Non-Neurotic Red

A hit, a palpable hit. Two exceptional grapes for one extraordinary wine! A wide sweep of sky trimmed to fit inside a manicured aperture of an open. Nose to tongue and back, the rows of daffodils and queen ann's lace lay open the long low paths and channels. The sun is well ordered on their stones. Squares of wildgrowth grows unwild. Crumpled up newspaper blows through on a wind from over the bay. The garden is walled and covered in ivy, but the wind, paper, dampness blow right on through. Trash in and on the silty gale. The two grapes mix without blending, kindling parallel developments and inconstancy. Nor bicker nor support nor insist nor yield.

Through the kimber the pallid day passes in mirthiness and laze. Triumph is ad hoc and that's the way, uh-huh, I like it. Uh-huh, uh-huh. The world here is built very slowly, brick by perfect brick. Brick by brick. Brick by brick.

One brick, two brick.
One brick, two brick

The kimber is the taming of nature, the ordering of mutation. The care of laying it out one brick at a time and measuring each one just in case, and checking the mortar, and using a level, and using union workers, and using a sextant, and using genuine secondary fermentation, and wrapping each cheese in burlap and laying her in with her sisters to age in the cave, and crystallized pineapple and wild sugarcane and long yellow light in the hollow of the shore and a little bit of noise and things which are well-tempered as in the following exchange"

"I say, that Mr. Bach's clavier is certainly well tempered."
"Quiet, you!"

The kamber is the world of wind and ghosts. Newspages blow on that ocean wind with impossible black outline. It swirls and spirals and there is a cloud with a big puffed-out-cheek face.
To measure is to not measure. Yellow is blue. A stillness of motion that does not quiver. At the kamber dewpoint a ringed sphere of ochre and iridescent bluered grasp at each other's mistiness. Particles all over the place and no two a match. At least growths of weeds help find the corner pieces.

Knots tie themselves together out of air, out of smoke, out of nettles, out of cigar box, out of paint, out of cold front, out of coconuts and raisins, but not grapes, and figs, but not fresh figs, and dates, but not fresh dates, and olives, but not raw olives with salted almonds and raisins that twist itself and ties tight around an empty collar, as in the following exchange:

"I say, that Mr. Bullshit's bullshit is certainly fresh."
"This is the land of wind and ghosts."

The last day of one is the other. It can be overwhelming, even ambivalized. Two objects can't take up the same etc. etc. etc. The last day of spring is summer. The last day of one is the other. The last day of failure is success. The last day of life is death. The last day of earth is earth. The last day of kamber is kimber. The last day of kimber is kamber. The last day of one is the other. etc. etc. etc.

The multi-finish benefits from sympathetic vibration and amplitude shift. The kimber fades first in an Euler's ring of sound and physic. It gets quieter and faster until it is silent and infinite. The kamber is nude descending a staircase, isn't impressed with small town manners or cooking, deepens itself out and up. Always out and up. A quiet but penetrating note, as from a bell or a gong or a really special bell. The finish rings impossibly true with the sound of gold.

Varietals: Kimber, Kamber
Food Pairing: Zen

Prospect Purple Rose

A last quarter of a ravished pint of ben & jerry's, chewed beyond flavor, rennet and milky, put back in the freezer for tomorrow or a few hours from now. Too light! Too light, the mocking carton burns with once and twice. Things unfinished snarl through the deep mulberry bushes lining the path. Things unstarted follow along and nip at the heels. Dark vines curl down from the canopy and drop their ripe wet plums on the drumhead of tangentialism. A taste like a disembodied wave pushed through the straw of a scallion. The beer you never wanted, the easy path. A lithe and lovely porridge-burn turns up the static all around, crowds out a place to attack from, crowds out the lemonade spring, crowds out the real opportunity of the night, crowds out the fevered dream of a madman, crowds out arsenic and copper fillings, crowds out mulchy rotting tree trunks, crowds out dusty water bottle, crowds out the resin hit you never wanted, crowds out the colors besides purple, crowds out feeling good enough, crowds out music, crowds out mulch, crowds out misty morning mushrooms.

The static you never wanted opens the door for the guests you never wanted bring in the beer you never wanted lays down the static you never wanted.

The wine always swirls clockwise, the glass rotates counter. That's the way we get by, way we get by, the way we get by. The long silence you never wanted, always wanted, never wanted. The firey vines hanging down curling up hanging down over the path. The perfect fall day you never wanted lays on the static and the broadcast never gets through. The piquant marble cake broadcast never gets through. The first honest words never get through. The purity of spirit never gets through. The moroccan cinnamons never get through, the bitter almond never gets through, the bright words of metaphor never get through, the proud longings never get through, the discouragement never gets through, the decompression never gets through, the delivery never gets delivered.

The long silence you always wanted lets everything through, the dangled bunch of bait flowers, the secret of the vanilla podules, the million years of settling in, the million years of growth, the million years of symbiotic growth, the million kinds of potency, the million men of yeast, the millions of millions.

The stasis you never wanted is static. The present you never wanted crowds out the future. There is only the deadly long finish crowding out the static even, crowding out the beginning, reprising the earliest themes, the first motes, the most helpless.

Varietals: Command, water rights, greenbacks
Food Pairing: Turn the spit on that pig, kick the drum and let me down. Put my clarinet beneath your bed til I get back in town.

Last Minute Merlot

Grapey, grainy, grippy, grippy, granola. Hooray for the mulberry leaves! Hooray for the easy drinkability! Hooray for you! Hooray for me! Hooray for the long days of summer!
Buggy, hot, humid, dirty, rough, regretful. Give it up for laziness, for artichoke blossoms, for someone else's troubles. Give it up for a 50th birthday party. Give it up for one with one hundred zeroes. Give it up for russian dolls, fruit punch, thick hot chocolate with spicy hot pepper mixed. Give it up for gimmicks. Give it up for twist endings. Give it up for a special frame.
Pairs well with seven jewish children, doncha know? Hot dish with marshmallow on top? What the hell. Don't supply your oxygen too readily to the palate without proper ventilation first, without proper Y chromosomes showing you the way from teh sky to the ground and a gentle marzipan landing. It's like candyland in here, or the lockers of the gay men's health crisis. The latino health crisis, the gods of files, the giant olive frog, the grilled onion fritters, the gammy orthopedic filling, the green ornamental frump, the gladly owned family, the gimped out fucktoy, the garrish ocean fires. The small grey can drinks from the lazy dog and you drink from the lazy, late harvest, overweaned, underappreciated, outer ringed, keg of glory. All in all it's just another brick in the wall.
Winters in spain, some dogs barking at your hells, some people have all the luck and sometimes there's nothing left to do put some more oak in, leave it for a few generations, hope mankind survives, hope our tongues don't evolve into moderate psychopaths.
A grand old flag, a high flying flag. A glowing purple amulet buried in the mud. Supersmart mice from experiments get some help from a passing crow who don't know nothing but love, red currant juice, celery salt, fresh varnish, hopeful puppydog eyes, and cream.
Such a finish! What a finish. Did you see the finish? Oh I'm having a heart attack for this finish, so smooth and silky and silty and satinate. What a finish! Brown and red flecks in a perfect receding iris through the glass of glasses through the glass of the window of the train as it pulls away into more receptive climes. Not a hint of sorrow. Not a bit of loss, except for the long list of big ones. Sweet and happy.

Varietal: Low bridge, everybody down
Food Pairing: Matzah brie with or without salmon

Zeitgeist Childhood Merlot

A classic example. Part www.nick.com/kca, part nick.com/kca. Sunlit valleys of nick kca provide a perfect habitat for rich mulchy nick/kca. Spirals within spirals and light within light. A dirty kluge, a mousetrap of danish buttercream and ashley biden. Powerful notes of www.nick/kca and airport 1975. Villanova university dances trippingly 'cross the tongue, asserts itself to a climax of nickelodeon/kca.
The main flaw in all this is the stunted useless finish. A mite of midnight bayou and then a flabby cardboard nick.com kca. By the time the kids choice awards fades out there's hardly any slums of beverly hills to bring it to a satisfying close.
Still and all, a good bottle for the price. Try pairing it with bemidji state university or nickelodeon kca. Just like heaven, the tar brings out the ochre midnight bayou by nora roberts. Powerful villanova basketball clears out a path for polar storm and scottie reynolds to villanova location, if they wish. A boxed up my big fat greek wedding villanova colleges at you, but not in a bad way, really. Worth a try anyway.

