably slip off as we hit a bump in the road and my skull would thunk off the window or the hard plastic doorframe.
We began passing signs for a winery. I caught sight of one as we sped by, the rain on the window distorting it, like I was looking at something through foggy goggles. Pendergast Winery, “The Winery on the Hill,” it said. Quotes and all. You don’t ever forget stupid shit like that. Was there really that much competition for the slogan the winery on the hill? And making “the” italicized?
“Just one more?” My dad said to my mom. Her eyes were closed and she started slightly.
“Sure, whatever.”
“Excellent,” he said as he crossed two lanes to make the exit. Despite the weather, my dad tapped out a happy rhythm along with the radio on the sterring wheel. He was humming something too, different from the song in the speakers, though. We drove along a muddy road, the rain pounding the top of us, the mud below us sticking to our tires and undercarriage. I imagined it like walking through quicksand, slogging along. I wanted to keep my head against the window, cool off a bit, but every time I tried I banged my head. Bile had risen to the back of my throat once already, burning up into my sinuses. I told my mom I didn’t feel good, she told me to sit tight, close my eyes, try and rest. She seemed to be ignoring the quality of the drive.
The parking lot looked like it could swallow up dinosaurs by the time we got there, yet there were still other cars there, and the floodlights along the path up to the winery were still on, and people were still scuttling from their cars, hunched over like they had just been hit very hard in the neck, to the winery.
They didn’t leave the keys, so aside from the rain it was quiet. I had to keep adjusting myself so that parts of my head were always against the cool parts of the window, like one of those rotating fans moving back and forth. Fifteen minutes or so passed and the nausea got worse. I was going to throw up. I felt the bile making its way up from my stomach. It burned the back of my sinuses. I could imagine the backs of my two nostrils being splashed with bile. I had to find something to throw up in. I thought about throwing up outside, but it was cold and I didn’t want to get wet. Then I’d be sick and miserable. The only thing I could find was a bag full of Cheddarhead souvenirs. Gripping both sides of the bag like I was going to use all my strength to pry something open, I leaned over it. It was coming. I stopped. I couldn’t there were souvenirs in there. That would ruin the souvenirs and, after a few drinks, my parents would be pissed at that. You wasted our money, they would say. I dumped the t-shirts out on the floor and filled the bag.
I tried putting the bag outside, but it still smelled in the car so, in my headache haze, I decided to stand outside, too. I was halfway across the parking lot when my parents emerged, a brown bag tucked under my dad’s arm. They saw me, stopped for a second, I guess to make sure it was really me, their son in his Wisconsin Badgers shirt, soaked through, coming towards them across the mudflat parking lot.
“Peter, what happened?”
I coughed, burped. “I threw up, I put the bag outside. Don’t worry, I took the shirts out.”
“I’ll take him inside,” my dad said, handing the bottles of wine to my mom.
He showed me to the bathroom and while I threw up again and cleaned up, he waited in the gift shop. When I came out, a wad of brown paper towels in my hand, he had another brown bag in his hand.
**
The inside looked like a really fancy mountain cabin. Everything made of really warm wood, except for the logo of the winery—a pseudo-Celtic knot thing—burned black into the floor. It reminded me of a Kit Kat, and the comedian who pointed out that we get robbed of chocolate by doing that. We were getting robbed of flooring, here. Shelves along the walls presented all sorts of gourmet foods. Wine-accented mixed nuts and chocolate-covered whatever. A bar ran the length of the far wall.
There were four other people in there with us. An older couple, a girl that looked like she was around our age and an old lady who, from the angle of her slump against the bar, had been doing the tasting for at least a few hours already. Frequent flier. The girl and the older couple were together on the far side of the bar, pinching the middle of the glass stems, holding them up to the light and swirling. What they were looking for, I had no clue, it just looked like what I did when I was a kid and I would try and swirl my soda to create a twister in the middle. Half the time I failed, my hand shaking like I was having a seizure and sending the soda in waves over the lip of the cup. The three people after swirling until the sommelier told them to stop, took sips and nodded in unison. Yes, that is a fine vintage, I imagined at least one of them saying. I knew I’d be saying that later, just because its what you did in places like this.
