Appetites: Feastin’s as Good as Enough

In the cosmos of Appetites, I’m sure the better metaphor is rather more like: we’re just ships on the open sea, playing constant violins against ourselves to make sure no mutineer’s courage cooks too hot, and everybody’s got enough–good as a feast, so I’m told. We sail around, with complicated tools (ingenious ones, really) to measure those things as old as time, if not older (the sun, the stars, the wind, the moon, and the waves that tie the whole thing into blood-sequence. We just cannot, cannot get enough of the waiting and the wanting on these seas.

I think about the first thing I learned about Burgundy: there’s just not ever going to be enough of it. (And what enough there may be is now forever stretching further and further thin over the toast.)

I certainly didn’t intend to feel the way I do about it. It was grocery-store closeouts of some premier cru & an accidentally in-depth tasting session of some Oregon wines during lineup. It was a winemaker who was so excited about my little mountain town, and the rootstock he’d grafted into live vines to make the wines he brought, and what age could do–the magic that only time brings.

That’s the critical thing for mapping Appetites. The meridian of time running through, and how close we get to this and that–to triumph and disaster.

Tony says, “What happens to a soup or a stew overnight, completely independent of what cooks may or may not have done, is magic.” That’s the ingredient everybody knows the soup and the wine rely on for the flavor; we know it’s the thing that tomatoes rely on for the ripening. We know, too, that hunger grows and recedes pleasantly if you play the game right, and heightens our love of the season, the day, the meal.

And memory uses those moments as much as anything else–loving moments, bitter heartbreaks, the dapple of sun and finger-trailing of breeze in the first green grass of spring, or the stirring of leaf and lengthening light–to mark the depth, and so chart our time on the sea. We got all sorts for this.

You have the madeleine de Proust, and I have Hemingway’s big ol Oysterslurp and his glug of cold white wine. We have birthday cakes we can taste from when we were young, or we have the haunting sensation of those Fritos that we ate right before we showed the stomach bug we’d been brewing–which ruined the corn chip smell till an old hound dog left our noses clawing at the last gasps of his stink from all the fabrics of our home. The Appetite isn’t, I reckon, some shortcut for when we want to say hunger. It’s our sensemakingest tool for searching the empty seascape, for finding our way home.

So when we look back on all the wine bottles we drained-dry, we can afford, I reckon, to talk in terms of charts. Of longitude-pulling, trusting our way into some safe harbor of hope, and joy. The sense we lived well. That includes the $6 closeouts that you found, brimming with the gentlest, spicy-rich, busiest good-wine-smells you could get your hands on. The big names that disappointed. The good-bottles-turned-bad (your own fault, almost certainly). That all makes good sense to me. We drop these lines to mark the depth.

The part that’s much harder for me to imagine is fair is that we’re supposed to take all that–those warm feelings, the cold disappointments, the bottle we don’t even know we’re gonna covet yet–and make a cellar out of that. And worse still, we’re supposed to take our workaday wages and pit them up against hedge funds, and the icy finger-tentacles of late-stage capitalism (against the mightiest forces of nihilism, really), and get our hands on the good bottles–lay them gently in our snug little cellars. And when good company comes in good time, pluck the right bottles out. 

My first experience of a wine cellar was in a Normandy farmhouse where our hosts quick-ran down the stairs for another bottle to send with us, when we’d said it had been awful good wine, and we’d had an awful good time (magnificent way to mark the depth, observe the important rites, to be fair!). And somehow, our task is to look into that best-of-possible futures and find the wine that’s drinking right, that we got enough grubby dollars left to trade for, that’ll go the distance we need it to. We need to find that wine several times a week, really, if it’s the old, rare, maladjusted birds whose feathers we share. 

So I reckon the Quixotic project of the cellar is our best interpretation for stealing as much joy for the clans we’ve best cultivated. For breaking as many breadcrumbs off the bank fellow’s loaf and passing them around to pass the time before the light slips off over the elephant hills. The wine is the anchor. The mind wanders the hills, tries to feel okay with the scope of our selves and all that: but what’s in the glass stays in the glass till we drink it gone.

Last week’s wine: 

Didier Montchovet, Bourgogne, 2017. In my neighborhood bottleshop, this bottle sat and gathered its dust a good-long spell. Nobody wanted it. And it waited long enough for me to once see it, and wonder about the producer, where that fella might’ve nabbed-up his grapes from, and even why he had a old ink-jet / clipart looking label (and why that janky label still strikes me as perfect–and even magnificent!). 

In the time that bottle sat on its perch in the shop, I learned Didier Montchovet was (at least apocryphally) the first Biodynamic fanatic in Burgundy. And further that he’d sold off his winery and hung up his spurs in the recent past. A fella named Champy now runs his old winery (which is up in the Haut Côte in a town called Nantoux).

My tasting notes are a composite of the three days I had the bottle open (on account of getting curious about the wine and its whys). It’s mid-bright fruit to my palate–not too much of the strawberry, not the redripe cherry, and not even the resplendent velvet cloak of raspberry. It felt like it lived squarely between the coldcherry and the summerfat raspberry, that fruit hiding just beyond the doorjamb. Could you also call it spicy, and even a little earthy? I reckon you could just. It was low-key, low-key, low-key. Softly, subtly, all diplomacy and tact, and waiting. 

Appetites include the wine we’re waiting to taste, and what the wine in the glass is actually waiting to do. 

On day 1, I’d decided my question was whether this wine (and other AOC Bourgogne / villages wines) was a project worth pursuing. Whether the world needed this wine? Or put more bluntly, I thought, “this is good wine, it’s so careful and balanced, but it cost $34, and do we need thirty-dollar wines that’re there to be the supporting player when we can find $10 chicken-wines that hold-together a busy dish just as much as this does?” 

In the wine-tasting book Bill Shankly never wrote, we’d have to very carefully consider not just the value of a piano-carrier, but how many piano-carriers can fit into a single bottle at one time. But lucky for us, we get to taste the wine again next day (after a corkup and night in the fridge). On day 2, I came to sense the question should have been “can we afford a thirty-dollar bottle of wine that’s NOT as kind and careful as this one?” The balance had just shifted ever-so little: like in the editin’ room how you can just pump the contrast, and maybe crop a bit on the one side, and suddenly the classic proportions, and soft lights seem to shimmer across a photograph. 

I reckon my final takeaway is I like a Burgundy that’s set out to be both hard-and-lean as gasoline-wiped arms and also as rich-robed as Pinot Meunier-rich Champagne. I want more flowers and dirt. I want the fruit that grape everything back in close with a warm embrace. I want the glycerin-thick sensation that the glass itself is warm, and moving, and alive enough to catch the light. But I’m sad I won’t be finding much more of this grand old wine around, with its homemade-looking labels, and ability to speak to a world that’s not around anymore. 

As the French say, “there’s always another vintage.” And I’ll do my best to stash as much of the right new stuff down into my cellar so I can fill your cup when you come round to visit–maybe even send you on your way with a bottle or two.