Varietal: Airport 75
Food Pairing: Aladdin

Nonesuch Evermore

Self-assured and well dressed, but drafty. Comes on strong with strong strength and long length. Hits on a twelve against a seven. Hits on a ten against a ten. Doubles down on a soft fourteen or fifteen against a four, five or six. Stays on fourteen against a five. Yeasty notes of overturned wheelbarrow split eights against pretty much anything. An overmalted finish brings out the particular sort of fellow in the small town on the Alaskan Riviera.
An excellent wine to order at dinner with a statuesque beauty who loves you despite your money and whom you love despite her beautiful statuesquitude. God, look at her with her hair up like that. Drink it because there has never been a neck like that before and there may never be one again. Drink it because it’s not the night of the proposal but that’s been scheduled, in your head, in your plans. Drink it now because it’s never going to come out as perfect as you imagine. The columns of dry cherry bring out the fat gut and otolaryncologist son you never had.
Spinning dryly into semi-eternity, there’s not much left to scrape out of the bottom of the dark wood barrel and hint of barrel. Only a splendid sense of belonging to a group that ought to be better than dark green lawn clippings, pencil shavings, and dirty smock. Membership is exclusive and has its privileges, one of which is not a finish of heavy ground smoke.
Drink it on a night much like tonight. In fact, tonight’s the anniversary. Drink it in the cab of a truck. Drink it with cheap animation. Drink it with dancing penguins and handcuffs and shave and a haircut, two bits. The two kinds of stolen bicycle wend round the palate and leave an adventure on the mind. Don’t be tempted. There’s nothing yet discovered that can’t be lost. Not even an old rusting shed covered and surrounded in weeds.

Varietals: A-ha!, only when it was funny, purple nurple
Food Pairing: Chips ‘n dip

Ein, Svein, Policein: Riesling

An old oak tree on fire, set on fire by you and your pocket lighter, not that you intended any harm or for anything to get out of control. Rich moist soil piled on the oranged limbs, trunk, roots exposed as flaming the more extinguishing dirt is dug out. The efforts are in vain. The body is full of heat. The edges are constantly changing, can’t be grabbed a hold of, flicker without intent. The fire’s coming up from under all the trees on the block now. It’s in the soil. It’s in the grapes. It’s in the wine.
Butter, nuts, sugar, and other tradable commodities stack up neatly in the dusty old warehouse of the back half. Long faded stamps brand their forgotten destinations. Spiced ground meat swirls up and outward from the center depression of the whirlpool. A miasma of thick card stock and strawberry jam. A hippie dippie band plays whatever feels good and will get past your resistance if you let it. A willowy red head bites down hard and opens a room you didn’t know existed. Shown a little age, shown a little wisdom, knows a little better all that it doesn’t know.
The German vines are stoic and logical with exquisite eyeglasses and bizarre television. You know how many naked chicks they show over there? It’s nuts, and that was the name of the town, pine nut. Cold winters bring out the inherent squirreliness of the yards, the cubicism of cubism, the shrieking of opera.
There's a big old storage room full of junk and valuable junk, juniper and peppercorn. Those who live there will be happy to sell you stuff, very happy, but they live in filth and you can too.
Will try to warn you but won’t be listened to. Will scream and weep like Cassandra. Will hole up all the women in the treasury. Cherry blossoms run past slow and steady tortoises and land in the glass of the world, the wine of the world, the deep color.
Don’t try to lie to yourself. The lazy berries make it impossible.

Varietal: Riesling
Food Pairing: Naked macaronis

Zeitgeist Off-Dry Off-White

Firey in terms of Smokey Robinson. A deep practiced announcement and how sweet it is to be loved by you. You're nothing but a pack of cards, but it's not something that can't be undone. Otherwise, there's a delicate sense of judy ogle. Intractable f22a, barry gordy, and vanessa bryant. Still, the muscular finish puts to bed any lingering fears of valerie bertinelli.
Drink at the government money club. Drink it at the marvin gaye death. Pairs beautifully with a rich spate of john hope franklin or motown songs. Governmentmoneyclub.com brings brian white to mind, but doesn't quite finish the job. Neither does ventresca tuna. There's a temptation to match it with king lear summary. This is not recommended. F22 crash, where the wild things are, broadmoor hotel colorado springs, and noot seear fight for dominance in an absolutely balletic revue of austin weather. Perspiring kxan drips its benny ninja bounty all over the place. Fine wine.

Varietal: Hitsville USA
Food Pairing: kxan weather

Trite White 1

It's grapes. They are grown in a certain way at a certain time in a certain soil in certain weather.

It's rotten grapes. Sour grapes. Mushy slimy stompy grapes. We're talking about trash here. Garbage. Trashola.

Sometimes there's wood involved. Different trees, maybe burned or used or something. Maybe a combination. A wooden barrel or a steel barrel with a piece of wood floating in it as if that is the same thing. Sometimes we'll say that the rotten grape liquid has seen some of whatever wood is floating in it as if it has eyes.

It's not a potato.

Then it sits around for a long time becoming the thing that will end up in the bottle which may still sit around for a while, maybe a long while, hopefully not so long that it turns back into garbage. Trashola. That happens pretty often actually, even with some very expensive bottles.

Then it gets poured into a glass or, hopefully, two glasses. Then it STILL has to age, but not for such a long time now. Maybe it doesn't have to, but it might have to, depending on all the previously mentioned factors.

Then it gets drunk and the drunker can claim to taste all sorts of consumables in it that are obviously not there in any literal way. Sometimes some of those consumables grow in the same soil as the vines that gave the grapes grow. This should not be confused for giving any flavor to the final drink which just takes like rotten grapes. It's just that rotten grapes can remind people of a lot of other things that they have tasted in the past and people like to talk about it because it doesn't seem like enough just to drink the thing and enjoy it.

The enjoyment can be so intense, so overwhelming, so confusing, that language just gets spewed out all over it to try to clean it up. It's all rotten really, but so will you be one day, sooner than you think.

Varietal: Chardonnay
Food Pairing: Something that tastes good and that the rotten grape liquid will taste good along side of

Sturm Burn

A still smooth beginning. Polished, not to a shine, but to a grey wholeness. Deceptive motion within the placid sameness, or sameness within the motion. Low hanging fruit, juicy and nutritive drops into and onto the impenetrable surface which grows pitted, complex, cross hatched. Simple flatness gives way to an interplay of light and shadow that is anything but simple. What begins as a disc mutes into a shape that can not be plotted with simple trig.
A pink epic sky. Blue above, pink ahead, but no way of telling what is cloud and what is clarity. Stripes of one in the other and the other in one pose, waiting for the drinker to define them, but glide continuously out of reach at the same speed as the tongue. The sky is a map of Europe, peninsulas sticking out in every direction. It doesn’t taste the way Europe ever looked in school. A rise of lies my teacher taught me.
There is no horizon line. There is no periscope sticking up with one huge blinking eye looking out. Pure warp and weft of growth to peak to the holy coolth afterwards. The calm of a scape that has known storms, just not recently. Small white shapes pop up between wave and wave, cloud and cloud, wave and sky, sky and cloud, the grape and the yeast, the bakery and the town, the june and the porridge, the salt and the sea. They are strange. They are disconcerting, to say the least, but they give the wine its distinct character. It is uniquer than one would think from the humble origins, the proud hills, the forgotten citizens. As unique as possible, there is a wild interplay of glacier and deep empty space.
Nothing is ever empty. Nothing is ever over. Nothing is ever too late.
Nothing is ever too late, but it can be hard to remember the point sometimes. Swells of dark fruit rise up blocking out the pink and blue sky. Little by little. The taste of the sound of crashing. The taste of the smell of home cooking. Seared sea scallops, live sea scallops, and a fishing trawler dragging undersea mountains of to-be-shelled sea scallops.
It’s honest work and doesn’t pay much, but there’s no better feeling than returning to a warm home and homemaker afterwards. A soft bed, a soft chair, a soft dog. A small house full of light and music. Full of the smells of love and food. That’s why he does it. That’s why he brings the close to a close, the finish to a finish, the savor to a savor. For you, for you, and always for you.