“I have to work for my wine?” I said to Shane, keeping my voice to the level of the slow, low classical piped in from speakers in the corners.
“Shut up. Play along, you’ll be drunk by the time the day is over, I promise,” he said. We walked up to the bar. Shane waved the bartender down. He walked over and spoke with Shane for a few minutes. I was a few steps behind Shane, head back, staring out the skylight. I could see the tips of branches stretching from their trunks over the edges of the glass panes.
“Pete come on, we’re going to start tasting.” I snapped my head back forward and joined Shane. There was a small piece of banana bread—well, probably like walnut amaretto poppy seed or something, being that all wineries seem pretty gourmet—with a candle in it. The candle was shaped like a wine bottle.
The bartender began singing happy birthday to me. The woman unslumped herself and joined in, a second or two behind on every word. Her voice was good, high and sweet, just off. Really off considering it was only going to be a thirty seconds song. I inspected how dirty my shoes were, how there was a hole beginning to form near my left big toe. I looked up, Shane was grinning, the bartender had his arms thrown wide in front of him, and the group next to us had turned to stare. The older couple had amused expressions on their faces, like they had seen this before, and the girl had her hand covering her mouth. Her hair was brown and shoulder length and curled up under her chin on both sides. Her eyes were green and, damn it they looked like they were twinkling. She was probably laughing at me behind her hand.
The song ended, I threw a hand up, waved at the two singers—the woman had already gone back to slumping over her glass—and then nodded at the family. The older woman smiled at me and I turned away before I could see the girl’s reaction. The bartender nudged the bread forward. I picked up the slice, blew out the candle and took a bite. It wasn’t banana, but I couldn’t tell what it was. It tasted like I figured all those spices my mom used in her holiday cookies and pies tasted like. Nutmeg and allspice and fancier things like cardamom. I smiled and put the rest of the bread back down.
“Shall we begin?” the bartender said. His speaking voice was much higher than his singing voice. The singing voice fit, which made his speaking voice even weird; he was taller than me, at least six-six, short-cropped black hair and a large, and for lack of a better word, flowing beard. He was wearing khakis and and a black polo with the winery’s logo emblazoned on it. He was wearing a gold necklace with a pendant of the outline of a bunch of grapes hanging from it.
Shane nodded and two glasses appeared in front of us. From behind the bar, Mr. Grapes produced a laminated card with different shades of purple and green grapes on them. Fancy looking script accompanied the grapes. They all looked pretty much the same to me, they all reminded me of the grapes on boxes of Juicy Juice. Mr. Purple introduced himself as George and went into a spiel about the grapes found in the area and what wines the winery produced. He told us we had come at a good time, they had just bottled something new. While he talked I ran my fingers over the edge of the bar. It was polished smooth. You could see the grains in the wood, but you could also see globs of polyurethane in the little cracks in the wood.
George waved the other group over, telling them to join us. The girl was next to me, her what I figured were parents on her other side, all of us leaning against the bar.
“So, birthday boy,” George said, “What should we try first?”
**
We were on Long Island visiting some friends of my mom’s, so of course, on the way out and way back, my parents decided to stop at as many wineries as possible. This was the Grape Gatsby Tour ’99. In the day that we drove out we hit three and on the day we drove back, we hit another four. Who knew Long Island had so many wineries? It didn’t make sense to me, the eleven-year-old suburban kid who spent his days playing with action figures or playing video games, ignoring the outside world, who only got his ecology badge in Cub Scouts because he copied what his best friend did. How could the ground be that fertile, that productive when the beaches were only made of pebbles?
