Behind the Bottle

My two passions in life, writing and wine, sometimes seem inevitable. I was raised in the Santa Cruz Mountains around books and literature; my father is a well-regarded poet, and his writing studio, which sits on a hill above our home, is a short stroll from one of the finest wineries in the Santa Cruz area. 

For the last two years I’ve worked on an MFA in poetry at North Carolina State University during the academic year, and spent the summers working for the vintner across the road, labeling and boxing new bottles of wine, pouring for customers in the tasting room, and helping with other chores when he was away. For a week last summer I walked through his vineyard every morning while he was out of town. At dawn, after feeding his chickens, I led his dogs between rows of green vines, leaves the size of my palm dripping with dew as the sun forced the fog to recede to the edge of the redwoods bordering the property. On one occasion, men with El Salvadorian accents were making their way along the rows—fixing posts, checking the drip system.  It was then that I realized the many invisible hands and hearts that go into the wine that I was pouring in the tasting room.  It was then that I realized I want to combine my two passions.

In one of his odes, Pablo Neruda shouts out to wine:

more than the wine of life;
you are
the community of man,
translucency,
chorus of discipline,
abundance of flowers.

Neruda knew the terroir of the human heart. He knew good writing, like good wine, must be balanced, well constructed, surprising but not overwhelming. And the best writing, like the best wine, appears so natural it seems to originate not from a person, but straight from the earth. Winemaking, unlike writing, is a process that involves many people, many of them invisible, unrecognized.  Neruda understood the labor, cooperation, reliance on nature, commitment, and luck necessary to make fine wine, and he seemed to insist that wine is more than an integral aspect of human life: it is a metaphor for everything that holds a society together. In order to better understand our own lives, let us understand our wine. Each sip of wine is a reminder of the complexities that tie things together, of the subtle connections that make life enjoyable.