| XXX |
|
|
Reward if Found
I am alive. But empty. And small. Empty and small as children watching their parents drain the swimming pool at the end of summer. Some days ago I lost my harvest notebook. The secrets and lies of good winemaking, gone. But hopefully not forgotten. Very much forgotten. My memory is faithless. But to protect the secrets, my penmanship is horrendous. So be it. Blame the lecturer at the pulpit talking too fast for the nodes that connect my eardrums to my brain and the cells that create the little bursts of energy that move muscles, my hand, in legible manner. The book will be misunderstood by any who try to read it. My notebooks never make much sense at all. Not to the casual reader or me, most times. I like it that way because one word stuck between scratches is usually three paragraphs when I suck three drinks through cigarette straws. So, I drank last night. A mouth puckering, double cup of white zinfandel that would stop a Billy Goat in its tracks. Taken in one gulp. Smash. Shards of glass bloodied my hand. I wiped my lips with my paw leaving a trail of blood across my mug and cheek. Not unlike the lioness who lifts her head from a zebra's cavity to be photographed by National Geographic. Frickin beast, the lioness thinks. The blood and the booze were too much. I passed out. But that is neither here nor there. How does this misappropriation affect you? It greatly effects you. You, my gentle reader, will learn little or nothing about what I learn. And that is what this is about, a conduit from one brain to another. But when that brain assumes its knowledge in un-secure places, the confidence level for scientific breakdown is statistically significant. Why else would you be here? You profit by me, stealing knowledge and plagiarizing it as your own. Impressing the dinner date and the maitre d'. Conjuring a travel plan and putting it in motion. Escapism. But who would want to escape to a vineyard to work before sunrise and leave a winery after sunset. For 30-odd consecutive days. I know you don't. Get the grapes out of your mouth and the dust out of your eyes. I am going to save you the glorious details. The secrets and lies. I had planned a daily record of my harvest. All the things I have done all the things that are important and all the things that are not very important, like the winery intern who drove the fork lift under a low hanging hallway and crashed two wine barrels into a fire sprinkler, gutting the ceiling and flushing water everywhere. The Fire Department stood on scene and shook their heads. It was the second week of work. No wine was hurt during the making of this incident. But other wines are being wonderfully made throughout and all detailed with one liners in my lost brown paper back, pocket size moleskin, bent to the curve of my ass, a bit smaller than that of Ella Fitzgerald's ass whose voice sounds more morbid than usual, as I write this today. "Autumn in New York" has not me in the mood to 'put on the Ritz.' When I realized I lost my notebook, which has a name, phone and 'reward if found' marking on the inside cover, I was determined to retrace my steps and I did. Back to the vineyard, Widdoes. At night, pitch night. Dark as the bottom of the laundry basket. My car rumbled down a rocky drive. My bright lights lifted the crumbly steel and brown rocks under the tires, kicking up a little dust to cloud the yellow lamp light. I parked and walked in circles in the cone shaped light coming from my car. I drove to the next vineyard. I recalled the work at the winery. Nothing. Nowhere to lose it. Passing cars, rectangular cars, in my headlights flashed visions of the top of my dresser, the empty cigar box filled with currency from four countries, the two books on artist creativity and the decline of the decline of the Bordeaux wine industry. Flatbed trucks. My coffee table with candle, dog eared magazines, more books, a cheap travel alarm clock, empty packs of cigarettes and water bottles, wine corks and headphones. No notebook. Nowhere else to look that night. I waited at the traffic light. It turned green. I drove home. I sat on the patio stared at the cloudless night sky wondering. Not a star in the sky to enlighten me. Not a ring on the phone to tell me that my notebook was coming home. Nothing. And I got no sleep, my mind trying to remember how the Hansel Chardonnay smelled when I checked its sugar contents. It smelled like. Tropical yeasty juice. Pineapple. Pastry. A bakery morning. The Searby Chardonnay. Toasty. Champs. Champagne, I thought. All the notes. All the stories. One word at a time. Counting lots of Chardonnay like sheep. I started to feel as fat as those bulbous Burgundian barrels. No longer empty as those same children who do not have the ability to look into the future and see the same pool being filled in front of their eyes. Harvest, part 2 is underway. Pinot may be over and Chardonnay may be ending, but Syrah is starting. And it is some wicked juice not for novices. Stay tuned. - Bonus Material. Three days worth of notes when my harvest notebook was filled with technical data detailing wine chemistry ("Not for novices"), but my keyboard digested the lighter side during those days, after the
jump.
Post - October'06 Back to home...
|
|
|