Each winery looked just about the same. I wondered if there was a winery factory. Each used dark woods for the flooring, shelving and bar. Each had the wine sitting on or around casks spread throughout the high-ceilinged room, one or two walls full of gourmet food items with names and prices that were outrageous and another wall or t-shirt and clothing with reprinted watercolors or oil paintings on them. The painting reproductions looked like crap to me then. I knew enough about art—one of my favorite shows was watching Bob Ross on PBS after school—and this wasn’t art. There were no flowing rivers, no towering mountains, no dots of oil paint that somehow looked like a cherry tree, or a rose bush. Instead, there were wide swipes that were supposed to be grape vines, or blobs that were supposed to be bunches of grapes. It all looked like a baby had done finger painting with his own vomit.
At this one winery, Stollman Brothers, or something, my parents paid for the deluxe tasting. Joy oh joy. Sometimes, when they did tastings, I got lucky. The places had sparkling juice they would let me try. Those winery operators had souls, evidently. Without the juice, I was left to wander for long stretches of time, taking slow circuits of the same wine nuts or decorative bottle stoppers. It wasn’t like a toy store, where you could press a button and see what the toy did. If I touched anything, I would probably break it. My parents warned me of that, told me to keep my hands in my pockets. If I were watching my child self, I’m sure I would’ve thought that I was either insane or casing the joint to rob. I mean think about it, A little kid walking slow circles around a winery gift shop with his hands shoved so far into his pockets he could probably scratch his knees if he tried.
This place had no juice, so I was left to wander while my parents made their way into the next room with a group of about ten other adults to taste. There was a large sign announcing times and prices. I had thirty-five minutes to kill. Thirty-five minutes for my parents to fully experience and enjoy the entire repertoire of vintages. The only people in the gift shop were me and a middle-aged man behind the counter, reading a newspaper. He looked at me once over the top, deemed me not worthy of watching and went back to his stocks.
I did my circuit, first in loops, then figure eights. I walked slow, then fast. Only seven minutes past. From the next room, I could hear muffled talking, some laughing. There was a velvet rope blocking the room off with a sign hanging from it that said tasting in progress, please wait. So I waited. And waited.
My parents were never coming back, it seemed after what I thought was thirty-five minutes, so I tried engaging the guy behind the counter in discussion.
“So, do you have sparkling juice here?” He ignored me, so I moved closer to him and repeated myself.
“What? No, sorry, kiddo.”
“Well will my parents be done soon?”
“Yeah, maybe.” He wasn’t being very helpful. If I sat around all day, I would’ve wanted to talk to someone, even if it was a little kid, even if only for a little while. I gave up after that and went back to my circuits. I counted the foot-long wooden floor panels. The room was eighteen feet by twenty-two feet. So many wine nuts, so much wine. I completed thirty-nine more figure eights and eighteen more loops before my parents emerged, my mom’s arm around my dad’s waist.
“Can we go now?” I said, hands held behind my back, hoping I looked cute and innocent.
“Hold on, we have to choose what wine we wanted, they have so many good kinds, honey,” my mom said. Her nose and the tops of her cheeks were pinkish.
**
We had been through six wines. A chardonnay and a merlot, and four others whose names I didn’t quite catch. Being there were only five of us tasting, we got to talking. The girl’s name was Bridgette and she was indeed with her parents. She was out visiting from Montana, where she was a park ranger. She was working on her masters in forestry from UMT. I was the same age as her as of earlier that morning.
“What do you want to do with that?” I said between sips of something blood red. It tasted like liquid wood, like sugar cane after all of the sweet juice was gone from it. She didn’t know what she wanted to do. Neither did I, but I didn’t say that. Telling her I floated from job to job because I couldn’t hold one down didn’t seem all that impressive. She seemed too smart to believe that it was for the experience so that I could write about it, so I didn’t bother with that either.
She was smart, no doubt, and she had a sense of humor, or she just pitied me and laughed when I tried a joke or two. Her dad, standing closest to her said nothing, just sipped his wine in silence.
“We’ve got two more wines,” George told us, his hands under the bar to bring up another bottle, “Then, if you would like, you can take a tour of the winery itself, see how everything is made and stored.”