Varietals: June, porridge
Food Pairing: Fresh rosemary by the bunch

Frog And Toad Are Friends

Tepid. Timid. Tremulous. Not much substance. Some apples, some pears, maybe a little grapefruit, but who cares, really. It all adds up to a flatulent mish-mash confusion. A couple moments of promise. Definitely starts with all possible advantages then squanders them on having no sense of itself. The sort of bottle that may or may not be corked. Wooden, monotone, uninspired. Syrupy sweet. Burned sugar. Rotten tropical fruit. The best thing that can be said is that it knows when to quit.

Varietal: Carbononton, but you’d never know it
Food Pairing: Happy Meal

New Vic: Cor' 'd'u' 'l'aire

Airy, aerated soil. Bright Hindenberg blue. Complete without artifice. Drinkable. Easy to drink. Fun to drink. Gallows humor on the tongue, cheeks, nose, lips, and tonsils. High as a kite, as an absolute kite. In the rise is an expectation of sordid preferentialism. Just a glass of wine so stop making such a fuss. Killer body, did you check that body? Light, airy, and bright. More ripe berry brain just preceding the climax. Never-never-landish. Opulent, expensive, gilded, ridiculous. Precious pink poodle poop. Quinine blue in blacklight. Radioactive blue on the upper G I. Still ponds of fragrant mutuals fall away to reveal the crippling drought of light blue sky and skylight. Troubled water calms when the prophet is thrown overboard. Urgent cherry-stained tongue-work works tongues of stain-cherried urgencies. Volatility in voice but not in body. Wildflowers grow up across the once proud orchards of the fade in. Xanathan gum thickens the body, making it thick, a thick body. Yellow flowers, green flowers, blue flowers, red flowers, pink orange flowers, all the flowers but not purple flowers. Zealots on horseback toss their flaming jam torches through your windows and make you wonder how you got here. Yon village is broken, is wild, is bitter. XXX rated pseudo-finish drops off to make room for a second rise, unheard of in an American Cor. Where you'd expect a deep resentment is instead a stubborn flag-waving ignorance. Violence begets violence begets really stupid country songs. Until it trickles down to the schools, the problem's just going to keep rearing its stupid red fruit head. Ticklish, light, airy, and bright. Sensitive to ticklish, light, airy, and bright food pairings. Rhone-style tanninity. Quilted layers of patchy ticklish light and airy brightness. Proud vines reach skyward and consume what sun there is left in the siltiness of the short dark period. Olive trees that laid the foundation for athena's people, her self-proclaimed populace. Nearly invisible in its clarity. More air than earth. Likely as not to evaporate between bottle and glass. Keenly aware of its own vinegar mortality and lets you know it. Jammy as Charlemaigne. Insistent, ticklish, light, airy, and bright. Half feather, half leaf, half butterfly, half brandy. Guar thickens the body further, especially at the end. Frozen at room temperature. Ending on a strong note of weakness. Dust. Crater. Blameless. Alluvial.

12 Gong Grenache

1) Only the keenest tongue will hear anything at this point.

2) An early insistence.

3) A nagging distraction.

4) Attention must be paid.

5) Blossoming of the buds of taste.

6) Sweet

7) Bitter

8) Sour

9) Salty

10) Umami

11) Banging and zooming around the palate.

12) A whimper.

Varietal: Grenache
Food Pairing: Lefsa & lutefisk

82 Black

The last natural born heartbreaker. Rare, luminescent, and vital. Deceptively quiet on the nose for a grape with so much to say, but at the tongue comes up a brilliant wall of sound. Big and then bigger and then biggest. A special secret mode of fermentation handed down and down and down results in the tiniest possible bubbles and distinctive hue of glowing ember.
To see it is to want it. To sip it is to know thyself. There is no browsing, no samples of red and white in little plastic cups, no consideration of cost or vintage. Warm to the touch, but served chilled. There is always the temptation to lock it away some place, display it, fetishize it, satisfaction through ownership. Lift it up, yes, but let its miniature pearl buttons of hydrogen and xenon lift you up as high. The tingle in the spine starts at the open and builds in intensity to the point of singing gold, great chain of being, release.
Crystal blue vanadium brings on the damp cruelty of bone-chilling winter, only to immediately release you into ripe cherry-stained summer. High green juice drips down the peak, pooling at your feet, growing into a wild and humongous ocean. The child screams at the crashing foam, vainly demanding acknowledgment. Waves break over distant stars or will o' th' wisps that jump and dive like flying fish or beaming mangos. The peak reveals an undersea world of light and coral. A glowing city hidden beneath miles and miles of luminous dark water. Follow the impossible dancing lights to an audience with the queen of the merfolk, who pours you a glass of this same recursive potion. The wine within the wine dazzles even more brighter and fantastic than the one on the shelf, pulsing in your hand, singing in the glass, floating on the table.
Everything is up and out and alive. The wispy swirls of lavender and lilac leave you lightheaded with no defense against the floating fireworks, held eternally on the exhale of their blue and orange climax. Cedar ash rains down subtly on the back of the palate, drawing a blurry distinction between the here and now.
Feet on the ground, head in the clouds and roots wrapping around the night sky. Stirring development, ever expanding and complexifying. It is impossibler and impossibler to get back to the previous beat, to get a firm grip before moving on, but the wine moves on, moves up and moves out, leaving an empty dark furnace, a cold apartment. Relax into the spread, though, and reap rewards of loud music in the latest free house, exploration of the best parts of melodrama and adult situations. Flush with understands you. Wraps up the never spoken secrets in damp healthy leaves and hands them back to you on a current of halo light and dirty overalls.
Pairs bitter with jealousy. Drink it alone with the lights off, guarding the lucidity against the urban fervor of strangers, friends who are strangers, and lovers who are strangers. Build a fence around it, turn your back on it and tell it that you love it. Save it for a special occasion, a more special occasion, an occasion so special that it can never come. Alone in a room, face lit up by the flickering glass. Flirt with letting go.
The world's but a bottle,
and life's but a dram.
When the bottle is empty,
it ain't worth a damn.
Pairs well with the beach with absolutely nothing to do. Bare feet in cool sand. Pairs well with a held hand. Drink it on the playground swings with a cute someone after all the kids have gone home, when the air is cooled off enough to cut the humidity but you still feel overdressed in t-shirt and shorts. Grow impossibly large and full. Blow your balloon self up. Tan. Cry for the first time in a century as the milder notes of butter and nut subsume the triumphant calls of golden trumpet and boychoir.
Goes down as easily as air and creeps into your irises, lighting them up in fierce glacial tones. By the end of a glass the walls are soft and insubstantial. Nothing is real or important except finding out just how high you can get.
Possess and be possessed in an ouroboros of easy contemplation.

Varietal: Light
Food Pairing: Brown rice with soy sauce. Maybe a little smoked tofu for protein.

Q: What Do You Call A Black Man Who Flies A Plane?

A stunning minerality lays the foundation for wild growth of ivy and chokecherry. Kudzu leaves open up on a sunswept vista of shifting tectonic plates, grass grazed short by lumbering historic beasts. Behind and above, there may be a sense of new beginning, but this is false and should not be acted upon New years resolutions fall away in dominoes before the strength of the flinty stasis grown in the heartland. Without a compass, the finish may seem impenetrable, but some naked lady sushi will bring out the inherent pain of loss associated with the grape in this season. Much brighter than a comparable bottle, the sun is hanging round looking fora good time, a fix, a true love, something. Outside, there's a hint of effervescence balanced neatly with a deeply heavy green dew. Some have compared it to the ruins of all the cities of man long overgrown and turned now to wreckage, jungle, ocean, desert. On the nose, a deep black smoke belched up from the young volcanic earth, disturbing the skies and turning them orange.
Zest of lemon, bauhaus architecture, oil of dirty hamper, mingle on the back of the tongue, together with fresh whitewash, off-sour in their dance. Attempt an impromptu conservative speech about the bad values of your neighbors to get the full effect of the tannic runaround. Not unlike eating a pile of sticks, leaves and all.
Throughout the body there is a lightness of touch that may come across at painfully effeminate, even faggy. A brunch wine, a wine to be drunk with a frenemy outdoors in early summer at a restaurant with quotes around most of its menu items. "ceviche" "hot dog" "rest room"
Out of joint, there's a time for everything that can be conceived in a glass. Don't be fooled by the yeoman's service, for the lies can be laid on as thick as you like without compromising the essential texture of the thick golden cold. Compare ourself to those arond you and wonder just how poorly you stack up. Don't let the bastards get you down, but do try to dress a little neatly when you bring her to meet your parents. It will just make it easier on everybody. Without which, you wouldn't ever know the land was larded without practice. Don't try to understand where the wine comes from without a thorough knowledge of the wars of the region. The soil is made of small glass beads and turtle shells. This gives the wine a power over the animal kingdom as well as a deep panache.

