happened

So some stuff has happened in the meantime. In that gap created between times I’ve written here. I’ve been back to Scotland, and sat in the sun on Islay sipping whisky and beer and eating something fresh from the sea. When the breeze died the midges appeared and fed on us, but it was breezy on the beach when we popped the Champagne and drank it even though our legs hurt. The sky so blue it pierced. And Loch Indaal sapphire, but for the odd white horse. The hills and fields an undulating green banner between them with the white buildings of Bowmore dotted against it all, tall black letters spelling the name of the distillery and town all at once.

I went to France and made wine. The Vermentino bubbled in its ferment like a bath with too much Imperial Leather poured in. It tasted of lemon barley and oats. The mist rolled in the from the sea and crept up the hills and mountains. I drank old Armagnac and stumbled in attempts to speak the language. Loose schist and pebbles fell beneath my feet as I stooped to pick bunches of grapes high up in the hills behind Banyuls. Thibault and I drank beer in a bar by the beach and we talked about wine and women. Andy and Julien and I drank strong Belgian beer next to the sailboats in Argeles after work and I don’t remember what we talked about, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the pretty Italian girl on the picking team came up once or twice. Her name was Luna. Everyone fancied her. I fancied the other one. I don’t remember her name. One night we decanted a couple of wines, Andy and I, and stayed up late in the gallery drinking and listening to music. The wines opened and we talked about them and the world around them. We drank all the whisky I brought and more. I returned to London but wasn’t quite sure why.

Summer turned and the leaves fell and now autumn is almost gone as well.

The Red Sox won. I stayed up late to see.

Mezcal, Old Fashioneds and Sazeracs stood lined on the bar, with shooters of sangrita to chase. We drank them, too many of them, and stumbled out into the Soho night. My bus never came, so I grabbed another. 

Wine sipped, glugged and sometimes spat. Old friends caught up with over beers and burgers. Plus ça change. 

I wrote and edited and amended and did it all again. I checked proofs and drafts and covers. I submitted and re-submitted. I drank pints and chatted with my publisher about costs and dates and rates and boards and dust jackets. I waited and then corrected again. I got it right, I think. It got sent to press, that book of mine, and soon it will be real. 

And now it’s now, and there’s a journey soon. 

be de plage

There was this one night in France. It was the first night. We sat around a table, dinner finished, tasting some wines and chatting about whatever. We were the last ones in the restaurant. It wasn’t bad, as seaside *** hotel restaurants go. The colour scheme, with its luminous orange napkins and waterglasses, may have been ill-suited to January. The orange may have clashed somewhat with the battle-ship grey upholstery adorning the chairs, but the food was decent and the wine list good. My bavette was chewy, but bavette is supposed to be a bit chewy. 

I was tired but relaxed. I think we all were.

I watched him walk through the door. Fashionable and drunk, with exaggerated movements of all limbs. I knew he was English, though his look had a Gallic edge to it. I could see the barrage of profanities swelling inside, seeking some poor member of staff to pour forth upon. As he entered further into the restaurant, someone at my table recognised him and called him over. We all shook hands. He wasn’t quite sure whether to speak in French or English. He swore the restaurant was shit. Told us we needed to go to this place.

‘The B de Plage, man. I’m sure there’s something funny going on there. Must be loads of coke in the toilets. It’s the place to be. What are we drinking? More fucking Grenache?’

‘Syrah.’

‘More fucking Syrah, then. I’ve lost the key to my room. I think I left it at the B de Plage. We’ve got to get there. It’s the place be.’

We sipped our glasses as he patted his pockets again and again, looking for the keycard to his room. Every few seconds there came a shit or a fuck as he failed to locate it.

‘So we’ve got to get out of here. Got to go.’

‘Go where?’

‘B de Plage.’

‘It’s the place to be, apparently.’

‘Yeah, but there’s something on going on in the toilets. Have you seen my key?’

We all fancied a beer. The sober one of us offered to drive. Where to go?

‘B de Plage.’

