My Weird and Wonderful Journey Through Wine
The visceral. Transcendental. Untethered and unmoored by such earthly restrictions as gravity and atmosphere. An experience so earth-shattering that it seems to unroot us, pulling us up away from ourselves, sending us to float freely through time and space, as we watch reality play out far below; forever changed in regards to what was previously understood to be real.
These are the experiences we chase; with music, with art, with travel, and with wine.
They can sound absurd to the uninitiated. delusional even, to those who haven’t been so moved by the liquid in a bottle. To some it’s just grape juice and these are just hyperbolicnotions, and that’s totally fine. But for those of us that have felt it, we will be chasing that dragon for the rest of our lives.
My own vinous beginnings open up on a humble scene with a certain primary colored “critter wine” and psilocybin. The night before Thanksgiving circa 2003, it was what I’d call ‘one for the books’. Unfortunately, those two things weren’t the best stomach companions and a tumultuous hangover threatened to end my future with wine. Riding high on youth and low on expectations, it would be at this point in the story that I would be sent around in a flying phone booth to get my life together and save the future. As luck would have it, my time with wine didn’t end there, but it was with a similar lack of pretense and pretension that I reentered the World of Wine. Skipping ahead a few years in that time machine brings us out of the halcyon days and squarely to 2010 when things in my life had leveled out a bit, insofar as I had parlayed my good timin’ ways into a career in music promotion and all that entails.
In Atlanta, GA for a show and not one to pass up some proper cocktails for fortification, I was at my favorite watering hole at the time, Holeman + Finch, where I found myself “getting my mind right”. The crew there (all legends) gave the tip that there was a really special tasting taking place at their bottle shop down the street. Not only is that a massive understatement, but that tasting ended up changing the trajectory of my entire career. Trying my best to look like I knew what I was doing (and very likely failing) while a French man around my age poured through his lineup, I (in my mind) elegantly gazed, swirled, and then, sticking my nose in for a sniff before the first taste, tumbled right down the rabbit hole. As my mind struggled to wrap itself around what was happening, I became entranced with essentially what I didn’t know, and felt this feverish desire to learn everything I could make its way up from the depths of my soul.
That bottle was Marcel Lapierre’s 2009 Morgon and that moment is forever etched into my mind as I felt the intrinsic pull into this magical world of rocks and vines, science and alchemy, the seen and unseen; spellbound by tales of gamay, granitic soils, and the “Gang of Four”. These moments can spark an insatiable hunger for understanding. Why? How? Where? Who? Since When? A deep desire for knowledge beyond that sip that will course a trajectory into the Wonderful World of Wine, down, down, down the rabbit hole and possibly never to return. It’s about chasing these moments, these experiences, rather than chasing bottles.
One such moment came while I watched as a golden amber-hued liquid flowed out of a bottle and I became mesmerized by the powerful aromatics taking over the room. Prodded to do so by my friend, I stuck my nose in the glass and was sucker punched by salty toasted almonds, golden raisins, dried chamomile, meyer lemon zest and ginger spice. My eyes popped out of my head (sort of like Christopher Lloyd as Judge Doom in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?) and my friend laughed and asked semi-rhetorically what I thought about it. I tripped over my questions and comments as they tumbled out of my mouth.
The wine in question was 2004 Jacques Puffeney Vin Jaune and it proved to me how little I knew, and sent me on a quest of humility to try to understand as much as I possibly could about this faraway land called the Jura, the fabled “Pope of Arbois”,Comté cheese, and the traditions and merits of wines aged sous voile vs ouillé. Forever bound to the wonders of Savagnin and the traditions of the Jura, the grape responsible for that moment, I can relate to its existence on the fringe. Far from being a testable variety and with a tradition of lending itself to the Jura’s voile-aged wines, it’s written off by many as too obscure or its wines too cool (like calling a science book “too cool”). But you know what? It is fucking cool and unique and what the hell is wrong with that? If the point of all of it is to expand our minds and barrel down the path of unending knowledge, why set boundaries? Acknowledging the historical importance and cultural significance of a wine while simultaneously writing it off as not important enough to study is creating a Schrödinger’s cat-esque paradox that serves no one. There should be no gatekeeper to the path of pleasure and enlightenment.
While the enjoyment of such pleasures is no doubt a privilege, it is by no means one that anyone should hold a key to or set parameters on. Barriers to entry for enjoyment should be burnt to the ground and any sort of wine “community” should be just that - a shared space for this interest we share. Not a private club with a dress code. Worship at the fashion altar of Mick Jagger? Fuck yeah. Is Missy Eliot your style guide? Get your freak on. Let’s weave our inherently unique attributes together with this common thread and build a space that actually serves all of us. That’s a club I want membership in. The sum of the moment is what causes the shift, in contradiction to what others might have you think.
Serious Wine People might try to have you believe that you must chase certain bottles. Tally up all of these trophy bottles by their cost, divided by their rarity, multiplied to the power of dick-swinging factor, and there you have your worth as a wine professional. These bottles are hoarded, whispered about, hidden under tasting tables surrounded ten deep by arms jabbing their way in for a sacred splash, poured behind closed doors in PDR’s, allocated in amounts of ones and twos, photographed like porn stars and shared like dick pics. But does suckling a quarter ounce out of a bottle like a hamster really make an impression? Or create an experience worth chasing? Not in my experience.
Much of my life is guided by the wacky wisdom of Tom Robbins, narrating my misadventures and informing my nonsensical plans. One in particular, seems to articulate my entire existence in the World of Wine: “Our lives are not as limited as we think they are; the world is a wonderfully weird place; consensual reality is significantly flawed; no institution can be trusted, but love does work; all things are possible; and we all could be happy and fulfilled if we only had the guts to be truly free and the wisdom to shrink our egos and quit taking ourselves so damn seriously.”
Knowledge is power, and learning is cool, and if you’re into learning and cool stuff and the universe and pushing boundaries and making quantum leaps and having your socks blown off then you’re my kind of Wine Person. Here’s to being wild and wonderful, not always easy to understand, maybe not for everyone, but most certainly unique and thrilling.