Varietal: Winter, late winter, wring, early spring, spring
Food Pairing: Any flaky fish or reptile

A: A Pilot, You Racist

Round and rubby and just delicious against the tongue. Precious fuzzy little nubbins purr happily in lilt with the golden acres of singing flowers in those big bopper sunglasses, not in an intimidating way, just that unthreatening cool, like your mother would be scared of him on the inhale and feeding him hot dish on the ex.
Pale strawman in color with characteristic salted macaroni temperament. American mentally, with Japanese tendencies, and Parisian sensibilities. So, stay out the vicinity unless you like cotton candy hugs and lots of ‘em! You! Look at you! Look at your adorable ears. Look at those little hints of sage and dry well. Fantastic.
Don’t you just want to curl up and forget about the world? Fresh suckling clouds will help cocoon you in an arbor mist of pink poodle. Raise a glass to our lost comrades of stress, not our brothers, but rather the enemy we harbored in our own shoulders, in our own clavicles, in our own shortened life spans.
A wine so fat it made the news. When this wine sits around the house it really sits around the house. So full bodied it uses a vcr as a pager. So dumb it takes an hour to make minute rice. So ugly it can only go out on Halloween. No respect at all, I tell ya. No respect at all.
Try it with someone you just met once and maybe couldn't pick out of a line up. Take a chance on the alt, once the bubbleberries have patterned the cold open. There are rewards here for anyone stoned enough to consider them. Don't forget to write.
Try to detect a faint tracing of apricot infused vanishing act peeking out from behind the dark eyes of grass weed. It hides between the tinsel and the tonsil and tends to trend tetherward. Terrible what happened to the ice cream man, his ice cream, his assistant, his lover, his precious precious grape. It's just before. Do you detect it? Continue to drink until you can.

Q: What did the fish say when it swam into a wall?
A: Damn

Putumayo: Chenin Branco

Round and ripe as one of her father's peaches and dripping juice and dew on the fertile soil. Pointed on one side, but not as in a cone. Creatively flavored with passionberry seed, the coarseness of the sugar is excused by the long time coming on the outside. Drops of honey lime splash the most superficial ocean layers. Complete without having a point, fun without making something good, eating without getting paid, but not stealing, you wouldn't say stealing exactly, not with the twin pillars of green basil and folderol keeping the acidic roof up with surreal zaftig grace.
Exceptionally full bodied, even rubenesque with gutter trash and cheap painted women. An overwhelming front of tangled thornbushes advances, spinning and ripping from out of the dark places in the gun shot. Can not be as god has made it, not if it hopes to remain. There's not much chance of a fair fight at this point, nothing to hang on our side of the balance. Historic but not epic. Finished but not beautiful. Varnished in thick clear sap. Spread out over your denim, what's left of your denim.
Some of the happiest parts of the trip overseas had unpronounceable names, probably lies anyway, hadn't showered, hadn't done anything to deserve it, lived in dark and dingy pensions, spun warm fresh bullshit and had no ethics about what kind of nonsense to claim about their homes.
Let's be straight, the wine is overweight. The few bright notes of citrus vent and radicchio nearly get it off the ground, but the heart is too slow to stand up, bored and lazy, spoiled. Thinks its above it all, or maybe just nervous. There are shortcuts here, grapes that should never have been picked or were picked too soon, vintners without purity of heart. A diet of fast food, arguments with the television, even the most nugatory pettiness in the vintner's spirit will uselessify the casks.
Crocodiles dance with hippos. Yang dances with HEMI yang. Rice & lentils dances with rice & beans. Blueberry dances by itself in the heavy corner of the darkening thickets of the king's woods. Dirty campfire faces and songs. Stolen sleeping bags, passports, maps, innocence, telephones, identity, vital organs, credit cards, ideas, cameras, scruffiness, ipods, flava, laptops, bohemianity. The best thing about tripping abroad was finding out that even though we're all different? We're all the same. Notes of that.
The complaints are well founded and are probably pretty smart to boot, but not the kind of business we do here. A spring dusk that is november in every way but actually. It is impossible to taste these oak trees and not think they've only just lost their leaves this week. There's no hint that a long dark winter sat on top of them first, but there's a hint of a hint in the nosing. You may even detect acorns under foot but this is a false sense, as opposed to the songs of chicken pot and pumpkin pies, which are real. Winds of canned cranberry sauce gelatinize lovingly across the palate but die out into stagnant bitter almond. Starts out running but it hits a wall and doesn't have the strength to get up and take another shot.

Varietal: Chenin Blanc
Food Pairing: Fusion fusion fusion!

Jug Band Bleu

The greasy brown stains of a raggedy hobo thrive amidst a clanking trainyard of warm, breezy kli. The initial instruction is of the smell of motor oil smeared out over the 12-dimensional landscape. Kicking it inthe front is licking a battery, touching a magnetic laptop cord to the inside of the bottom lip, a grounded minerality. Copper on th sides of the tongue and a whisper thin sail of carbon at the back. Old songs of America rise and fall with the passing speakertrains. Afterwards, a bush of lateral apples. Apple on the lift, but an apple of translucent azure geode, one crystalline corner empty as a bite. Too, a golden apple with a war carved on the side, the narcissism that started the narcissism that started the Trojan Narcissism. Interludy bitterness of that's what you get for starting civilization on the Mediterranean. Vacancy of languid democracy.
Dripping nickel pillars support a cave of ponderous shapes, things that are small and seem large, things that are large and seem small, things that are in flux. There is a pleasing liminality to the come down, a mobius drifting in of itself.
An excellent choice for a dinner party, a drink with a close friend, or even just a night in. You work hard. you deserve it. No one appreciates you. No one understands you but your woman. Put your feet up. Tell me about your day. Get comfortable. Have a glass of wine. How 'bout a nice hawaiian punch?
Steel apple, mashed and haunted grows up in the afterfinish. Driving home, the wine is still developing, still dropping hints, dropping apples on your head, PhD's on you, little brats of heavy oily rope, big nets of fish when we get there, all the work you can handle and then some. Gold under our fingernails and you can finally get that guitar restrung. And the burritos, have you heard about the burritos out there?
The next morning, still tasting the wine, pair it with waffles and fresh fruit, real maple syrup, not one in a funny bottle. Pairs with your kids are getting so big now, pairs with gonna miss the bus, pairs with bringing home the bacon, pairs with tipping the paperboy, pairs with a hot and stuffy commute, pairs with coffee at the desk.
By lunch, you may detect a disturbing sense of fear at the afterlinger of olives out of the basket around the big stone press. The back fades into helium green einsteinium and rust.
Brings out the tuna in a tuna fish sandwich or the martini in a three martini lunch. When you started, they told you those days were gone, then they drove a dumptruck of money up to your house. The finish finally finishes finishing. Leaves by the back door, never makes a sound, never leaves a trace except things are a little neater than maybe they would be. Sleep like a baby the next night, meaning sleep undisturbed, meaning sleep good.

