Here I am, late at night, with my bare feet up on the hearth, warmed by the dying embers of the fire, lit from within by a bottle of 2007 Grenache from a California producer called Dobra Zemlya. A friend from Alaska, an Orthodox priest friend who lives near the vintner and who introduced me to Dobra Zemlya's wines on a back porch in Eagle River this summer, was kind enough to ship me a couple of bottles today. I am not exaggerating when I tell you this is why life is so good. This is my terroir: in my cottage, feet on the hearth, drinking good wine and reading a good book ("Liquid Memory: Why Wine Matters" by Jonathan Nossiter, more on which in a moment).
This wine makes me so happy and nostalgic. It takes me back to this summer, sitting on Eric's back deck, when I was first introduced to the stuff. And later, in the living room of the St. James House, late at night, drinking and talking. It's pleasing to me that i can't separate the experience of this wine from that place and those people. Anyway, the Dobra Zemlja Grenache is so lithe, but also masculine and aggressive; it makes me think of a shortstop bobbing on his calves, waiting for the crack of the bat. Drinking a wine as forward as this makes you realize how most of the wines you drink, even the good ones, are so settled. Julie doesn't care for it; she thought it was too forward. But I adore it. Yes, the wine is young, and somewhat raw and alcoholic. But the fruit is so ruby-like and bright, with a long, herbal finish, and the acid is just about perfect. I can't imagine drinking this wine with anything; it's so dramatic and lively you only want to think about it. This is a tense, muscular, lean wine, brusque but captivating. Its tannins are restrained, allowing the fruit to express itself delightfully. Two years from now, this wine is going to be stellar. Tonight, it's made me glow like the embers in my line of sight, and I'm thinking that I need to contact the winery and order a case of their best. As I recall, everything Father Stephen poured from Dobra Zemlja was deeply pleasing. Please, order some of this wine. It's special. This is a wine that demands your attention, and rewards it.
Can I just tell you that Jonathan Nossiter is a bullsh*t artist, and that I love his book? Check this out, in his discussion of the wines of Burgundy:
In their intangibility and their deceptive resilience, they're closer to the experience of poetry, particularly as practiced by the ancient Greeks and, say, the classical Chinese or, not coincidentally, by the modernist poets since the turn of the twentieth century who've sought inspiration in the staccato lyricism of the Greeks and in the mellifluous indeciperability of the Chinese.
Don't you want to slug him? But In the very next paragraph, he confesses to being guilty of the "greatest pretensions." Which he plainly is. But how invigorating it is to read someone who is outrageously opinionated and sure of himself! I love this guy. I love his definition of taste:
For that matter, what is taste? It could be described as the expression of a preference between, say, A and B. But what distinguishes taste from mere opinion is that such a preference emerges from a sensory, emotional reaction with the subsequent ability to intellectually decipher that reaction for the self (and, if really necessary, for others). But ultimately, the defining characteristic of taste is the coherent relation of that preference to one's own conduct, to an ethical relation to oneself and to the world.
Read that a couple of times, and contemplate what it means to relate one's aesthetic preference to one's own conduct. i'll tell you what it means. It has something to do with what happened when Julie and I, through the generosity of friends, had dinner at Aurora, one of Dallas's best restaurants. Julie said at one point in the extravagantly delicious dinner, "This food makes me want to be good." I wrote a column about it.
Early in the book, Nossiter writes about the concept of terroir, which is hard to translate (this is not a bad place to start), but which broadly connotes a distinct sense of place. Strictly speaking, when one talks of terroir related to wine, one speaks of how a particular wine expresses the sense and spirit of the place where it's cultivated -- the physical qualities of the soil, and so forth. But Nossiter has an expansive view of terroir, which he calls "an evolving expression of culture," of particularity. He writes that maintaining a true sense of terroir is vital, because it preserves memory against homogeneity. To lose a sense of terroir is risky, he writes...:
Because it risks wiping out historical memory, which is our only safeguard agains the devastating lies of marketing and the cynical exploitation of global markets, culture and politics.
Matthew, my oldest son, photographed me tonight as I was reading and drinking wine by the fire. I'm wondering now, as I hear him rustling around in his bedroom with his Legos, trying to avoid going to sleep, what I would have him understand is his father's personal terroir. My terroir is the hearth and the black iron pot. It's Randy Newman's melancholic piano, Bach's solo cello suites, Diana Krall's love ballads, old Van Morrison, Billie Holiday's blues, REM's "Nightswimming." It's pot roast and brussels sprouts with bacon, sausage and apples and Irish oatmeal. It's where hobbits live. It's autumn, and crisp air with a hint of wood smoke, and tulips in the springtime, and mustard greens and bourbon and the South, especially the way south Louisiana smells on a wet fall morning. We do not speak ill of the French on my terroir, but hope to learn from them. It's laughter and conversation, and the metallic taste of raw oysters washed down with crisp white wine. My terroir smells like church incense, and it has about it an air of seriousness of purpose, but also generosity of spirit. We love the saints in my terroir, and I stand ready to hear your crazy-ass woo-woo story, as long as it's a good one. On my terroir, I lay a generous table, where the only guests banned are those without generosity of spirit, and a sense of humor. There are books everywhere in my terroir, and the aromatic smell of decaying binding is cherished, especially when enriched with the stout aroma of strong coffee. We love Champagne there -- we really do, especially Veuve Clicquot -- and we wish we lived in a perpetual New Orleans of the mind. Children and old Southern ladies who say "I declare" live in my terroir, and so does Flannery O'Connor, and the dusting of nutmeg on my mint juleps, which I learned from reading Walker Percy. If you walk on my terroir, you have to have stepped lightly through Spanish Town in Baton Rouge, having brushed your cheek with an elephant ear in a stranger's garden, and raised a beer with the beloved Barbecue Lesbians, who smelled, it must be said, of lighter fluid, and are all the more dear for it.
We love going places in my terroir, because there are new friends and new tastes there -- but our favorite journey is always Home.
And I've only begun to tell you about my terroir. I cannot imagine a wine that captures all these tastes, but I think I had a bourbony, bittery Manhattan at the late, lamented Colonel's Club under the Perkins Road Overpass in Baton Rouge that came pretty close.
Tell me about your terroir. I really do want to know.
UPDATE: Mike Steinberger, Slate's wine writer, thinks Nossiter is a pompous gasbag. I think Steinberger is almost certainly correct. Maybe that's why I am enjoying this book. Weird.
Oh, and yes, that's me in my pajamas. I don't go out in public looking like that. At least not always.
UPDATE: If you deduced from this post that I am something of a pompous gasbag, I would congratulate you on your discernment.
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