Franken Franc

Atkas
Holy fucking shit, man. Have you tasted this fucking wine? Brighter than like a furnace going at maximum out of control speed, like practicing knife throwing on your one true love because she's the only one who trusts you enough to hold still for you. Never mind if you cut her a couple times; they're just nicks; little nicks; little slices of adoration.
And sharp, shattered but like ok to touch because it's like only shattered on the inside or something, like between two really thin panes. Light reflects. It refracts. It gets transmuted. It gets all fucked up. It's going in so many different directions it fades out at the edges of all of them into nothing, but the nothing isn't really dark. It's more like room temperature.
They say you can identify tepid if it feels like basically nothing. 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit is tepid. One or two degrees more is ok but hotter than that and you'll kill the yeast. Do not kill the yeast. Very important the yeast. The yeast is alive and it makes everything it touches alive and it makes bread and the bread keeps you alive but only once you fucking break it. You have to fucking break it with the people you want to keep close to you or they won't remember your name and they won't have any compunction about killing you to protect the people they have broken bread with if, for whatever reason, they have to.
Would you kill a stranger to save your wife? Would you kill a stranger to save your child? If you were an alcoholic and you suffered a trauma or engaged in a truly terrible act, one you'd have thought far outside your capabilities, will you immediately pour yourself a glass of Franken Franc? They say that's what happens, or else their other chosen intoxicants.

Pasille
Fury crusts over like a sugary sweet. A mad dog that chews its tail to bits, its leg to a raw useless stump, that whines pathetically, that can not understand what is happening, that would never be accepted to this grad program. What fading anger feels like the setting of the sun is actually repression sharpening and strengthening the will to cause to harm.
You, who would not hurt a fly would do more than hurt more than a fly.

Totchka
The grease is flying and the stove is hot and the convection oven is hot and the edge of its door is right at the level of your arm so one of seven times it burns you in the cleanest, thinnest trauma you've guessed at and the oven is hot and we are all at our best and we are all at our least human and we are monomaniacal in our thinking and we cling to each other and we hate each other and we are alive and we are at our must human and we are adults and we don't trust anyone over 30 without a liver problem or a problem with the inside of their septum or a collapsed vein or a pack a day habit or a gold-plated one-hitter or a flask or a mirror and razor or a sword and shield or winged sandals or a trident or who sews corn instead of grain or who showers or who can sustain a relationship or who makes it to the dentist regularly or who washes his hands before he eats or who says excuse me after he burps or who considers your feelings more than or as much as your own.
Burns last only a moment and whatsoever they put you in touch with: That thing is holy.

Won Word Wines: Merlot

Fine.

Big Fat Red Blabbermouth

Brittle and broken down into tiny little jaged cubes. Glass brick that's been broken through by a badass chick on a motorcycle with a head full of revenge, who throbs with the engine, who crashes in, who throws the office into chaos, who's chasing someone who wronged her, who licks her full lips beneath the black visor, who's gone again, closing in on her prey. And the glass that's left behind is in the smallest chunks, impossible to reassemble, and the shards of red dye that run through their middles. Try and stack them up into some semblence of order and then stop trying due to abject failure. The piles are shapeless; they can be any shape.

Wine Which Cannot Be Consumed

Beautiful deep blonde. Mouthwatering nose of eucalyptus and sandy beach vacation. Reminiscent of that fantastic morning, that one fantastic morning, that one fantasy. Stays frustratingly in the glass no matter what you do. Can be poured. Can be swirled. A few airborne molecules of which can be siphoned off, but nothing more than a whiff of things which can be imagined. A sinking house in Venice, a shining opal or gold filigree. Pink sandstone carving remain stubbornly, shockingly complete after 600 years of ants carrying splinters of wood from the decimated nearby town, the overgrown streets, the choked off rivers.

The choked off rivers. Dams that have burst years ago and reformed at other bends, flooded the boneyards and stocked ponds and been destroyed and rebuilt and have been steadily bleached in the sun. Forgiveness sweet as honey but not flowing; clotted and sickly. Lurid colors promising what everyone has always wanted but in the end just a trick of evolution, a defense mechanism, a survivalist manifesto torn from the pages of fiction, now standing in a new context and worried about the vanishing crops this year, the soy beans baking in the sun, the climate all wacked out on pills.

Fingers clenched into impotent fists, the shapes useless for picking up food for manipulating machinery for soothing skiddish horses, women, babes. Wispy clouds burning off by the afternoon, the hottest part of the day and the wine not evaporation and the glass slipping from your clenched fingers but not spilling, and the bottle being emptied but never tasted. Yellow wine that smells necessary, satisfying, pleasing. Imagination leaving reality to be another example of.

Neutral Tone Merlot

Just anything you want it to be, not what you want not, most what you want most. Silty, but shallow and transpierced with sunlight to the point of pellucidity. Features of mulberry-wood cigar box where you stash your weed, which you dig into at the low points to find water. Leather jacket over beguiling female shoulder recalling corduroy jacket over unrecoverable damsel recalling failure to act recalling failure to act recalling failed action.