Varietal: Grapes
Food Pairing: Spicy lamb curry

Vntrntntglishr Brambscott Scaramouche

Never trust anyone over 30.
The first sip helps you say yes when you want to, helps you dismiss your young and awkward you, shows you that there is another way of being indifferent, of being the same, of being a you you make instead of the you you're made, the one with those stupid braces. These days all the coolest guys have crooked teeth, but all the rich kids have stupid straight teeth. Comes on in phases and never lets go. A kiwi hook to the jaw. An uppercut to the parts you try to keep secret. Shorthand of seeing everything private strewn out on the lawn, the sidewalk, the pavement, and blowing down the street for hours already. A yellow knot in your stomach gathering thick acid around it into a ball of snakes bobbing along the dirty flood waters of that black people's city.
Early clues of incomprehensible smallness and wisdom fight with pride of goosefat latkes in a knock down drag out down and dirty fist fight, with biting and scratching and cheating and blood and dirt and copper and songs of black eye and turnip greens, mustard greens, sesame seeds, and bing, songs of bing means respect, songs of bing means understanding, means acceptance, means asimilation, means ABC not FOB, without which there's not much to the fight but sharp margins of tigerstripes and jungly richness.

Never trust anyone over 20.
They hide in the awkward folds of rich black hoodies. Say no when you want to say yes. Look through the dark, sweet, thick purple swamp in your glass to the dark you on the other side. Unexpected poverty mingles with kidney bean, red currant, and donated notebook.
Your grandmother is watching you with your stupid opposable thumbs. Have you heard about the drunken monkey? The drunken monkey is a monkey and enjoys drunkenness so she likes to eat the bloated rotting guavas as well as the shiny fresh ones so there is more food she likes so she is less likely to starve to death before making her little stoned baby monkeys. Some day one of her grandchildren will be your grandmother. More or less.
A wet and wild dullness of hazed out misunderstanding. Protected by delirium as the vines are by the ants who live in their shade and kill anything else that tries to grow in the neighborhood. They must get some ant version of buzzed off the fallen grapes and they guard their disco very jealously. Who domesticated what?

Never trust anyone out of diapers.
Grow up big and strong in the second act, still so far from the close, from the finish, from the bottle is empty it ain't worth a damn. Streams of turbulent tropical fruit come bubbling down the earthenware broccolies. A crudely broken bough ripped down as a weapon, aimed at the themes of noise in the banana trees, in the new phase. Terracotta red, unmarked cigarettes at the center of the mystery. The sip is older now, smarter and dumber, different, doesn't know much, isn't self-satisfied at this point, doesn't understand its place amid the marks of luscious licorice berries.
Right now is the perfect moment for this vintage, having matured past the point of disconsolate restlessness. Stage by rotten stage. The golden braid at the center is buffeted by the coarse, icy waves of sandpaper. Tossed over the shoulder of control and taken as a war bride to a place strange, unfamiliar, dangerous but with a something of something that could be home in it. A creepy painting hanging above a weird kind of stove, but someone must like it. The gooey center is what stays pure time after phase.

Never trust anyone who promises not to hurt you.
There can't be said to be a true climax. Aged at half the rate of a typical Bramb, there is instead steady but uneven growth. Spurts of change and gradual foment that don't make sense together, even several you-know-whats later. Nothing fully fades, but leaves stratified landmarks of the confusion of the days, the years, the decontextualized beats of the rise.

Never trust anyone apple red pear.
Beat the drum. Sing the song. Cry the surprising lover. We are better than we were. We are not as good as we will be. We won't make sense to each other tomorrow, but we will the next day. Can you pick up on that one incessant demand? That pleading frightened sound in the back of the evening? As much as everything has already changed, everything is still going to change. As much as the little boat, the little feather, the little idea is tossed around mercilessly, there is something that never fades or grows, that can flex but not forget. It's all but impossible to recognize though, amidst the din of all the other stuff in there, the stuff that demands attention, sour to the point of neglect. You've got to fight, fight, fight for your mind, mind, mind.


Varietal: Brambscott Scaramouche
Food Pairings: Murmurs, shouts

Riverbed Red

Prepare thy palate for turmoil, for emotional blackmail, for failure. There's a part of the open could drop off tomorrow in an earthquake. Its delicate and dangerous powder-coated steel is rusting from the bottom up. Sturcturally similar to a brown robin, but metallic and hard. Criss-crossing shadows of leather and dirt-smoke disguise the interlocking clockwork of beams and ladders. One room opens onto the next, each skeletal, each permanent, each ticking towards habitation.
A slinky lounge singer introduces thick swaths of burnt umber and flesh. The glittering piano of chocolate strawberry doesn't distract from the sirens, 1,000 floors below, skating cross the thin ice of steel and glass, spotlight, billboard, military helicopter, and tinkertoy city.
The gifts of the rise come in almost on queue even. The great horned wine gives you a potch in the tuchus. The wine gives you a leather switch. The wine gives you a slap in the face. The wine gives you a collar. The wine gives you a promise. The wine gives you a reason. The wine gives you a blessing. The wine gives you a chastity belt. The wine gives you v.d. The wine gives you a folded paper with an image you're not allowed to see til you're on your way out of the tattoo parlor. The wine tells you all its secrets but it lies about its past. The wine leaves finger sized bruises around your gentle throat.
The flashing lights of tropical fruit and fresh inkstain thrill to a climax of firey aspiration, lick the the bellies of the steel grey clouds, the sharp angles of the sky, the dizzying heights of rushing, heart stopping loss. A disturbing finish of slow dawn without a safeword, without hugs, without.
A perfect accompaniment for a wet night of hiding a tree branch outside of town, doing your damnedest not to make a smell that the dogs could track. Burning plastic, rich green bud, midnight chicken wings. A wine to drown things out. Noisy, plodding, uninvolved, protect yourself from yourself. Imitate yourself by being yourself. Control yourself by giving up control to your lover, your frenemy, any authority figure. Fix your issues by embracing them. The grapes are grown in a country with a sheepish name known only to the uberwealthy, a bargaining chip in the fall of man.
Try the wine with hopelessness. Try it with gifts. Try it with elective surgery, barren construction sites, a filthy kitchen, steel wire shot from an arrow, a lifelong dream of doing something truly stupid. The bitter taste of wanting something more than a beer commercial to free you from the horrible why of youth, of old age, of timidity. Grown in low humidity. Force the boss into complicity. Anyone can take one of pretty much anything. Sip for the last time and try to see the slef that wears the mask as the real drinker, the self that wears the face as the bank robber, the steam engine bandit, the adulterer.

Varietal: Shame
Food Pairing: Ham and swiss on rye, lettuce and tomato, sharp mustard. Stuck through with an olive on a toothpick.

Decadent Shortcut: Take It Easy

On the nose is some kind of impossible landscape left fallow in the main by the millions of proto-people who have passed through it during earlier periods of development, but also something out of a medieval text book about dragons and knights and lords and vassals. The aroma is that of hope for a forceful return of past, which was obviously even less real than any past any of us can imagine. The color is bold blood red with the dark rust swirls of a beautiful car that nobody got told to maintain.
Without looking, anyone can tell that royalty has pissed on these grapes, anyone can tell that the future is not as realistic as they plan. Anyone can tell that the girl is looking at you. Anyone can tell that the grapes were picked by people who don't make living wage. Anyone can tell that we live without ethics for the sake of convenience. Anyone can tell that's had to imagine what else life could be like. There's a delicate balance between work and play, between safety and freedom, between the eggs and the grapes, between the glass and the drinker between the jester and the king, between the king and the food tester, between the food tester and his wife, between his wife and her friend, between her friend and her home, between her home and her husband, between her husband and his dog, between his dog and the fire hydrant, between the fire hydrant and the hose, between the hose and the fire which burned down the vineyard the first time it was planted, the second time it was panted, and the third time it was planted.
That's what we've got now. The strongest castle in England. Grapes from the richest, ashiest, freshest soil in the valley. The sun doesn't reach, the winds are easily avoided. The animals wander around free. There'd be no point in stealing one. It would just wander home. Everyone in the community owns at least one chicken for eggs.
On the nose is some poverty stricken villages crumbling into the hillside around a beautiful impossible set of plains. Almost insultingly full bodied, we expect that one sip will send you into a psychotic rage of unhinged feeling bubbling up from deeply buried places in the parts of your soul you like to pretend don't exist. More than any sort of therapy, psychoanalysis, drunkenness, heroin abuse, or true love, it is the note of banana that will drop you off in the deep end of the pool without a paddle, the jungle without a map, the sky without a lawn chair, florida without a gated community, china without rice, egg salad without balsamic vinegar, bread without yeast, life without dance.

