Woodstock Wine Guy

Take me back, take me way, way, way back On Hynford Street

Where you could feel the silence at half past eleven

On long summer nights

As the wireless played Radio Luxembourg

And the voices echoed across Beechie River

Van Morrison - “On Hynford Street”

Summer is upon us. As I write this the school year for my children dwindles down to mere hours. Soon they will be loosed upon the neighborhood, at the park, over at friends, antsy for their vacation. There is something in summer that makes children of us all.

As a child I lived about three blocks away from some train tracks. They were the boundary of my unlimited wandering. Late at night I could hear trains roll by, but the trains of summer sounded different from the trains of winter. In the summer it was all peaceful, rhythmic clacking and a sense of the wind pouring behind the moving train. Hearing it as I lay in bed brought an odd comfort that clings to me still.

It is what long summer nights are for: the late-night comfort of familiar sounds.

If I listen closely I can still hear Mr. Lahey, our neightbor who lost a leg in WWII, calling out to his nine, count ‘en, nine children as he played volleyball with them on their tiny patio. Or, it’s the voice of Ken Broda, my father’s best friend, mellowed from cigarettes, telling a story as he sat with my father on our patio, a can of Stroh’s in his hand. More than the heat of summer’s days, I recall the quiet sounds of summer’s nights.

I have stood in the middle of vineyards well past midnight and listened to the leaves brush against one another. I have poured the final glass of a cricket-loud evening, the glug and splash of the wine barely audible and thought this a fine, fine life.

And it is.

Wine, like the trains of my childhood, is different in the summer. Winter wine is for our marrow. Summer wine is for our souls. Wine is the sound of laughter coming through a child’s bedroom window and assuring him his parents are happy. It is the whispered silence of lovers before the last light is turned out. It is voices coming from down the street, hushed, satisfied, lingering in the companionable darkness.

More than attending the big rituals and passages of our lives, wine is best when it attends the small, personal rituals of our day-to-day lives: friends stopping by unexpectedly, a cook-out that doesn’t want to end, the happy fatigue of a day spent swimming, watching children race to catch and cradle fire-flies. This is what wine is for. Forget the scores and the hoo-ha surrounding wine. Use it to make your meals taste better, to make the day last just a bit longer, to restore your sense of peaceable wonder.

Towards the end of another song Mr. Morrison growls, “Take me back, take me back, take me back to when everything made more sense.” The quietude of a long summer night, a glass of wine shared and everything makes more sense to me.

Collegiate Assessor Kovalev also awoke early that morning. And when he had done so he made the “B-r-rh!” with his lips which he always did when he had been asleep - he himself could not have said why. Then he stretched, reached for a small mirror on the table near by, and set himself to inspect a pimple which had broken out on his nose the night before. But, to his unbounded astonishment, there was only a flat patch on his face where the nose should have been! Greatly alarmed, he got some water, washed, and rubbed his eyes hard with the towel. Yes, the nose indeed was gone! He prodded the spot with a hand - pinched himself to make sure that he was not still asleep. But no; he was not still sleeping. Then he leapt from the bed, and shook himself. No nose! Finally, he got his clothes on, and hurried to the office of the Police Commissioner.
- Nikolai Gogol, “The Nose”

Anosmia is to smell as blindness is to sight, as deafness is to hearing. Though most people value their sense of smell the least of their senses, it is, arguably, the one that provides us with the most pleasure. How else to explain that anosmiacs suffer higher rates of depression, weight loss and loss of libido? Just try and imagine your life without it.

Two days ago I, like Collegiate Assessor Kovalev, awoke without my nose - except mine was still on my face, just not functioning, the by-product of a summer cold. For someone in my trade, the lack of a viable olfactory system is something of a deal breaker, even if only for a few days.

Food is clay. Wine tastes of heart-break, and all around the pleasures of the world film over and memory strains for its moorings.

I once knew a guy who raced cars for a living. He quit racing after he sustained serious head injuries in a wreck. By the time I knew him he had healed of the life-threatening aspects, but had lost his ability to smell, the wiring cut or jammed. For him eating was a trial trying to recall what steak was, what bread was, what feeling satisfied was. All of his cues were gone. He said, “I’m like Moses. The promised land is just over there, I can see it, but I’ll never get there.”