We can pretend it's a movie; it's gritty enough. The sweetspot of coffee cool enough to drink and not gone acid with old age; the one sip that makes the 20oz worth carrying around on the dark and haunted subway. Footnoted with green grace. Overflowing with communication, drowning in words, choking on words, sweltering under words, brokenbacked 'neath words, deafened by words, lost by words, and desperate 'sprate 'prate 'rattling off things that can not be said to be lies but that can not, strictly, be said to be truths neither.

Far beyond the point of jammy richness, forward thinking tannic overload, and slim to no chance of recover; irrelevant is the color the body the nose the afterburn the price point; so mixed up with a bad crowd that even the hooligans don't want to be seen with you no more; lost in a thicket of your own doubts; and with nothing left to go by but the adorable little frog or prairie dog on the label, even ignoring the first thing you ever learned about wine, that warning never ever ever to buy a bottle with an animal on it because that's how they sell the cast off piss-water to the rubes, and look at what you've become since you stopped tasting with your whole self, since you let your better judgement substitute itself for the hun-and-vandal pillaging of just taking whatever you want all the time. You hear what you want to hear except when you hvae no choice. There is something so pure at the heart of the palatte here that miles of muck are worth wading through and don't say it's a mirror because i know it's not a mirror and
don't say it's a dream because i know it's a dream. The louder it gets, the more impossible it is, but eventually the question gets asked, against everyone's better judgement: What if the thing I'm scared of is exactly the opposite of the thing I should be scared of? Maybe there's no way that one, still totally desirable bittersweet note will fade, but keep coming up and up and up, well beyond the point of welcomeness. What if you don't back off? What if you not just hit against the side of the bottle with a liquid-dulled ring, but break right on through and leave the different reds to mix together?

Excess self-control? Take one bottle and call me at three in the morning.

Kashmiree Blanc

People have spent their lives trying to get back to the 1,001 flavor profiles of that first sip. They beat themselves against it, as birds do against windows or against a massive brass bell hanging in an otherwise empty hut in a dark and haunted forest, the birds do, to warn the little girl of danger, and in doing so give their lives so that she can live and that was the only time that bell was sounded and what was it doing there in the first place, who would have built a house for nothing but a bell that no one but altruistic birds would strike.

That first sip is a lake of cool clear water, housed in the basin of a volcanic peak, the highest in crisp, iced over, and disputed valley. The water drains out in rivulets that carry along your raft and down you go, and those first moments was all you ever got to see of the beauty that is growing increasingly indescribable. It is easy to float away from paradise, there are a 1,001 exits. It is not easy to climb back up. It is not easy to accept your lot outside. The road back is confused by wrong turning and deliberate obfuscation.

The wine is excellent, the crowning achievement of the vintners, with a price tag to match, but nowhere on the label does it warn that drinking it may cause inconsolable change in life-direction, vis a vis, drinking more of it, collecting the 1,001 suggested fruits in an inevitably fruitless attempt at recreation, not recreation as in golf and tennis but recreation as in the American civil war.

Hail, hail, the conquering white. Snow us in, we ask for it because we need it. Hail. Hail.

Crimea River Red

Footnoted. Constructed from the inside out. Scaffolding still up like omnidirectional icicling in a climate unused to it. When you were a child you saw water burst through a drainpipe and run off into the thirsty earth, but the water didn't run because it was frozen solid and the earth wasn't thirsty because it was frozen solid.

The most interesting and beautiful woman they'd ever met, no matter how brightly she glowed, wasn't warm enough to thaw them. There was no marked trail to the pinnacle, no winding road, no map, no gate, no illuminated shortcut; only the ironclad law of the ascent. To reach the top, a fall must be risked and the prouder the mountain animal, the stronger gravity and the deadlier the claws.

Blows gales of ice and metal. A metallic aftertaste. A coppery blood-rich finishing move that may as well be artificial, as artificial as the circumstances of the tasting, as artificial as the place we've all agreed to leave it, as artificial as artificial good cheer. Still it tastes like metal, which, while often manmade, is far from artificial. It is absurd to call human-made materials anything other than natural, anymore than birdnests or nuclear warheads are unnatural. The taste of copper; no, tungsten; no, silver, no, aphrodisiac made irrelevent by the presence of itself, squid ink on the wedding invitations and fights among the bride's friends.

The view from the top is heartstopping, in the sense that it stops hearts, in the sense that it kills you immediately, or by degrees, but big ones. The world is laid out around your feet like a broken mirror, like a mosaic, like mother of pearl inlay, like lacquer. Do you know the secret of lacquer? It is very carefully guarded. It is thin layers that add up to something deep and amazing, but each layer must be pure and therefore each heart must be pure and therefore each heart must be honest and purged and not clogged with old blackness.