Varietals: B, C, D, E
Food Pairing: Chalky aristocracy

Beggar's Wine

A proud black night bares its chest arrogantly above the cowering aromas of cotton-wool and wool. An enormous sinewy arm, eternally in fist, thumps against cosmic chest cavity. Services will be held at midnight for the poor old bright lines of grim and servile oat. The bright red apple dances with the grainy bourbon and it's not to be said who leads whom. A crack, a crash, a crevice in the ebony blue. An iridescent shimmer of black and eggplant. The creative balance of a little drop of pain. The forking of filmy lightning bolts, of juniper, of last kiss.
Behind and beneath it all, around and inside it all, within and without it all, a heavy bass drum thumps on and on. The black raspberries throb meat, threat, viscera. A memory wafts up on the first scent of a place and time you can't have been, couldn't have forgotten, must be remembering. Drive yourself crazy looking for that black-flagged memory again. One of those rare moments of nightmare, in whose heavy fire, heroes are forged, maybe. The sky cracks open and all is rushing chaos. A wild and naked old man raises his gnarled lulav and dares the open to do that which it dares do.
Come rain! Come wind! Come crumbling earth! Come crunch! Come flint! Come clover! Come peach tree! Come stone! Come hail! Come pomegranate! Come rhubarb! Come tobacco! Come caramelized onion! Come bacon-fat! Come acorn! Come you dogs of hell that bark and nip at ankle! Come endive! Come blue cheese! Come beet! Come candied walnut! Come pear! Come incense! Come chaos! Come entropy! Come electric light orchestra of thorny aerial gardens! Come bell pepper! Come stew! Come foie gras! Come snail! Come orange rind! Come cherry! Come sherry! Come fear! Come fright! Come fathom!
The smudge of purple candy curls up on itself in useless defense against the unending torrents of particulated radishfall. The potent earth grows muddy and boggy and rivulets of dark cedar grow up around. They flow away slowly, leaving a dawn of paper products, of chicken wire, of pearl. A fine wine to drink never. In fact, don't even uncork it. Don't open it at all. Quick. Hide it here. How did you even get it? Such a bottle as this. Such a bottle as this does not just show up in the corner wineya. This is a bottle to be cellared immediately. Don't have a cellar? Build one. Can't build? Have one built. Can't afford it? Get a better job. Can't find a better job? Beg, borrow, or steal. It must have a place to rest. It will rest, one way or the other. Give the wine a home, a place to grow, a forgotten place, an old place, a place for its subtle finish of faintest winter mist suspended in airy, off-dry soil.

Varietal: Opiated poppy
Food Pairing: Never serve! For god's sake, don't open it!
!!: !!!!!

Blonde Ambition '27nd

Fresh salt spray o'er the nose, cheeks and eyes. The bracing vitality is an assurance of your best self. Without coming on too strong, there's no lack of possibility in the yellow hued thick elaborate texture. It carries a honey cherry that, while genuine, isn't so important in the end. Unique among blondes, there is no finish, but rather an infinitely evolving epiphany. Yeasted milder than it is to disguise its dizzying intellect, its serious place in the canon, its communicable strength of character.
Bloody, bold, and resolute, no one ever forgets the first time. Drink while getting carried away. Drink it while feeling the best ever. Drink it while imagining twentyfour possible futures, each starting with this one night. There was once a single note of old souled walnut in a sip I once had, and now I find myself hunting for it through the uncharted thickets of ascent.
The waves crash against the sturdy ochre hull and drain out in a steady reassurance again and again. A steady reassurance again. Uphill from the crystal clear pings of inedible leaf and mango are the swarms of activity. Wine which does more in a day than most people do in their cigar box lives. A tight, powerful package. A grim, forbidding delight. An openness that may need to widen your ability to talk about it.
Blue and white striped sailor hats bounce in time on the uniformly blonde heads of the dancing chorus girls putting on the same show night after reassuring night for the drunken reprobates too sloshed on the delicate honeydew veil to remember it. Blended carefully by no fewer than 88 vintners, working in and out of consultation. A together-bringer. A goose fattener. A powersuited semiconstruction of light and danger particles. An again and again forgiveness. A giant hole in the world. An anonymous, tempest-tossed, windswept, sun-bleached, deck swabbed, barnacle crusted, fully rigged, rigid bowed, false finish of chocolate and herbal remedy. A bold red disguised as an insipid white.
A world straddling bigness of taste, a brassness of comfort, a simple song that stands out like a flashbulb in the dark notes of stone and night sky. Blonde to put you at ease, you world of superficialities and no speakers. A wine that says yes. A wine that says show me. A wine that says more. A wine that says grow. A self-fertilizing grape.
Does your conscious bother you? There's no need to be afraid. Inside your head, the wine will put things right, help you prioritize, wonder what you were ever so confused by. One glass leads to another in a cool yellow river, carrying a lost and found simple black cardboard boat, folded by some child, or some father for his son, or some man who never became a father and who never got past childhood.
The most deadly crosshatching yet produced in a wine of this style, a wine of this region, a wine of this treelined hilltopped village acned valley. Down in the galleys, they still drink and upside down they still drink. you may drink it for years before you find out it can never be dismissed. More addictive than most. For sure, more addictive than you can handle.

Varietal: Collaboration
Food Pairing: Let the mermaid do the cooking.

Loios: Vinho Tinto

This wine is named for the Loios Monks who once dominated the area. This is a very well balanced and interesting wine expressing the fresh characteristics of the grape. This wine is versatile and well paired with every day foods. This is a secret guarded with life and death of deadly kung fu monks, deadly Portuguese monks. This wine will be the making of you or this wine will be your doom. This is a fine wine for bottling in glass bottles and labeling with animals on the cover, on the label.
This is a way up for the downtrodden. This is a way out for the trapped. This is a way in for the lonely. This is a path to righteousness. This is a wine once beloved by the common people of the simple villages of the peaceful region before the domination of the monks came to be. This is a taste of history, of freedom, and of loss. This is a memorial wine. This is a casket. This is a mausoleum of interesting fruits and vegetables. This is a raft of fruit.
This grape was at one time the pride of Judea, the jewel in the crown of the Medicis, the wooden teeth of America. This is a wild grape, a fresh grape, a proud grape, a grape easily harvested. A grape not easily forgotten, a grape for the ages, a grape of beginnings, a grape of life, a grape of delicious torture. This smell of yeast and color of unhealthy blood may be as confusing to you as it was to the Loios Monks who, confused and enraged by the interesting freshness, felt compelled to dominate the region, to dominate Portugal, to steal the grape away from the people who had once uncovered its secrets, who had for years shared its secrets, taught its secrets to their children, and to lock it away in their monasteries, chained vineyards, jagged gardens of no, who forbade themselves to speak at all, lest they speak the truth about the grape, lest they share the interesting freshness with those on the outside, lest they be anything less than utterly dominant.
This is the wine of affliction. This is the wine we drink to remember our ancestors whose lives were far less filled with idle joy than ours are. This is a wine we drink for revenge. This is chocolate and almonds on the nose. This is a plate of food. This wine is such that only a true believer can taste the full range of flavors and it is said that on the day that happens, the grape will be released back to the wilds and the villages will return to healthfulness and the abbeys will crumble and the tyranny of the Loios Monks will end and be forgotten and be remembered only in jokes and songs for children who will rise up and eat, yes eat the raw grapes off the vines that they will play in too, seek shade under, climb, tend, love. This is the wine of prophecy. This is the wine of rebirth, of the color orange and the color purple. This is the wine of ink.
This is an explosion on the palate and a dark and evil finish. This wine carries the mark of dominance and will present you with a choice. This wine will ask you, with every sip, with every note, if you are Bob Dylan or you are Mr. Jones. This wine, this chalk grown, raisin built wine with its finish of blood; This wine, this overflowing sunshine through clouds fantasia; This wine; This wine is only a shadow of the wine that was. This wine is named for the Loios Monks who named it after themselves in their unholy arrogance, in their evil, their monomaniacal drive to control, to limit, to reduce. This wine is the key to their eventual fall and the rivers of blood and fresh interesting wine that will have to flow down from the cathedrals, down the mountains, down to our cisterns, down to the earth that birthed it.

