(For earlier excerpts, go to Post Coitum (2/2/13) and Cotton (1/13/13).
An hour and twenty minutes later after the tasting began, Clyde Craven-Jones
leans back in his wheeled throne and sighs. Nine bottles down, and not a clear
winner. He thinks he knows who made half of them, and can come close to
guessing the rest. Two hover in the mid- to-upper teens of his twenty-point
ranking system, which will make their investors moderately happy, but no
ecstasy in this tasting. If the mystery wine’s among them, then it’s merely
good.
The brown wrapping paper disguised
the last bottle, emblazoned with the number 10, the poured wine in the Riedel
deeply hued. He pulls the glass to him, picks it up by the stem and quickly,
deftly twists his wrist, driving the wine high up the sides. Its concentrated
fragrance reaches him even from that distance. He dips his nose directly into
the invisible pool of inspiration and inhales. He’s impressed by the wine’s
power, and annoyed: surely this is not the mystery bottle, which means he
failed to detect the interloper among the previous nine. He scribbles “...
barely ripe black fruit... toasty... a lean, shimmering nimbus of cassis.”
He takes a mouthful and holds it
for a moment, lips parted, drawing air in over the wine, then closes his mouth
and, without swallowing, exhales through the nose, pushing the sacred “ether of
harvest and extracted oak,” as he often puts it in his lectures, back out
through his nostrils, with a surprising result. He’ll describe it as
“reverberating cabernet bells.” St.
Paul’s? Too grandiose. A chapel? Too parochial. This wine tolls on the nose with all the
power and precision of Christopher Wren’s gem, the Church of Mary Le Bow...
If you can fully appreciate that complex melody you’re not Cockney, you’re
enchanted!
He swallows, the cascading flavors
identifiable, married in an onslaught of what he thinks of as the essence of Bordeaux, not California
– elegant, balanced, with a long trail on the palate that dwindles into the soothing convergence of light and shadow
in a distant clearing... Yes, that will do nicely. The wine might well be
one of Bordeaux’s
best, from a first-growth estate, introduced as a joke. Detectable tannins, but
overall so silky as to be forgiven. Less heat around the gums, meaning
relatively low alcohol.
It could represent the glory of France, but the initial, decisive burst of fruit
and lingering ripeness has the power of California.
Has someone finally managed to make a wine in the valley with the contradictory
merits of France and America, or is
this a con? If so, it’s near the top of the chart and worth a great deal of
money.
He takes a fistful of popcorn and
crams it into his mouth, snowing all over his sweats. Now for the sobering
second swallow, the true test. He tears the wrapper off the bottle and is
confronted by a column of dark liquid in generic glass; that he has no idea
whose this wine is or where it came from is humiliating. A wine critic without
self-confidence is - how did he put it at the Friends of Wine lecture in San Francisco the week
before? - in the evening of his being.
In the frenzy of stripping No. 10
he has upset No. 6, spilling inky cabernet over the white table cloth. He
attempts to mop it up with the wrapping paper, without success. More tearing to
expose the other bottles, an array of family and fanciful names - Eagle Ridge,
Block 69, Trifecta, Copernicus. He knows them all and he knows their makers;
No. 10 is indeed the interloper.
CJ confronts the wreckage of his
tasting, takes another swallow: Ah, is there anything better than a glass of
fine red wine of an afternoon? Well, of a morning, actually. He can feel the
alcohol now, not just No. 10’s but the collective onslaught of the wines he has
absorbed despite spitting, a hazard of his profession.
He peruses his notes. Numbers 2 and
5 - Block 69, and Trifecta - are clearly the stand-outs, after No. 10. What
comes next is tricky. He stands and pads to the hallway door, opens it a crack,
softly whistles. Then, “Missy.”
A scrabble of claws on heartwood
Doug fir, a blur of brindle hair ejecting from the bedroom, smiling if a
mastiff can be said to smile, her soft brown eyes full of anticipation. He
reaches down and digs his fingertips into her wiry coat, but the dog brushes
past him.
CJ eases the door shut and returns
to the disarray of the tasting. Bracing himself with one hand, he slowly
kneels, groaning, and places the two winners on the floor while Missy watches,
a timeless scene: dog, master, quarry, older than history.
“Go!”
Missy creeps forward and
tentatively smells each glass in turn. She settles on Trifecta.
“Back!”
She obeys, still eying the glasses
as if they might take flight, and waits while he crawls forward, carefully
blocking her view. He replaces Block 69 with No. 10. If Missy picks the mystery
wine, this will compliment his olfactory abilities since she’s infallible, and
very close to his own palate.
He crawls out of the way, sweeping
aside wine-soaked wrapping paper and dropped pencils. Spilled wine drips
through the crack between the leaves in the table; popcorn litters the carpet.
“Go!”
Used to the drill, Missy sniffs at
Trifecta, then at the interloper, hesitates, and stays with the nameless wine.
“Ah,” says CJ proudly, since it’s his choice, too. He has to remind himself -
down on all fours himself - that this colleague is, after all, just an animal.
Next: Glass Act
Next: Glass Act
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