Wine Country

Better than a camping trip in the woods, going to wine country was the perfect excuse to get drunk in a natural enough setting without feeling like a total alcoholic.

The truth was Jim was an alcoholic. It was nothing to feel bad about. The doctor had assured him of that.

The doctor was Jim’s friend, Sam. Sam was the most respectable of all doctors. He was into neuroscience and the brain and all that. He had a funny way of scaring and fascinating Jim all at the same time. Clearly Sam had a passion for the human body – especially the female anatomy – but Sam had a very doctorly way of being quick to contradict his knowledge by saying that doctors knew nothing and may as well be practicing medicine with blindfolds on. As far as Sam was concerned the human body shouldn’t work at all and Jim may as well seize up now. But before all that might have a chance of happening, Sam’s prescription for Jim was to head to wine country and have a few.

And thus was the reason the friendship lasted like the Energizer Bunny. Sam gave Jim the excuses to live every day as if it were the last. Why, Jim could be dead at any moment. He may as well lighten up and have a drink with a certified doctor.

Jim had had a frazzled week. Well, not that frazzled, really. He’d been working in the same cubical for nine years. It was more like a dull stress than an acute, lively ‘frazzled’. A dull stress, like a magnet, attracted more dulling, and wine country certainly offered the most exciting kind of dulling that existed next to heroin, not that Jim would know about that.

Jim and Sam pulled off highway 101 onto what might have been highway 2 until the mountains pulled them away from civilization and into God’s country. God must have loved grapes because there were so many things people were doing with them around these parts. Tasting wine and putting name to flavor was no bullshit. That was why alcohol had barely clung to staying legal, Jim thought as he pulled off what he still wasn’t sure was highway 2. If crack cocaine could have been connoisseured it might have stood a chance. The legalization of marijuana, for example, was imminent in Jim’s mind because it had learned from wine country. Naming and differentiation was the key.

Jim snapped back to reality as he realized he was being called to open his wallet for the pourer. The room he and Sam had found themselves in was as quaint as Santa’s workshop. It was a veritable toy factory of fermented grapes. Myriad bottles, all as infinitely different as they were infinitely the same lined the walls. The reserve room in the cuvee cave was like being inside Mrs. Claus’ vagina, Jim thought, stifling a smile as he looked the pourer straight in the eye with the air of seriousness he might have applied to a Vegas card dealer.

The pourer went down the list, starting with the whites. Jim and Sam weren’t particularly fond of white wine, but whites were a great way to put their livers in the mood for the reds. Jim remembered the first time he went wine tasting. It was for a friend’s birthday back when he was in college. His mother had paid for the excursion which, at first, seemed unbelievably lame. The first paltry pour seemed like an extravagant insult. Jim was a 21 year old Natural Ice drinking champion of The Keg. He was afraid it would be a long day. It was. The most pleasant, long day of his life. He would come back, he thought. One day.

Being a 35 year old adult was ‘one day’ to Jim. If there was a thing all those years in the cubicle had trained Jim in, it was patience. Just being in Mrs. Claus’ plaid vagina (haha) was assurance enough that Jim was in for good times. He no longer needed the doctor to comfort, caution, or encourage him in this place.

What Jim learned on this trip was knowledge that would soon change his life forever. The pourer, a short middle aged New Yorker, revealed that the blueberry and cocoa flavors of the third wine they were tasting came from the soil. That, Jim and Sam could have guessed, but the New Yorker elaborated. The soil where the grapes were grown had blueberries and cocoa growing in it once, before the land had been sold to the vineyard.

“Grapes are sensitive fruit,” the pourer said, “they tend to take on the flavors of what’s been in the soil before them.”

The doctor’s eyes lit up. This was just the kind of logic his neuro-receptors got off on. Jim dug it too. It was the perfect time for a pleasant epiphany. The alcohol was kicking in, and they were both feeling especially warm inside.

“You mean, these flavors aren’t metaphors?”

The pourer laughed and shook her head as she would to a silly child. “No, dear!”

Jim was impressed. He felt briefly like the young, inexperienced college boy he once was. A thousand questions sprung to his mind. He suddenly wanted to know the histories of all the vineyards of all his favorite vintages. He flash-fantasized of what it might be like if he could afford a crop of land where he could take five to ten years to grow his favorite non-grape crops. He could condition the soil with all sorts of fruit and plant – heck, maybe even marijuana! – combinations to perfection before finally staking his prized grapes in the fertile earth…

Jim noticed the doctor was not looking well. He was grasping his throat. Sam looked as if he needed some treatment. Jim reached up to grasp his own. He tried to ask the pourer for help but no words came from his mouth.

The pourer cracked a wan smile. It was then that Jim realized why there were so many varietals around these parts, off what probably wasn’t highway 2 after all. The pourer had the decency to elaborate.

“There are only so many fruits. So many soils. So many variables. But nothing is as complex and unique as the people who drink them. You should rejoice! Your lives will have been given for the most noble of purposes.”

That evening the pourer put Jim and Sam's bodies through a wood chipper. The next day, their remains were scattered evenly across a fresh plot of soil, that had once had lilac bushes and vanilla growing there.

Jim did not know he would eventually make many a dull yet exciting Cabernet that would sell for $44 a bottle. Nor did the doctor realize that he would make a fine Syrah, with contradictory flavors that were both vibrant and bitter at $38 a bottle. But it was the pourer who knew that the best wines were like best friends. Complex , and brimming with personality.