Varietal: Tinto Tonto Tunto Taint
Food Pairing: This wine is versatile and well paired with every day food.

Prospect Perky Rose I & II

Is there shame? Some, but its gone green and aromatic, like the pruny notes of saffron petal, insatiability, and correction. Open up your head and let the characteristic reflective pink color, the cold white mirror on the top of the glass out. Look for sticky sweaty DPKs rolling around the front of the open in dirty haze.
Fantastic! Great! Perfect! So good! Excellent! Grand! Marvelous! Awesome! Super! Shiny! Shimmering! Splendid! Tell me princess, now when did, you last let your heart decide?
The fruit is in high affect in this devilish little art-house fare. A truly unambivalent blending of the steam of early spring with the crystal chill of midwinter. The soils of paper thin pickled ginger slice nearly hide the thick sap of disappointment in the you-self you notice in her away-walk.
On the nose is a sweetness bordering on bitchiness that will put off the more discerning of your friends but be not deterred for the greater treasure lieth in store to be claimed by he who dareth brave the porcupine fields of porcuponia, where the happy maidens dance and sing and crush ripe grapes beneath those grape crushing things. Feet, you call them.
So light in body you'll swear it must diet, but it's that very sweetness that gives it its frat boy punch. Try and hurry it along, try and be linear or directional in your therapy palate but there's no room today for exclusivity. Just one long velvet road from strawberry ice cream to marshmallow fluff.
Herds. Herds of wild beasts sprawl across the vistas of the open, leaving plenty of room for those portly, even chestnut, winds of development. Themes of roasting and distortion crank up the crazy and rip off the knob before fading marvelously into vapor and vaporousness. A gardening full of sculpturings bakes in the sun.
One way leads to sweet reward, the other to saccharine reward, where everyone is thin and beautiful. One way leads up, the other also up. One way is an escalator, the other an elevator with a tin roof and a glass wall, and a steel wall and a brick wall and a missing wall and a cardboard wall and a wall with doors and a stucco wall and a broken wall and a forgotten wall and a marble floor and a wet wall and a primrose wall and a rosemary wall and a tea rose wall and a rosy wall and a rosin wall and a prose wall and a rusty wall and a wall with buttons on it and it takes you up to the dive floor where the third class passengers stay. They're poor but they're so merry. They don't have gold or baby bjorns but they have wheelbarrows of aromatic chilies, mace, twigleaves. Passing notes of sage and green onion protect the pools of gooseberry, raw coffee, green syrup, the falling waters of candy-canes, the lake of bug bites and allergies. Purple stained tongues and skinned knees drain off the palate, weighed down with sunburn, yawnings and cargo shorts, and leave behind a fine silt of maturity and yesterday's melancholy. Light suspended in time. Rainbows suspended in ponies. Fanciness suspended in utero.
Between the close and the finish, pointillisms of chokecherry, radish-beet, and saltspore turn life into a game, so you don't have to.
Uh-oh! I lost track of myself when this all began. Can you help find me? Amid one glass, there are over 1400 waldos running about. Can you find them all between the nose and the wipe? Mail your answers in for a chance for big prizes. Hundreds will enter. Dozens will win. Underage? Get a parent's permission.

Varietal: The secret way you feel
Food Pairing: No food necessary. Just a paper bag and some good friends.

Loneliness Syrah bin 420

A syrup just a little too thick to count as a balm rests upon the tongue like so much greasy wind in the willows. Darkness covers over the beat when you finally grow too ashamed to use the nightlight anymore. Imagine it, a grown man like you afraid of the dark, afraid of solitude, afraid of no protection. Where will it go next? Grad School?
The dark is broke and buried in a landslide outside Seattle. You've been walking the bold pavement under street and moon lights for longer than you care now to remember and at home your wife lies waiting for you to return whole. But there is no peace, no family life, no cheap succor for the empty life that you are afraid you've been living all these years, ever since the nose.
Throughout is a tactile rainstorm obsessed with powerful antinarcotics I know where you go at night. I know what she does for you. I know her cheap perfume and flimsy nightgown Whatever you think you've discovered is less than the price of a beer, less than you could get from me, from my mother, from anyone, from a roughly sketched dream, if you could ever sleep peaceful and still.
One dark sip will have you tossing, turning, shredding your bottom sheet and sleeping on disgusting mattresses. The germ has been planted now. Half a note of earned placenta with antibiotics grown from orange peel and mold and forgetfulness and abandoned places in the world of thieves. Somehow your friends ended up being pimps and rascals, con-men and forget-me-nots. The blue light of dawn peeks through the themes of sour-cherried ham and throatfulness.
She looks at you like that and you just have to sound off on faint green tannins and bareness. You can't allow another morning to come and go with such little action. Shout your wishes out into the deep wind as loudly as you can, as loudly as you have ever shouted anything, but it still doesn't carry beyond your own melon head. The coincidence of other men shouting along with you is one you can let go, more than you can let the rest of it go, more than you can let go the overgrown bayous and burned out ferries of your calamine youth. More than you can let go the way she looks at you, the way she looks at everyone, but it probably means something more stormy and muddy than she could label, notes of mold on cheese, rancor on friendship, veneer on brick wall.
Stick inside a popsicle stick to make a wine pop and lick it on a sunny day by the sea if you're feeling small. There's a little bit of child left in the finish, where the grape hasn't forgotten what it really is, where performance hasn't demanded a broadening and cheapneing of emotional language. Where we spend all day studying the things we love instead of committing to a system that can't bring us out of the darkness.
Overyeasted so that the pressure is enormous, impossible to ignore and, like freezing to death, dating the rat king, playing with dolls, becoming blood brothers, waging civil war, and wearing monocles, entirely avoidable if everything was to change and not if not. Please forgive yourself after this. You are chocolate. you are cigar box. You are rascal. You are just checking.

Varietal: Ironwood
Food Pairing: Apricot glaze

New Vic: June Loon

Right off the bat, strong imperial red fruit. Splashes of sunlight across the crystal waters of the moat. A beacon of incessant longing for days gone by and from the children's stories of other people's children. There's a smokiness that doesn't belong to the front or the back. You may find that the first sip is potent with a power of ten to the crystalline coverings. Snow in a public park. Bundled up children walking shivering dogs. Underneath everything, a goat roasting on a spit in a poorly ventilated stone basement room. The smoke gets in your eyes. The twigs crunch under foot.
Flag waving proud red fruit. Cherries, but red cherries, red grapes, plums, raspberries, cranberries, strawberries, red apples, pomegranates, hunks of raw red dripping bloody meat carcasses hang from balustrades, testifying to both plenty and revenge for the green kingdom.
Alarm! A fifth column of black fruit though, some currants hidden in royal garb. Some kind of old hemp bag of plantation grown trade goods stacked in heaps in the store room beneath the castle. You may think the very woods begin to move as the silent black fruit armies mount their jammy assault, slow at first, only a few ambiguous signs. A shadow across the minty sunrise in the back of the palate. Then fierce with drums and alarums. Banners snapping in the wind, the steady marching of blackberries, black cherries, black plums, stony clear creaks silted with volcano ash.
On the finish you will find a woman weeping for her lost sons, one on each side of the battle, each dead, each killed by the other or by some anonymous solider, there's no way to say, but the twigged out twilight will seem stronger than it is.
This kind of epic battle between the stone strong forces of red fruit and the overzealous and grasping rebel band of black fruit is characteristic of wines from the region, where more often than not, the vines are watered with the blood of the vintners' enemies. The alcohol content is something to be wary of as it will sneak up on you just as you're driving home from the dinner party, cocktail party, oscar party, poker party, superbowl party, barbecue, moon landing party, debate party, election night party, inauguration party, martin luther king junior day party, or some other perfectly appropriate event to which to bring the wine to.
Bring the wine and be sure to be a hit. Perhaps tell a joke or two to get the night flowing. Social lubricant, we were thinking of calling it. The empty bottles can be used to help grow your garden, to mark off the parts of the yard where the rabbits can eat from the parts you are saving for your loving family. Try the wine when you're alone and feeling it. Try the wine when you're with a date you hate. Try the wine if you aren't feeling very pretty today and want to look on the outside the way you think you ought to feel on the inside if you only looked a little different than you do.
The point is that its easy to imagine the red and black fruit are fighting, not for dominance of the kingdom founded on the first sip, but for dominance of your fair heart, truly the greatest prize in all the kingdom. It is easy to understand, on the nose, that it is your oil painting likeness that inspired the romantic bloodshed in the first place, will some day inspire an exquisite peace and ballads of heroism that maybe will even be lectured about at to bored middle schoolers in a country not yet founded or even predicted.

