Kalin Cellars Chardonnay 1995 W Cuvee

There is something so Japanese about Caviste in Winston-Salem.  Here is this one man in this little store doing this one thing so enormously well.  As I wandered around his store grinning, recognizing so many beloved wines, I saw this strange bird hanging from the wall, her 1995 proudly displayed as well as gram or more of sediment.  He told me the story, the distributor, laughed with me at the strangeness of the fact of this wine, and told me to wait until fall to drink it.  Naturally I drank it that day.

Golden as in light shining in a golden box, thick, yellow, saturated, dirty gold.  Not gleaming or pristine, but glowing from within, thickly, slowly.  You could not read by this light but you could find your beloved in a crowd of bodies, by their shape, by their motion.  The nose is, on the one hand, butter, but so is butter, and if butter smelled like this then it would be as precious as truffles.  Which reminds me that there are also truffles here, rubbery and bright, acrid, like new tires, very little stately porcini.  Outrageous acid, heartburn-inducing, like a 750 of daiquiris.  The palate is unctuous, oily, full, there are hazelnuts and almonds and fat.  Concentration, fat, gold, rubber, graham crackers sodden in a torrent of hot butter, the mind reels.  If this is wine, and River Road is wine, then what does the word wine mean anyway?  Overwhelms sausage and cauliflower alike, is a ballista where cheese is a thatched hut.  This wine needs cinnabon!

Cuvee Jules Chauvet Beaujolais Villages 2014

Sour cherries, of course, but they are in among the bubble-gum and acetone and ethyl-methyl  phenolics of sorghum-spirits, which heads right off towards flowers.  And not the good kind.  The "tea-rose, tea-gown", a mandarin fusty cinnabar cabinet filled with dried osmanthus.  The hand is old but not infirm, the artifice of cosmetics cannot totally hide the smell of drying blood, the bruises too dark, bruised wet flowers, fleshy and thick, the air just above them warmer and more humid than the air two inches further away.  The musk of fresh cranberries, the pungent sour of sumac berries.  She has treated her papery skin with witchhazel.  Its brambly pricks whisper across your lips as you kiss the bruises and abrasions, upholstering the inside of your skull with luxury's own velvet.  You wait at a threshold you dare not cross but are desperate to be beyond, where her shape is seen, and the smells and tastes are fast and thick and there are no more philtres and masks and buttresses.  This is the preparatory peignoir, imagined, alone, humming to herself, puttering through her cremes and powders and arcane tools.  The beauty-things all create an effect, their removal exaggerates their absence.  It is here at her vanity, half-painted that she is herself.  When Donne grew up, did he know better?   Those little red earrings, a gift from whoever, do they smell of sandalwood, or am I imagining it?  The drawer full of flowers, aren't some of them a little rotten?  Jules Chauvet is a lecherous Jacob Marley of melancholic boudoirs, shaking silent chains at the careful application of eyepencils.

Formigar colterenzia Chardonnay 2007

Oh feast!  Oh unexpected plenty!  Where time has left the graphic design and the winestyle zeitgeist behind, still sentiment can extract dews distilled in buttered pears and outrageous baked goods.  A spine, too, persists and after I sip, I sigh, and my son says, "Daddy, I'd like more swordfish, please".  What is this life?

Palmina Malvasia Bianca 2012

What is this?  I'll give you a dollar if you can tell he what this is.  What is that fruit, or vegetable?  (20 mins pass). PUMPKIN you toadstools!   Pumpkin, persimmon, sweet potato, the chemical that orange things have in common, then tannins?  Also mangosteen, wtf?  Who is this wine for if not for me!