Though it can verge on the silly, the language of wine revolves around the sense of smell. Wine is an olfactory experience more than anything else and as such a unique metaphoric language has evolved to describe it. In order to know one thing, you have to know dozens and dozens of other things. Wine smells of: grapefruit, lemon, blackberry, raspberry, strawberry, black currant, cherry, apricot, peach, apple, pineapple, melon, banana, raisin, prune, fig, licorice, black pepper, cloves, geranium, violet, rose, orange blossom, baker’s yeast, yogurt, sweat, saurkraut, wet wool, wet dog, burnt match, cabbage, skunk, garlic, rubber, diesel, kerosene, plastic, tar, mold, mushroon, dust, smoke, burnt toast, coffee, bacon, oak, cedar, vanilla, honey, butterscotch, butter, soy sauce, chocolate, molasses, walnut, hazelnut, almond, cut green grass, bell pepper, eucalyptus, mint, canned green bean, asparagus, green olive, black olive, artichoke, hay, tea and tobacco.

And that is just the official list.

I am always amazed at our capacity to build meaning out of the materials at hand. Implied in this list is that each of us has an understanding of “banana” or “tar” or “wet dog” that allows us to project that experience forward and then find it in the aromas coming off a glass of wine. We are brilliant in our presumption, brilliant in the use of the bounty that surrounds us.

Harmonic convergence, indeed.

Though I cannot smell a geranium from yogurt today, I have them stowed away in my memory’s store and just reading the list has brought a smile to my congested face. Unlike my race car friend, I’ll make it to the promised land again by drinking plenty fluids, getting as much rest as I can and waiting a few more days.

Thomas Jefferson hoped that America would become a nation of wine drinkers. He believed, and rightly so, that wine exerts a civilizing influence on society, whereas whisky and rum tend to provoke the baser instincts. Now, I’m all for a snort of bourbon now and again, especially on Derby Day, but on the whole, I’d rather have a glass of wine.The Fourth of July isn’t much of a wine holiday. No, it belongs to baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet. And beer, lots and lots of beer. Again, I like a tall, cold, frosty one as much as the next guy, especially after a day spent spitting out lousy wine, but on the whole, I’d rather have a glass of wine with my food.

Every Fourth of July my parents would throw a huge party that most of the neighborhood attended - we were the first house on the block to have an above ground pool and every kid was my pal, at least during summer. These parties often involved the police as the few pinched up neighbors who couldn’t bother to come always thought we were way too loud. Famously, my Uncle Wick, drunk as a skunk, invited the officers in for a beer - which they accepted once their shift was up. They, too, had had enough of the whiny neighbors.

As the years faded, so too did the party. The whole warp and woof of it was for the neighborhood kids to have a safe place to hang out, and for their parents to drink their fill without getting in a car. By the time I am 16 the parties have stopped and the Fourth settles into a quiet family BBQ.

Move forward a bit. I am in my early thirties. My father has shifted his drink to wine from beer and when I return home for a meal he trots out these enormous, pale green plastic wine goblets. “Hey, man, they may be ugly, but they won’t break,” he laughs. My father and mother and I eat and drink at the picnic table they bought thirty years earlier. The wine is always sweet, the food is generally grilled and though I wouldn’t go out of my way to recommend some of the pairings, they were delicious in the moment.

There is a photograph of me, my father and my brother standing in our backyard. Each of us is holding one of those ugly green wine glasses and we are happy. Especially my dad. In the photo he is thin, a bit wobbly, with great whoops of fatigue below his eyes. He’s been through his first round of chemotherapy and is home for the Fourth. My brother and I are scared at the change in him, but not him. He is beaming, glad to be surrounded by his sons, his knobby hands holding onto his wine. It was his last Fourth of July.

