Vina Tondonia 2004

Unctuous, full-throated Alto butterscotch song, with unaccented purity in the high notes and a charming, mid-century modern solidity in shades of thai tea or caramel.  But not sweet!  The jerez trick of taking only the sugar out and then melting down the werther's original, the chewy toffee, the nougat, the montelimar.  Good with ramen but better with jamon, this is the thing I thought i had invented when I was drinking over the top CA chard with jamon iberico, oak with oak, fat with butter, but I was imagining that the Spanish had left some pleasure undiscovered and that is a ridiculous thing to think.  Here it is, for drinking with the damned jamon of the damned acorns and Catalan women are all degrees of Penelope Cruz and olives and lemons and tiny fish, and culture and damn it Spain, freckled Galicians and the sauce Mahon-ese, and Baleares and snails and garlic and blood sausage and octopus and rioja and bulls and damnit Spain!  Damn it. 

Gramercy Cellars 2011 Southern Blend Lower East

The best thing about my job is that I am able to have my wife stay at home with our son and to spend time with them often. 

The second best thing is that people bring me wine.  Every week, people show up with wine, always for me to taste, and sometimes for me to take home.  This is a benefit I could never write into a contract, and even if I was making a million more dollars, I wouldn't be drinking all this wine unless I found some kid at Total Wine and paid him to buy me wine, but good lord that would be patrician as all get out.

So a nice man brought me some really good wine today, and I was late to our meeting and he still left it for me with a nice message.  This made me smile, at least until I got home.  Then I got home.  

Shit oh dear!

This wine should be teaching kissing lessons.  The structure is imaginary, futuristic; like wonder-woman's airplane loaded with cigar boxes full of oozy overripe cherries.  Except that instead of flying it is coalescing as tenderly as blushing cheeks by candlelight in the 50's.  America!  The imaginary perfection of the poodle-skirted buttocks, the angora-ed breasts, the sweatless, smooth and un-bumpy dream womanikin that the internet age has disabused teen boys of but that still hovers wispy and streaming above floodlit bleachers in autumn and hides in the bustling only-on-christmas crowd humming out of the church, a half-remembered name, blue eyes, the nose a little crooked, went to the other school, then college out-of-state.  She is here, too, an un-looked for and (as in not really there) imaginary purity, an implied wholeness that the mind forgives the palate for imagining because wouldn't it be nice.

But the finish is the thing.  I always want thunder and then echoes and aftershocks, I want the finish to never end, to roll out like a wave of molten lead that burns and smokes while it cools.  This wine does not do that.  This wine is an object lesson in aperture, separation, and tease.  The fingertips touch, brush as if by accident, the feeling overwhelms, the body is covered with tenderness, bathed in touch.  The lips touch, shy, desperate, still polite, and the breath catches.  The synaptic distance is the great intimacy, the hedonic contact a thing forgone, the real event having happened, an inevitability that does not thrill, but satiates.  Here is a wine saying, as quiet as you please, "you're welcome" and then disappearing into a half-remembered sunrise without a trace of fear or obligation.  The skull, swaddled in the velvet of pleasure, reclines to the pillow and the eyes roll back, lidded and slow.  The body knows before the heart that something real has happened, the mind demands interpretation, processing, but the body says, "later, in a little while, rest my love, the world spins, water drips from leaves, someone kissed you; sleep."