We piled into the rental. My search for B de Plage on google maps failed. The one way system of Le Gau du Roi confounded us; we wound up driving in all manner of circles. Drunken directions erupted from our guest from time to time. Often just ‘no, no, no... it’s just over there’ or ‘I’ve no fucking idea where the fuck it is’ and often 'it's by the fucking beach, obviously, it's the B de fucking Plage'.

Doubt spread among us. It became Cortez’s city, or de Leon’s fountain. We aimed for the beach, and frequently missed. Still my map showed no prize. We were driving blind, guided by a howling drunken lunatic whose ravings could well have been that of the ancient mariner for all we knew. All attempts to apply logic to our course failed. We hit the same roundabouts and took different exits, only to find they led to the same places and yet more roundabouts. The rental car took some speed bumps a bit too fast and we hooted as the car leapt; cringed when the undercarriage simply scraped along.

Another circuit and we admitted failure. Decided the ancient mariner had imagined it in a booze-tinted haze. The car pulled up to the hotel and as we tumbled out I heard him say,

'I found it.'

'What? The bar? It's not fucking here, is it?'

'My key.' 

He wandered inside, sanctuary rediscovered. We decided to drink on the beach under the stars. The January air was mild and the sea lapped quietly at the sand as the constellations twinkled and we drank our wine. 

Glasses empty, we wandered back to the hotel, into the empty lobby. One of us picked up a black business card from a table covered in fliers and such things for local venues.

There was a gold 'B' emblazoned on it, and, in smaller text beneath, 'de plage'.

It existed.

salt & old vines

I'm back in London now, after a good two weeks working vintage at Mas Cristine. There's that post-vintage feeling, where my body heals itself while my heart and mind miss the work, the sunshine and the friendships. My hands and fingers are still leathery and calloused and a touch arthritic. I open and close them for a few minutes in the morning to get them working again. 

I need them working, as I've a lot of typing to do. You see, I've a book to finish. A book that has a publisher and everything. It's a story about wine, which is appropriate. A story about making wine down where the mountains meet the sea.

The publishers are the lovely folks at Unbound. They're a new-fangled publisher and raise support for their books in a crowd-fund-y kind of way. Most of their authors are terribly exciting and some even very famous. How they found space for an aspiring writer and hopeless wine nerd is beyond me, but I'm happy they did. 

So if you read this blog and would like to buy my book, please sign up to support the project here. You get your name in the book and everything. Isn't that exciting?

south and then further south

The train's sat in Kirkaldy for longer that it should be. Bright August sun pours through the window and the surface of the Forth dances and glimmers in the morning light. A few cargo ships sit scattered on the water.

It's been a long week. Good food and old friends, fine wine and gallons of beer, all shared and some spilled. Laughter so strong and hard that you clutch your chest and fight to get air into your lungs.

I see across to the Lothians now and to Arthur's Seat, sat to the left of Edinburgh, dwarfing the city.

There were birthdays and singing and dancing. I woke to the sun and the cat asleep at the foot of my bed. I suffered only one or two hangovers, but maybe deserved a few more.

One story ended the only way it could, no matter how much I wanted to rewrite it. It's not a tale to tell, but I'll turn it over in my head for a time to come.

Loads of people board the train at Inverkeithing. I don't blame them. I'd get out of Inverkeithing too.

London this evening and then France tomorrow. I fly to Toulouse and then head down to Collioure to make wine for my fifth vintage. I bought new boots and took my wine-stained shirts out of the closet. I'm bringing good whisky with me, and a thirst for good wine.

We're now sat for too long at Haymarket. Still miss the Caley Ale House. The gap where it stood looks simply as though it's been erased, and never was.

I've been moving a lot recently. South and north like a yo-yo, and soon even further afield. I'm bored of packing and fretting about what I've forgotten. But I like the sense of motion, the sense of movement and progression. Another mile travelled, another blank page filled. New stories to start, perhaps without the sad ache of inevitability.