If Jefferson hoped for a civilizing influence he couldn’t have found a better ambassador than my dad. By the time that photo is taken I had worked as a wine steward, opened up Charlie Trotter’s, ran several small restaurants and basically passed through the deep snobbery associated with such places, but had yet to meet someone who simply loved a glass of wine like my dad. He didn’t care about stemware, or vintages, or histroy or culture, he just like the way it tasted.

Completely civilized.

So, because of my father, I think of the Fourth with a glass of wine. Preferably in an ugly green glass.

Be safe.

As I write this it is raining, a steady, easy sort of rain that comes down a bit harder for a while then eases off the gas and just fills the air with water. When the first drops were beginning to fall the air took on that incredibly rich, fecund smell of dirt being washed away, and the sweet, sweet smell of clean, clear water.

All of my kids laughed at me as I stood in the rain and took in lungfuls of it.

My father called rain like this a farmer’s rain - a gentle soak, and then, boom - life.

There is something emotionally satisfying to watch a rain like this fall. It is a kind of assurance, a promise kept, that there is more yet to come. A hundred years ago I stood just inside the doorway of a polebarn and watched rain like this fall on a patch of Oregon’s Wilamette Valley. God help me, but I can’t recall the name of the vineyard, but I stood there next to tractors and backhoes and listened to the sound of the rain striking the fat, broad leaves of Pinot Noir vines not 10 feet away. I stood there with the winemaker and he just grinned at his good fortune.”Nice rain,” was all he said.

All farmers are gamblers. They place their best that they can work hard enough to grow a healthy crop, and are lucky enough to dodge the worst of nature and so reap the reward of their labor. It doesn’t always work out, but still they place their bets, confident that nature won’t punish them forever. We are the beneficiaries of such wagers. The rain that fell that day over twenty years ago in Oregon could be found in the wine made from the grapes that soaked in that rain. The wine I have here in the shop is just the same: it is raining in the bottle.

I love wine and how it makes our food taste better; I love it for its ability to reflect who we are, and what we aspire to be; it is also the singular expression of a specific place and time. When you open a bottle and share it with your friends, your family, with those you love and care for you are also completing the circle that began in the vineyard, that began with the rain.

As a child I would run outside when it rained. The smell, the wind, the power, the fact it could rain at all held me in its thrall. When I open a bottle of wine and can smell the earth, the place where the wine originated, I am like that small boy I once was - captivated by the gift of rain.

It’s a rainy day. Open that bottle you’ve been saving for a while. Invite some friends over. Stand inside the door way with someone you love and share a glass while it rains.

solstice 
c.1250, from O.Fr. solstice, from L. solstitium “point at which the sun seems to stand still,” from sol “sun” (see sol) + pp. stem of sistere “to come to a stop, make stand still.”

The days just before and just after the Summer Solstice are referred to as Midsummer in England - drowsy, still days where imagination runs riot, where the beautiful Titania, Queen of the Faeries, falls madly in love with the ass-headed Bottom in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where time seems to stand as still as the sun.

Solstice, equinox, declination, the sun traversing the sky and every time I hear these words (once I get past my Shakespeare fix) I think of Rudolph Steiner, the progenitor of Bio-Dynamic Agriculture. Steiner was an Austrian thinker, Goethe scholar, philosopher and occultist who was hated by the Nazi’s for his ideas on human freedom.

In 1924 Steiner gave a series of lectures in Silesia in response to concerns from farmers about soil degradation and the decline in the health of their crops and livestock. Steiner’s great understanding was to treat the farm holistically, as a single organism, and to abjure from any chemical treatments at all. It is the root of all organic farming practices.

Wine makers have been devotees of Steiner’s thinking for years, and the health of their vineyards is proof of the efficacy of these ideas. But here is where I land right back in the upside down world of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the love potions that disrupt the lives of Shakespeare’s lovers. Beyond Steiner’s stout and steady advice to work in harmony with the land he also advises planting, sowing and harvesting by lunar cycles. He imagines preparations to be sprayed on the plants to enlist the help of non-physical beings in the growth of that plant. He calls out to the spiritual world for help in this world with a series of concoctions, potions & preparations all loosely based on rotting animal parts.