“We should do that, Carl,” Bridgette’s mother said, tugging on his shirtsleeve. He nodded, making sure George could see they were on board. I looked at Bridgette. Her hand had tightened around the stem. She was looking down. She sighed loudly, cut it in half with a sip of wine, then finished her sigh. Slick, I thought, her parents wouldn’t pick up on that one. Shane did, though.
“Let’s go on the tour, we’ve got a bit before part two of the day,” he said. I was still watching Bridgette. She had turned her face to look at Shane and I. She was the picture of a puppy dog begging for a treat. I agreed to go on the tour.
The father had situated himself between Bridgette and I. Out of the side of his mouth he murmured to me, “You’d think that after being here eight times over the years she wouldn’t want to go on the tour again, but no.”
He laughed quietly and nudged me. I jumped a little, I wasn’t expecting him to touch me. He didn’t even seem like the kind of guy that would want to talk to me.
**
We were on cruise, docked on a Caribbean island for maybe six hours, with beaches everywhere, and my parents still managed to find a winery. At age twelve, they wouldn’t let me go off on my own, afraid I would be picked up by a local and beaten or raped or something. They also wouldn’t let me stay on ship, where I could at least sit out by the pool, a frozen drink melting next to my deck chair while I looked at girls I thought were pretty and would like to talk to but wouldn’t. In my head, I could see myself going up to them and saying something—something witty, even—and then from there it would only be a matter of time before they were enthralled by my almost-high school-ness. My body had other ideas, though. It would stay put, like the deck chairs, screwed in place. In a way, I was sort of glad that they didn’t let me stay on ship. There are only so many times you can see a pretty girl walk by and not have the courage to say anything before your ego taking hits, before you start hating yourself for your lack of confidence in your skinny white self.
The winery was on a cobbled side street. Pastel paintings of grapes and vines and, what looked like corks, decorated the wall around the screen door, which was propped open. Calypso music bounced outward from beyond the threshold. Three steps behind, I followed my parents in. They made a beeline for the bar area, leaving me to start my circuits. I should’ve been excited. This winery was different than the others. It wasn’t air-conditioned, they only had one fan making passes from the corner. There weren’t gourmet nuts or chocolate-covered cherries. There were instead hot sauces and cane sugar made on the island. The t-shirts and ties had bright swipes of color. They shouted “island life.” This was completely new, and yet it wasn’t. I did my circuit while my parents tasted. They were still tasting when I walked outside. I wondered how long it would take them to realize I wasn’t there. I crossed the street and sat on a bench a couple yards down. A man pushed a cart down the street full of coconuts. He was shiny with sweat. He offered me a coconut, and when I told him I didn’t have any money, he smiled shrugged and cracked one open for me anyway. I took the coconut from him. With a flourish, he dropped a pink straw in, nodded and walked away.
I sat back down with the coconut. The juice had the consistency of thick water. It was milky and not sweet, like I thought. I swung my legs under the bench like I thought I should, like a little kid with a lollipop or something. Twenty minutes later they came out, another brown bag in hand. They looked left and right and started walking toward me. Were they going to see me? It didn’t look like it. I got up off the bench, coconut in hand and walked beside my mother.
“Peter, where were you?” She was trying to sound concerned, but wasn’t really getting there. It was more concerned like someone would be if they saw a stray kitten outside. You sort of care, but not enough to help it.
“I was right there the whole time.”
“Are you sure, I didn’t see you in there when we were checking out,” my dad said.
I shrugged.
**
The next two wines weren’t anything special, although Shane wouldn’t shut up about the gewürztraminer. He called it heavenly, like ambrosia. George seemed pleased with us and gave us all a second taste of it. He asked me what I thought, I told him it was tasty, just fruity enough and not too sweet. He was pleased again. I was pleased I said something good. George excused himself from the stop-and-go conversation between tastings to clean up. He began cleaning rearranging bottles and glasses behind the bar. Bridgette’s father turned to me.
“First time here?”
“Yeah, this is my birthday gift from him,” I nodded to Shane at my side. Shane waved. “I’m not really a fan of wines or anything. Bad experiences.”
