I first connected with wine in the early ‘90s living in the Bay Area.
It wasn’t a bottle or particular dinner that was the big aha for me.
It was the human touch that drew me in, bonding with artisanal winemakers and their families who brimmed over with their love of vines and the lore of making wine.
I fell hard for the storied iconoclasts in the early days of Napa.
It was story upon story, people, land, bottle and taste—an easy going banter, layered with beliefs and craft, personal philosophies and science, passions and humility all in one.
Twenty-five years later, I still have a visceral sense of driving down a funky dirt road in the hills north of Napa to hang at the kitchen table with Art & Bunny Finklestein from Judd’s Hill. Talking art and gravity feed systems, vines and the weather, drinking wine and eating cheese mid morning on an Autumn Sunday.
Sitting on lawn chairs outside the barn with my friend Kelly Smitten along with Todd Anderson of Conn Anderson Valley tasting his 4th vintage, chatting and bowled over by the litany of natural science he was sharing, mouthing words and learning an entirely new language.
Or knocking on the trailer door on the way back to the city to buy wine from Cathy Corison before her winery was complete.
It was a step into something completely new yet reminiscent and familiar. Something that felt right at first blush.
I’d never heard of natural wine, knew little about the craft but there was a confluence of life experiences that came together.
There was no wine culture in my family upbringing.
Not a rural bone in generations coming from shtetls in Europe to live in LES and Patterson NJ, working in the Garment District on my mother’s side, the silk mills on my fathers.
I was a city boy, 70s hippy who had spent a few years in the back-to-the-land thing in British Columbia. Gardens, root cellars and bee keeping steeped in a youthful zealousness for all things counter culture and the Farmer’s Almanac.
From street smart kid to drop out to tooling around Napa as a tech exec rediscovering a new sense of an earlier self.
Too odd but true.
I want to say there was a gravity that pulled me, but this is more subtle, more happenstance as Andre Breton would express it.
I woke up this morning intending to write a long neglected interview with Scott Frank at Bow & Arrow.
But sitting here at 4.30am, samthecat on my lap, looking at a bottle of Gonin Altesse on the table from last night, it was my own story that wafted over my thoughts. Like a Proustian nudge.
I kept thinking back to those days in the 90s and the 70s before them, realizing the binds that tie and the core beliefs that define me today.
No one loves a great bottle of natural wine more than myself.
I’ll travel to the outskirts of Marsala, Sicily to drink skin-fermented Grillo with freshly caught sea urchins from the hands of a winemaker to obscure and small to be imported to the states.
This is not about wine. Not about wine blogging. Not about new wine economies spurred on by the Etsy effect.
It’s about why something that has nothing to do with my work or life, how this connection and community, spur things more important than the wine itself.
Almost a palimpsest of something uncanny behind the realities of what we are tasting.
When we look at ourselves honestly we see a gaggle of oft disconnected things and passions, seemingly random.
If fortunate, we get to a moment of clarity that drive health issues to become companies we start to change how people eat to stay healthy. That drive the benefits of a great education to spending your time being a big brother and role model to lower income kids.
I’m looking at these pieces of myself hard and realizing the mess of influences have a theme and pattern that gets clearer as my memories reiterate themselves.
To my world and networks, I’m the wine guy. That marketer and businessperson who’s a geek and the one to hand the wine list to.
But it’s more than that, and that’s what bears thought.
I can weave a story about a bottle and winemaker with some skill. Hundreds of posts later are a case in point.
But the why of why I focus on the small and the obscure as the taste worth experiencing and the story worth telling is where the crux of this lies.
Why I’ve championed natural as a rewriting of the scale where interesting meets delicious in a new definition of perfection. Why I believe there is an ethos of taste that can change the world.
Why organic is truly an important idea beyond the certification? Why individuality in winemaking is worth exposing when almost no one can find the wines and artisans I lionize?
This is worthy of a great pause.
And pause is all I have this morning.
I realize that this post is a bit like a Neil Young song, all rhythm and poetry at the start then fizzling off into an emotive silence.
But this indulgent idea of why I—and many others in my community—grasp onto wine with such passion is an idea well worth surfacing.
It is a lens that we need to turn on ourselves.
Why we love what we do with such passion is a larger, more personal and more interesting idea than the craft of winemaking itself or the uncanny abilities of a professional taster.
It’s about ourselves and why this community–not others–is the icon we wave as what inspires us.
Share if you’d like from your own experience.
For myself, this meme is one I’m going to stick with.
As honestly–that line between a winemaker’s story and our drive to share it–is truly the story worth sharing.