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the weekend passes

There was wine and beer and old friends and new friends. I cooked and we all drank. In a tremendous fit of nostalgia, we re-canted wines from decanter to bottle and wandered down to the end of the pier in the never-dimming light of a summer evening. We swigged merrily from the bottles as we navigated the cobbles and kept far from the edge and the water below. The pub beckoned, but we only lasted a pint before staggering home.

Sunday felt rather dreadful. But it was worth it. 

splattered

I own a lot of t-shirts. They sit, folded with reasonable competence, in three piles, on the top shelf of my closet. Two of the piles are the t-shirts I wear regularly, pretty much everyday. Those are the two front piles and they're stacked high. The shirts in those piles are varied - some are beer freebies, many are Red Sox tees, and quite a few possess quirky graphics or phrases that appeal to whatever mood I was in when I bought them. I like my t-shirts to have some sort of meaning to me. I don't know why.

The third pile is smaller and sits in their shadow. I have to take out one of the other piles to get to them. Those shirts are not worn everyday, or even monthly. They get worn pretty much once a year.

Technically speaking, they're clean. They've been thoroughly laundered and detergent, be it Ecover, Bold or Persil, has done all it can for them. They don't look clean. The white ones, if they can still be called that, bear the full brunt; splattered and smeared with uneven blotches of grey, black and jaundiced brown, front and back, sleeve and chest and belly, looking for all the world as though I'd slaughtered something long ago whilst wearing them.

I didn't slaughter anything. Honest.

It's the mark of grapes in their thousands and perhaps millions.

Out came that third pile this morning. I lay them on my bed, smiled, refolded each one and packed them tightly into my duffel bag. Each one has three vintages worth of winemaking stains so deeply pummelled into the fabric that they must be now a part of it. Tomorrow I'll start pummelling the fourth vintage into them, and I couldn't be happier about it.

electron microscopes

I honestly don't remember the first time I saw an image taken by an electron microscope. If I told you a day, a situation, a tv show, a class, an idle thumb through a magazine on a slow Sunday where the dust sifted softly in the sunbeam through the living room window, I'd be lying. I may have seen it in school, though I doubt it, knowing my school at the time. TV is equally unlikely - aside from cartoons it was the A-Team or The Dukes of Hazzard - neither known for their cutting edge science imagery.

In all truth, it was probably a magazine. It may not have been a slow Sunday though, and there may not have been sifting dust. It may have been raining.

So the details surrounding my discovery are hazy. As is the image itself. I'm pretty sure it wasn't pollen. Pollen came later, and was hugely popular - along with dust mites and allergens in general - among the electron microscope model agencies. I think, and I can't be sure, but I think it was either the head of a needle or the corner of a microchip. I want to think it was the head of the needle.

I do remember how I felt the first time I saw an image (whatever it may have been) taken by an electron microscope (where-ever and whenever I saw it). I felt confusion and wonder. Mostly the latter. Wonder at a world so small as to be invisible looking so enormous and alien. I sought more, and flipped pages of National Geographic and 1-2-3 Contact and Discover looking for images. The pollen and dust mites didn't really interest me - it was the everyday things, like the head of a needle, things that seemed solid, flawless and perfect in their form, revealed to be imperfect, ridged, fibrous, ragged, hugely complex and often flawed at a microscopic level. Even the geometric perfection and symmetry of crystals bent and twisted with a close enough look. They all seemed to come from the negative zone, bizarre shades of blue or purple against black, alien shapes and daunting landscapes. That such a simple thing could boast its own landscape...

There was so much more than what you saw.

I remember at one point seeing the daunting precipice that was the face of a single ridge of a finger print and staring at my thumb thereafter for an hour, trying to imagine that same precipice occuring over and over again, on every uniquely individual line on both my hands and being unable to fathom it. I'd be lying if I told you when and where I was. Very early eighties and Boston's as close as it gets. I might have been on one of the semi-circular, cream upholstered chairs in the library, occasionally kicking the wall to spin it slowly as I stared at the pictures and read the captions. My mom yelled at me, telling me to keep my feet off the wall. I'd say sorry and do it again 15 minutes later.