These preparations include filling a cow’s horn with cow manure, burying it in the autumn and recovering it in spring, then mixing it with water to spray over the fields. Another preparation takes crushed quartz and stuffs it into a cow’s horn, then buries it in spring to be used in the autumn. Steiner calls for yarrow blossoms to be stuffed into the urinary bladders of Red Deer, then left out in the summer sun and buried in the winter. He does the same with Chamomile stuffed into a cow’s small intestine, and on and on.

For pests and weeds you have to burn the skin of the pest, or the seed of the weed and scatter the ashes to make them infertile and prevent any return.

Brilliant.

Most wine makers don’t buy into the geomancy of all this, but they follow it to the letter just in case he’s right. I admire the vision that buries cow horns filled with manure to elicit a harmonic response from the spirit world to grow grapes. Steiner may have been a kook, but he was also passionate about improving the world around him and all of his work pointed in that direction. That was why Hitler, the old paper hanger himself, railed against Steiner, and the dangers his ideas posed for Germany.

It would be easy to scoff and make fun of Steiner and his odd agricultural preparations, the cow horns his talismans, but I’ll pass. His work was Protean and we eat and drink better because of it. So, when the solstice rolls around raise a glass of wine to Herr Steiner, and raise another to Puck, Titania & Bottom - wine being the best love potion of all.

Does anyone know where I can get a used cow horn cheap?

If I make the argument that wine is a living thing, then it is easy to understand the metaphor of letting a wine breathe. To round back on René Descartes, I live therefore I breathe. And something wonderful does happen to wine when it is exposed to the air - at least for a while. It is during this while that we re-discover just how varied and unique the juice is.

There is a very specific set of chemical and molecular reactions that fire off to provide us with the sense of the wine’s development in the glass. But I am no chemist and I care less for the sequence and more for the experience itself. I am glad someone knows why it happens, but that is something of a recent development. Over the centuries wine growers and wine makers were aware of the same process as they encountered the wine they made, but the molecular chain reaction was, for them, an unnamed mystery.

Sort of like our autonomic nervous system. You know, breathing.

As astounding as the depth of scientific inquiry is, I fall squarely in the camp of “Don’t ask why, just enjoy it.” Half a lifetime ago a friend was in her cups, quite upset that some British physicists had discovered a sound-wave’s crest, trough, and crest that they determined originated with the Big Bang. Her words were, “Why can’t they leave it alone? They’re taking way all the mystery.” My answer to her was, “So what? They’ll never be able to say what erupted. It gets too close to God for them.”

Same thing here. No matter how specific the science of wine becomes, it will never be able to explain our pleasure in consuming it. The rustic barnyard aroma that comes sailing off a glass of a simple country French wine, or the heady mix of tar and lavender that can only be found in Nebbiolo, is a specific chemical reaction, but so what? The endless quest for greater specificity is an endless quest for more information and must not be confused with the quest for wisdom. Rarely do facts matter the way truth matters. The truth is that bottle of Minervois is greater than the sum of its parts because we - you and I - complete the wine-maker’s work by consuming the wine. If it stays stoppered it is a tree falling in the woods with no one around to hear it.

Wines don’t need to breathe. We do. We anthropomorphize wine because it is in a constant state of change, just as we are. It is a type of controlled decay that we hope is the same for us - namely, that we get better with age. Of course, some wines benefit from softening them with air, but that’s because we’re drinking ‘em too soon. What’s the hurry? Put the corkscrew down and step away from the bottle. If you have to let a bottle breathe to make it palatable then you should think twice about opening it.

The only breathing that matters belongs to you and your loved ones.

Transubstantiation is the process by which the bread and wine offered at Mass is changed into the literal body and blood of Jesus, though to all outward appearances they remain the same. It lets the recipient eat his God. It is an old idea, the ritual consumption of the deity as religious practice. It is also a stunningly beautiful compression of our human desire for communion with our animalistic need to consume. Joseph Campbell said life consumes life in order to sustain itself, and that by ingesting the god we become part of that whole, we are sustained.