He nodded, “Well, we still have a tour, but buck up, its almost over. My name’s Carl.”
I offered my hand. “Pete.”
We shook and he kept talking. They lived in the area and he was in engineering. He was a project manager for a firm that specialized in bridges.
George was on our side of the bar now and herding us toward a door next to the bar.
The room behind the bar was big and cooler than the tasting room. Huge wooden casks sat on their sides and lined the walls. On the far end was a closed barn door. George began a spiel about the history of the place. Carl and I walked near the back. Bridgette walked a few paces ahead, staring at the floor. Every once and a while she would throw her head back and roll it between her shoulders.
Carl must have caught me looking. “She has a boyfriend you know.”
“Dad, stop it” she called over her shoulder not turning around.
I wanted to say something, say that I didn’t care, say anything, but couldn’t. I’m not good at thinking fast.
The tour brought us past old-fashioned presses, some carriages with the winery name painted on them and more winery memorabilia. Everything smelled like heavy wood and dirt. Carl talked to me the whole time, making side comments while George was talking, but asking questions when he stopped.
“This is so it looks like I’m paying attention,” he told me, a grin on his face. I laughed. He pushed his hands into the pockets of his black jeans and swayed as he walked, trying to look like he hadn’t said anything when his wife turned around to glare at him.
“So do you go to wineries often?” I said. We were outside now, looking out across rows upon rows of grapevines. The trellises, if placed end to end, would stretch for over a mile, George was telling us.
“We go about once a month. There are so many around that Miriam says we just need to go. It makes for a good outing and because Bridgette was in visiting she said we doubly needed to go. She used that word, too. Doubly.”
I couldn’t remember the last time I had a conversation with someone my own father’s age like this. People that old didn’t come into the coffee shop where I worked. And my father was definitely out. I could never have a normal conversation with him. When I graduated college I got a handshake from him and a congrats. That’s it. Not an I love you or an I knew you could do it. The deepest conversation we ever had revolved around me placing a bet on his rival football team when I was sixteen. He sat me down and lectured me on betting and why it was wrong to bet against who he thought would win. When I got my ninety bucks, he made me give him half. For breaking the law, he said.
“How long have you been going to wineries?”
“Oh, probably around thirty years now.”
“You sound like my parents.”
“Do your parents go to wineries, too, then?”
I wanted to laugh in his face. I wanted to tell him that they seemed to go to wineries more than church or work, that they were frequent fliers. That they should just run one, they had been to enough to know how they work.
“You could say that.”
He nodded. “Been to a lot then, huh? That’s got to get boring, especially since you don’t seem to have been legal for too long.”
I shrugged. He was right, but I didn’t have to tell him that.
George led us back inside to the tasting room, telling us to feel free to peruse the collection and if we had any questions to ask him.
“So where yare you going now?” Carl said. Miriam was coming up to him with a bottle of white in one hand and a fancy looking corkscrew in the other.
“Wherever Shane wants to, he said there’s something else going on today.” I wanted to tell him that I was going with him. That we would talk for hours so that I could attempt to make up for what my father and I never talked about. Girls. Sports. Shaving.
Shane was pulling me towards the door, muttering something about having to go. I shook my arm free and went over to Carl again and shook his hand. I looked him in the eye and told him thanks. He smiled and nodded, like he was a little unsure of what I was thanking him for. It’s okay, I figured, he didn’t need to know.
In the meantime Shane was saying goodbye to and thanking George. He came over to me with one hand behind his back and shook my hand and wished me happy birthday. He pulled a small bottle, around the size of a large cucumber from behind him and gave it to me. It had happy birthday written on the label in permanent marker.
“Enjoy,” he said.
Back in the car, I reclined the seat and stared at the ceiling.
“So what is the rest of this thing we’ve got going on?”
“Hot air balloon ride.”
“What?”
“Hot. Air. Balloon. Ride. You know, one of those things that looks like a giant striped blueberry floating across the sky. Yeah, one of them. Bring that bottle, we’ll drink it up there.”