I looked at my fingerprints, on both hands, and they weren't a pretty sight. The pigment of a million or more grape skins stained the grooves between the ridges. Cuts sliced perpendicular to their idiosyncratic patterns. Never parallel. My cuticles ragged and dyed. The nails unintentionally painted.

A bottle of wine is a simple thing. A liquid encased in glass closed with a cork, or quite often a screw cap. Grapes seem quite a simple fruit, grown in bunches on vines. They come in different colours, the wines and the grapes. Most of my professional life has dealt with wine in this form, the bottled form. A cork screw and glasses are all that's required, though accompanying food is a treat, good company's a bonus and if it's the wee hours on a secluded beach with a roaring bonfire, the glasses are optional.

It's fairly simple. That said, washing one's hands is fairly simple and yet no amount of scrubbing seemed to take away the dye.

I helped make wine. It's fairly simple. You pick grapes and control their fermentation in a way that prevents the juice turning to vinegar. The result is aged and encased in glass and sealed with a cork.

It was still dark at 6, when we got to the winery. The winemaker worked under the dim bulbs in the half light, already there. No matter how early we arrived, he was already there. That cool pale light just creeping on the horizon, the winery in shadows. We set up and tasted the still-fermenting juice with half opened eyes, our morning coffees a memory. We navigated the tanks, the barrels, the various apparatus of the winery, be it stained oak or shining stainless steel. The tiredness doesn't slow us, and with every scribbled note or bit of machinery checked, our eyes opened that little bit more.

The grapes started to arrive. Dark jewels, beset with pinprick droplets of condensation. Their ripeness glowed. I loaded them onto the conveyor, which loaded them into the destemmer, which dropped them into the crusher, which dropped them onto the sorting table, which dropped them onto the second sorting table, which dropped them into the pump, which shot them into the 4000 litre stainless steel tank.

The odd berry fell onto the concrete floor and looked for all the world like a child's marble.

Sometimes it was me on the sorting table, spreading piles of the fruit, the sugary juice and tattered skins and globules of the flesh and countless seed coating my arms up past my elbows. My t-shirt stained purple. That freedom of being dirty, caked in the work, knowing its inevitability and taking pride that your work leaves its mark on you, that keeps you going until someone calls lunch. I sprayed down my arms and face with the hose and we ate bread and cheese and drank someone else's effort.

After lunch and there was more to do. The food revived us but the muscles started getting sore. From aches to burns to the uncountable lacerations on the hands and anywhere else a limb took the hit instead of the fruit.

It got hot but there was a breeze. From one job to another, when something needed to wait, there was always something else to do. Either up ladders or in the bottom of a vat, shoes off, pushing the last of the macerated and fermented grape detritus into the press, to squeeze that last bit out. To get those final drops of quality juice, for it to age and mature and eventually be put into a simple bottle.

At the end of the day we wandered into the Café Sola, filthy, caked in fruit, exhausted, waiting for the sore to set in for the evening. Beer never tasted so good.

My hands are cleaner now, the cuts healed. I feel a bit of loss. My muscles don't ache any more than usual. It's far colder here than it was there. I wake up after 530 whenever I can. Though, I'll confess, once or twice a week I'll raise my head in the dark and for a moment think it's time to get up.

And I look at a bottle of wine and I see terraced vineyards, vats of steel and barrels of oak, loose grapes like marbles, the pickers laughing at the lost American and smoking their roll-ups while gathering the harvest, the machines of the making: the press and pumps and destemmers. I hear the crackle of a fresh loaf at lunch, feel the warm, fermenting juice shoot between my fingers as I rack from one vat to the other. I listen to the winemaker's quiet words while tasting, hoping to hear 'bon' at the end of the sentence. And I think about electron microscopes, and the heads of needles, and the strange and alien universes held in the liquid encased in a simple glass bottle enclosed with a cork.

Or sometimes a screwcap.