This change from bread to body, wine to blood is completed in Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus, Part 2, 29

Silent friend of many distances, feel
how your breath enlarges all of space.
Let y our presence ring out like a bell
into the night. What feeds upon your face

grows mighty from the nourishment thus offered.
Move through transformation, out and in.
What is the deepest loss that you have suffered?
If drinking is bitter, change yourself to wine.

In this immeasurable darkness, be the power
that rounds your senses in their magic ring,
the sense of their mysterious encounter.

And if the earthly no longer knows your name,
whisper to the silent earth: I’m flowing.
To the flashing water say: I am.

(Translation: Stephen Mitchell)

This is wine’s central mystery: the change from one thing into another. What starts out as a fruit becomes a juice and in the process of fermentation becomes wine. I’ve often told customers that wine is the art of controlled decay, that wine - even the humblest - is a living thing, with a rough life span and a moment when it is at its peak.

Just like you and me.

It is wine’s capacity to hold our metaphors that make it so central to our religious observances, to our daily rituals. This is the work of transubstantiation: if drinking is bitter, change yourself to wine.

Consume the god.

Change yourself.

Now I’m not suggesting that I think of all this when I have a glass of wine, when I share a glass with those I love, but it is there in the glass waiting for you to fix your gaze on it. It is easy to get drawn into the linguistic gymnastics of wine writing, trying to describe a sensory experience so that another might understand what it tastes like. My work compels the same from me, but of greater interest to me is trying to tell you what wine might mean - not as a specific sensory experience, but as a metaphor for our very human desires.

This is just a taste.

A loving cup is a large silver or pewter wine vessel with two handles that is passed from person to person at banquets, or farewell gatherings, or at weddings. It is a token of our esteem for the others gathered that we share the one cup. The first time I saw one used was at a Mass held for incoming freshman at DePaul University. We all took a sip of altar wine and headed back to our seats vaguely worried about bacteria and hoping the wine was strong enough to ward off any illness - just like when we were kids and we took turns taking a swig out of a Pepsi bottle, wiping the bottle with a dirty sleeve and passing it on to the next thirsty kid.

There is something lyrical, almost elegiac, about a loving cup. The name itself seems to belong to another time and place altogether. Perhaps it is a bit sentimental to think of it that way, but I am Irish and sentiment rises easily in me. I think it would be a fine thing if loving cups were used for their original purpose again (instead of their current use as trophies). Imagine your holiday dinner. Now imagine it with a loving cup. The presence of such a cup is the difference between Ebeneezer Scrooge’s Christmas past and his possible future.

One dark winter a hundred years ago I sat perched on a barstool in the Rainbo Club at Division and Damen in the city. I had become something of regular there, my photo-booth mug making it onto the yearly calendar two years running. The Rainbo, in a former life had been a Polish Social Club, and now had been turned into a hangout for artists, pseudo-artists, posers and punks. I sat with my friend Paul Pawluk having a few beers. The place was half-full with angst-riddled twentysomethings all dressed in black. Paul and I were anomalies (we had plenty of angst, but didn’t wear black) as was one other fellow - an old rummy nursing a shot of whisky across the bar from us.

We decide to buy the geezer a round and so asked the bartender to deliver our gift. The old man looks up kinda mad, giving us a hard look, taking our measure to see if we were being patronizing. I suppose we were, but his response was to buy us a round and as the drinks were poured he made his way over to us and plopped down next to me.

“I don’t suppose you smoke do you?’ were his first words to us. I was instantly reminded of a scene from John Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle where a union organizer is told to take up smoking because a man just won’t trust another man who wouldn’t smoke.

We told him we didn’t smoke. He grunted and nodded his head a bit as if confirming our weakness.

“Why’d you buy me that drink?” he asked, the hard look in his eyes. “D’you think I didn’t have money?”

It was unnerving to be confronted so directly. We were being condescending, though I doubt either of us knew it. Just spreading some holiday cheer, I said.

“I’ve got money,” he said and we settled into an uncomfortable silence. I was wishing we’d left him alone. This was no fun. After a few more minutes he told us his name was Stanley, that he used to come to the Rainbo back “when it was a nice place.” He was back in Chicago after some time away and thought he’d look up the old joint.