Varietal: Aged zodiac
Food Pairings: Victory, Bitter marmalade

Idle Ideal (Idol)

Underestimated on the nose, the finish will bring contact joy that won't be measured by your primitive human measuring things. Cry havoc, release the gods of the pour. Know from whence your secondary fermentation comes. Know the simple smells of apple, crab apple, and apple sauce. Unless you plan to start dressing better, leave the bottle on the shelf. After an initial flood of consideration, you'll find yourself waiting at the top of the stairs for him to come home. Night after inconsistent night, the darkness consumes you with the light suggestive touch of old perfume bottles and dust, so much dust.
Velvety in texture, almost waxen, flaxen curled and yellow, so yellow. A brightness of character and quickness of wit that can be awfully intimidating unless allowed to mellow properly. Stick a bottle on a shelf some place and forget about it. Just be sure to store it properly or you'll end up with something suitable for salad dressing.
The bubbles go up. The bubbles go down. All around, our cities to ground. So proud. So white. They've put out their lights. No one now knows how to grow the grape. There hasn't been a vineyard capable of producing an effervescence this easy since before you were born, but the wine is still aging beautifully. It gets better with every birthday. It's been going down hill since it was sixteen, when all its friends were learning to drive and it was still trying to claw its way up out of the glittering, un-oaked ether.
Drink it with a blindfold, lest you never make it past the unearthly color to the real meat of the grape; round, full and vulnerable. There's a clear lack of pungency in the swampy health of light inkwell, peacock call, and viewing platform. Notes of power and corruption remind the drinker of a twenty-first birthday party spent bombed out of mind and time on fruity cocktails and shots of tequila basura. Cement mixers and prairie oysters lead forcefully into a prison of light green and blue vines with such shy, pale eyes peeking out at you. His oiled, rippling biceps hold you down and paint you with honey, sunflower petals, fresh bread, sugar sweet sunshine.
Sweet, without being fruity. Fruity, without being floral. Floral, without being pretty. Pretty bad, actually, if you don't know what you're tasting for. Do yourself a favor and don't attempt a glass without at least a couple of degrees of education in something relating to taste, or else a good decade spent traipsing across europe on a motorbike, carrying pilfered grapes in your helmet, riding away from the vintners' shotgun blasts fast as you can. Hoot and holler along the way like some teenager who just, for the first time, drove with the top down to the skinny dip lake where the girls in his class reveal their secrets so lightly. It wears its secrets so lightly, thinking back on it there will be honey flavored tears.
Soft metal, unhammered by time, fate, hammers. Uncreased. Unholily pure. Don't be a goldsmith if you can help it. Drink a glass of bubbly instead. Lay your tired body down and become rich soil and pray that some day the lost grapes may grow again.

Varietals: Summer, Ease, Cocaine, Insouciance, Aw shucks
Food Pairing: Store it bad and use it as salad dressing

L'Auberge Espanol '89'7

Big and bold and bright and beautiful. An immediate sensation of rushing through icy winds down a steep slope in a roller coaster car. Sparks come flying out of the sides while underneath, the tenderness of new buds come up, peeking through the darker fruits and insistent sunlight.
Suspended throughout is change we can believe in. On the nose are memories of deep purple flowers with poisonous berries from the house you once visited as a young girl but can not now place in space or time.
A dead skunk on the highway, but not unpleasant. Rotting beef left to go fallow in fields that have been ruined by the raping and pillaging northern armies after the civil war, but not unpleasant. Dark cherries with the stones removed, mountains falling into the sea, glass still molten red and yellow with the heat from the kiln, a smoldering coal in the mouth, but not unpleasant.
A burlap sack tied with yellow rope and full of rice, payment for the work of the vassals and a sacrifice to the monks at the temple. A hint of incense, a hint of cigar box, a hint of the secret of the magician's tricks. Water flowing but without the minerality you'd expect from such young grapes in such a young country on such a not unpleasant planet as this.
For an afternoon snack, try it with cheese, for a midnight drunkenness, try explaining your new tattoo. Drink it sulfur if you're feeling saucy. Let it breathe and see where the tannins hide. The bottom of the glass tends to cloud over with despair, but not unpleasant.
Dark plums cascade down the mountain with old tobacco, chocolate, banana, cotton, tomato sauce, other plantation fruit. The molasses trade, the slave trade, and inequality, mingle on the palate, gently but with something resembling the spice. Clove, cinnamon, cardamom, coffee ice cream, strawberry jam, and some dental fillings bring out the natural id of beef.
Inexpensive for the punchiness and quite affordable on a night of getting pulled over for drunk driving. Consider paying the cop off to avoid arrest, or else a nice piece of toasted cheese.

Varietals: Things which are missing
Food Pairing: Slaughter a goat. Cook killed goat. Feed dead goat meat to strangers and record their reactions. Blog about it. Call it The Brooklyn Bovine. Run into your friends at the same bars, the same coffee shops, the same subway stations, the same bagel places. Work on the crossword puzzle with them. Feed them cooked goat with the wine in the glass.

Old Red #1

Smoky and with a hint of brambles. Fresh with a sense of deja vu. Rounded on top and sort of heavy at the bottom, like it may fall apart if you breathe on it too hard or talk about it behind its back too cruelly. On the nose there's something resembling trust, but I can't say exactly what it reminds me of.
The incessant noise it produces demands heavy accompaniment, like a torrid affair with your secretary. you might have a glass on a dare or under a tree if you aren't too attached to your sense of yourself as a person, especially regarding what morals you may still have left now that you've reached an age where those tend to degrade. Where does the grape come from? A village in France. Try it with cheese if you please. Try it with toast and I'll boast, you'll never taste a wine so fine unless you've dined on nine brined swine.

Something Prometheus might have drunk on a single night of peace, comfort, and coziness in the middle of his period as a fugitive. The gods are chasing him. He can imagine the future of pain involving organs and birds he has in store for him, or he may be imagining other tortures instead, since the specific vengeance of Zeus is not to be predicted.
Drink it while musing on tortures profound. Drink it while eating the gizzard of a bird that has been eating the liver of the greatest hero your species has ever known. It can catch easily but if it goes out you have to find a brand new source. It is infinite but extremely temporary, like the wine.
The bottle is made of glass. The label is made of paper. The cork is made of cork. The salesman is made of person. The store is made of metal, glass, concrete, brick, copper wire, rubber, steel, wool, hemp, cotton, blood, vinyl, outside, inside, upside down. You are made of cells and germs that attack the cells. I am made of the same thing as you because I am a direct copy of you. Drink it with your clone on a steamy saturday night of forbidden lust. Drink it when your alma mater calls to hit you up for money that you don't have, money that you have but don't want to give, money that you have and want to give but need some begging involved with the giving of the money that you have. Try it with a nice piece of toasted cheese. Enjoy it with a sprig of rosemary stuck into your skin. Taste it after you've split this coronet betwixt you.
It's a bottle of wine. Hit someone over the head with it. Use it as a tool to pound your rice, grain, millet, flax seed, other kinds of rice. Hit someone over the head with it because they want to use it to pound their grain before you, instead of you, with you. Share it among the simple people of your village. Use it to send a message to people on the mainland, but not until after you drink the wine. Realize you've forgotten to include a return address in your message in a bottle that used to be a bottle of wine.

It's a product of France, America's ally. It's a product of Prometheus, Zeus's enemy. It's a naturally occurring phenomenon that's been domesticated like the wolf to the dog, the bear to the pet bear, the orox to the cow, the rainbow to the rainbow brite, or fire to a zippo.

Varietal: Altitude
Food Pairing: Long deferred freedom