Tell Me

A story...
Please.

I need inspiration 
Adventure
Heart Racing
Hope
Fear
Joy
Anger
Passion

Vacation
Favorite Birthday Gifts
The Loss of a Beloved Pet
I Need...
You 
To Touch Me
Please.....

Quit Pushing

 
"I'd like to get in to see you with my Roses before you pick your set for the year" More than one, in fact more like 7 of my sales reps and importers looking to make an appointment with me to taste the brand spanking new 2013 roses...in February. What the hell people?!

Seems each year the push to get in and taste me on Roses starts earlier. At one time we were the only real game in town when it came to French Roses, only a tiny smattering of restaurants and a couple other retailers bringing in a.....a, Rose here and there compared to our huge wall of hundreds of cases, but now? Everyone has caught on and the mad rush to import dry Roses has been rather insane to watch. Distributors finally catching on to what my boss was saying 18 years ago, that Rose is the perfect summer wine, weighty enough for charred foods retrieved from smoldering backyard grills, the crisp produce and layered salads we tend to eat when everything else seems just too heavy...and it's just fun as hell to fill a glass with icy cold, pale pink wine and drink it under the pounding sun, and what the in-the-know importers were doing all along. The phone and my email box get blasted each year as the Wine Country Rose buyer and this year, sooner than ever before.

Each year my experience gets taxed a bit more while being seated across the table from a sweaty bottle of pink wine, often with the vintage changed via magic marker. I smell these samples, swirl and try and shake off the baby fat, try and imagine where this wine is going to be, you know, when it's ready to be consumed, and do my best to make notes on the stuff underneath the gangly bits that tend to be the most aggressive when wines are sampled weeks or months before they are going to be bottled. I know there are critics out there that write notes on wines still in barrel and as someone that has done this for 17 years I cannot begin to image just which dark crevice of their asses they think this information is good for or who it's going to benefit....

"Dude, what they hell?!" my frustrated garble after swishing the thirtieth backward 2013 Rose around my palate, feeling the daggers of pissed-off-and-not-ready digging deeply on my tongue. I pushed the glass away from me and looked demanding into the big, sympathetic brown eyes of one of my beloved French importers. "I know, I know Sam-mon-ta, but what am I supposed to do?" his thick accent full of as much annoyance as my stinging palate. He went on to tell me that the retailers and restaurant folks here in California were demanding that they get sampled on the new vintage Roses by February and early March, at the latest, so they could make their buying decisions for the year. "But, but these wines aren't ready" my scrunchie faced protest. He nodded and shook his head, I could feel his confusion and trepidation as he said, "Yes, but to have my wines considered I have to show them now. I'm sorry and I know you guys get it but...well think of all the people here that buy strawberries in November, not everyone does. They don't taste right, or even good but they are here and that's appears to be what matters." Argh!

Hard enough to evaluate wines that aren't even bottled yet. Even harder to do so when they are being rushed to market...lets toss in a vintage that had record rainfall, grapes picked a month later in many regions, (ahem, like Provence) and saw production numbers down 30% and more, well lets just say my notes are a bit like pin the tail on the donkey. Why the hell are we once again forcing wine to do what it isn't ready or able to do? Just to have your Roses lined up that are not going to taste a fucking thing like the wines you took notes on, months before?! Helpful that. How the hell does this make sense and what is it doing to our credibility...or is that something we, as wine professionals, have just tossed in the air and said "Fuck it." about? I have wines lined up, notes nervously taken, and a shitton of Rose tasting appointments still left to go. You want to know what to think about the 2013 vintage Roses? Well here, there's this..

 

   

The wines while young do show plenty of promise. All the pieces are there and given just a smidgen of time I know they will come together...just wish we weren't rushing them! Let them settle and kick off their awkward teenage gangle. Can't help but think we'd cultivate a lot more, long lasting Rose fans if we let the wines finish before we shake them from their evolutionary slumber and dump them on the public while they are still stumbling around on baby legs trying to settle into their own flesh...

Ready for ready Rose...
Your palate fatigued Wine Slinger
 

One Last Kiss

I had been thinking of you all day, thinking about the fact that last night was to be the last night I would have to see you, touch you, smell you….it was been a long day but I hated to watch the sky turn that cold shade of blue that let me know that the day was almost over and night was coming, our last night was coming. While I knew the day would have to come I had been pushing the thought out of my mind, sailing through my days with blinders on but always with a tick-tock buried deep in the back of my cluttered head, flinching the once or twice I even let myself drift to the thought of being without you….

My drive home was a schizophrenic, I let myself remember you, think of how I longed for you, the way you touched my lips in just a way that would make me suck the air deep into my chest…not wanting to exhale, not wanting that one second of sheer pleasure escape my body. As if holding you there would make the moment last forever, or as long as I could have it. The way my fingers would run along the length of your frame and I remember, even now how even though you made me feel warm there was coolness to you, like even my fingers knew that you would not, could not be mine for long. 

My mind then shifted to the many times that even though I loved you, I would let my desire wander, look to others to please me and how each time we were reunited you reminded me that although others may be “fun” there was something serious happening here…. We were never perfect together but somehow it just fit, I understood your feral nature and you filled my heart with comfort and my body with delectation. 

But last night, we had to let it all become a memory, a memory that makes me smile, ache and wish that I could see you one last time…..knowing it will never be will only remind me of how special you were, worth remembering worth longing for, worth missing…..I see myself years from now rubbing my fingers across my lips, picturing you, remembering the way that you move and wishing I could taste you one last time. I will miss you more than could ever possibly fathom. 

As I pulled you out
Ran my fingers along the length of you
Felt the insides of my mouth begin to water with want 
Could hear my own breath and heartbeat as the soundtrack
Of our last night

The next You
The newest You
The "best" You
Will never taste or feel as sweet
Never be better than you were last night...
Only different


Wine not unlike people has personality, each vintage a little different…not better or worse, just different and the more we drink them the more you can decipher the subtle touch that each vintage lends to what is in the glass. Love each vintage for what it is and look forward to the next like you would a first kiss from a new love.