“Nothin’ stays the same,” Stanley said and he turned around on his barstool to look at the room. He pointed to a far corner “I kissed the girl who would be my wife for the first time right over there. Sophy and I used to come here dancing back in the late forties and such.”

Stan was smiling now. “What a place this used to be. We had bands come in here. They played all the good stuff. Swing, y’know? Sunday’s they’d have a buffet here. All the roasted chicken, pork, kulduni, pierogies, bigos you could eat. It was all here. This is where they had my going away party before I shipped out for Korea. I was married by then and Sophy did all that for me.”

Paul and I ordered another shot for our new friend.

“Yeah, that was a party, I tell ya. Everything was just great. Just great. The music, the booze, the food. Just great. Then comes the time to go. Only I don’t want to go. I don’t ever want to leave. You know what I mean? Then my So, my So takes out this bottle of sweet cherry wine and says, “I was saving this,” and she pours out a great big glass of it into a beer mug. She takes a little sip and tells me how much she loves me. Then she passed the mug to my Mom, my Dad was killed in the Second World War, and my Mom takes a sip and tells me how much she loves me and that I should be safe when I’m in Korea, and she starts crying about my Dad and all. And on and on. That mug was passed to everyone who was still there. They all told me how much they loved me and I shouldn’t be a hero or nothing like that, but to just come home when my tour was up. The mug finally made it to me, there was a lot left in it. I think everyone was afraid to be a hog about it. I wanted to say something to them, to thank them, or something, but I was too busted up. I just drained that glass in one gulp. Everyone laughed at that.”

Stanley turned back to his drink and downed it. He got up from his seat, “Thanks, boys. Thanks for being nice to an old man.” With that he left.

I’ve always wondered what happened to him. Did he have kids? Was Sophy still alive? Where did he settle after the war? Why did he look so shot through that night? But it doesn’t matter. Not a bit of it. He gave me that story, and that is more than enough.

So, the next time you are with your family and friends don’t simply raise a glass in good cheer, share one instead. Tell those you love that you love them and pass it on.

In 1984 I attended the Karl Marx University of Economics in Budapest, Hungary. No lie. I was part of an exchange program with DePaul University where DePaul students went to KMU and no one from Hungary came to DePaul for fear they’d never go back. One day in early spring we were on one of those tedious outings to examine the glorious wine-making prowess of the proletariat when I felt the sickening presence of the KGB watching our group. There was this one fellow who hovered over us with long, dank, lanky, black hair swept straight back over his forehead exposing a Widow’s Peak that almost reached to his bushy eyebrows, a walrus moustache that looked like a taut hunting bow draped over his lip and a dark, filthy trenchcoat with the belt sliding out of its loopholes and almost touching the ground. Central casting couldn’t have picked a better KGB spy. We were warned by the US Embassy we’d be watched, but, man, this was too wierd.

We were gathered around a chipped and worn Formica tasting table drinking some of the lightest, awfulest white wine it has ever been my displeasure to choke down when one of our Hungarian chaperons leaned over me and told me that the president of the University of which I was a guest would like to speak with me. I was brought to an office just off the tasting floor and sat across from Lazlo Mozes, the President of KMU and the same fellow I had assumed was KGB.

The first thing I noticed about Lazlo Mozes was how drunk he was. He motioned for me to sit and poured another glass of the insipid wine we were drinking in the tasting room. He asked in an inappropriately loud voice, “Tell me, what do you think of our wines, Mr. Child. I heard you speaking with your friends. Clearly, you know wine. What do you think of our fine Hungarian wines?” And he slugged down a full glass of the awful juice for himself and smiled at me. I muttered something non-committal and Lazlo Mozes leaned over the desk and whispered, “Don’t worry. I know it’s garbage, but we’re being watched you see.” And he nodded in the direction of the busdriver, a warty workman in thick boots, who was making time with the wine matrons in their white aprons and stealing a glance in every direction. “KGB,” he whispered. “If you want to taste true Hungarian wines you have to go to where the forgotten ones live - old men tending their own bits of land - unafraid of the mongrel bureaucrats - making wine worthy of your stomach.”

And so it was soon arranged that I was to go to Badasconytomaj, a little wine town on the old slopes of an extinct volcano that drifted down to the northwestern shore of Lake Balaton, with Lazlo Mozes, the president of the university of which I was a guest.

Two months later I am walking in tiny vineyards meeting the forgotten ones, survivors of WWII, of the pogroms of 1956, bachelor farmers in their 60’s, 70’s and 80’s. “These men,” Lazlo told me, “are simply to tough to die.”

We visit politely. I have brought gifts, trinkets I’d bought at O’Hare for just this purpose: Chicago skyline shot glasses, keychains, playing cards. Finally, we slip and slide our way down an earthen tunnel tipping into an underground cellar. One of the old men we’d met earlier, Tibor, was waiting for us with glasses already filled with his wine: an amber colored thing that must have been as old he was.

Tibor stood no higher that five feet tall with a face that looked like a crushed pumpkin: at some point his nose and cheekbones had been broken and had settled where ever they pleased. His eyes were milky with cataracts and a lattice work of busted capillaries covered his face. He smiled and said through our translator, “Please, drink. This is my best wine.”

It was fiery and deep, that is all I remember. I made a point to nurse my glass. I did not want to get into a drinking contest with Lazlo or Tibor. After a few minutes Tibor asked, “Please ask the young American if there is something wrong with my wine. He’s not drinking it.”

Who knew an old man could be so passive aggressive?

I assured him all was well and I started pounding the wine. This makes pumpkin-faced Tibor very happy and he offers a toast to my health. I am now half-moon over and I want to offer a toast to Tibor, and I say,”Here’s to your casket. May its lining be of the finest silk spun in the Orient. May its handles be made of the finest gold mined in South Africa. May its wood be made of the finest 100 year old Hungarian oak…”

Wait for it. Wait for it, here’s the kicker, “…and may they plant that tree tomorrow.”

Bang. Boom. Zowie. Score one for the home team. I had ‘em near tears. I had ‘em eating out of my inebriated hand. Tibor said this back through our sloshed translator:

“Tell the young American I will have no casket when I finally die. During the war my family, my neighbors, the village,” and here he swept a beefy hand in a half circle, “we were all forced from our homes one night in the middle of winter. They marched us from place to place for days and days and days. We were in our nightshirts. Most died from the cold and were left where they lay - open to the sky, the birds, the hungry dogs that followed us. I am the only one from my family who lived. When I die I will be left where I fall, just as my mother, father, grandfather and two sisters were.” Here he paused and looked through the opaque lenses of his decrepitude at the dozen or so barrels quietly percolating in the suddenly too quiet cellar and continued. “I work these vines because they were my grandfather’s vines. When I found my way back home I couldn’t think of anything else to do except work these vines. When I see my grandfather again I want to be able to tell him his vines are doing well. I want to be able to tell him I kept the vintage alive. I hid what was best so I could share it with him. The wine in your glass is from my first vintage.”

Bang. Boom. Zowie. Indeed.

Wine reflects the gaze of our most fervent desires. It shows us who we have been, who we hope to become. For me, wine is an expression of love for my family, my children. It is how I try to earn my keep, but more importantly, there is nothing more precious to me than to celebrate and exalt in the company of those I love. Wine binds us to one another - past and present. It comforts our sorrows and dances in our joy. Not the alcohol, but the still surface of remembrance that is cast upon it. My dear Tibor, a forgotten one, a bachelor farmer whose eyes could finally bear to see no more taught me this lesson over twenty years ago. He teaches me still.

Work your vines. Keep the vintage alive.

Welcome to woodstockwineguy.com. My name is Mark Child. The idea behind this blog was to stretch out and ruminate a bit on wine. My job as a wine buyer keeps my nose close to the grindstone wine-wise, and there isn’t an awful lot of room to go off on tangents, or riddle out some of the ways in which wine intersects our lives.

So, this blog.

See, it is right there, where wine crosses over from the realm of aesthetics and enters into our lives that interests me. There will be no scores, no reviews per se, just some recommendations and noodling around with the forms used to describe, or imagine wine.

All the best,

Mark