German Catalog 2006 USE THIS ONE.qxp - Michael Skurnik Wines

As a junior in high school I took honors-English.
Figures, right? I must admit I had no great love of reading;
I rather had great love for the young woman who
taught honors English, Jane Stepanski. Every year I realize
how much Jane forgave us, and every year it seems
like more.
I wasn’t actually a nerd; I was a freak exactly two
years before everyone else was. It was painfully solitary
for awhile, and I craved a pack, any pack, and honors
English helped satisfy the craving. Oh I read some, but
mostly I was earnest and clueless. I recall a time when my
classmates were especially derisive at what they called
“truth-and-beauty poems.” I went along with the prevailing
contempt; truth-and-beauty poems: pfui! Only ignorant
clods liked those. What kinds of poems did I like?
Um, er, ah . . . well—ahem—um, y’know, all kinds of
poems as long as they are not truth-and-beauty poems.
It might appear as though I look back on all this with
disdain. Far from it. I see it as pitiable; we were so needy,
we hungered for any scrap of certainty, any piece of solid
floor we could stand on. And so we struck our fatuous
attitudes and somehow Jane Stepanski didn’t spit at us.
I got into wine as a man of twenty five. I was like
every fledgling wine geek; it consumed me every hour of
the day. Alas it also consumed anyone in my proximity
for a couple years, for I was as great a wine-bore as has
ever trod the earth. But I was greedy for knowledge, or
rather for information, and I did as every young person
does: I sought to subdue the subject by accumulating
mastery over it. Ignorance was frustrating, and uncertainty
was actively painful. And lo, there came a day when I
felt I had at least as many answers as I had questions. I
started, mercifully, to relax.
I was amazingly lucky to get my basic wine education
in Europe, where I lived the first five years of my
drinking life. It gave me a solid grounding in the
“Classics” of the wine world. I still believe it does the
novice nothing but good to drink somewhat aloof, cool
wines to start. (S)he is thus encouraged to approach a
wine, to engage it, to have a kinetic relationship with it.
This is substantially less possible (If not outright impossible)
with most new-world wines, which want to do all
the work for you, which shove you prone onto the sofa
saying “You just watch, and I’ll strut my stuff.”
Eventually, I came to see wine as the mechanical rabbit
that keeps the greyhounds running along the track.
No matter how much “knowledge” I hoarded, the ultimate
target was the same distance away—if not further.
The “truth” of wine, it seemed, was a sliding floor . . . and
even then you had to first gain access to the room. This
frustrated my craving for certainty, for command, for
mastery. And for a period of time I was angry at wine.
Now I rather think wine was angry with me. But, as
patiently as my old honors-English teacher, wine set
about teaching me what it really wanted me to know.
First I needed to accept that in wine, uncertainty was
an immutable fact of life. “The farther one travels, the less
A Little Essay About Nothing Much
one knows.” There was no sense struggling against it; all
this did was retard my progress toward contentment. But it
is a human desire to know, to ask why. Would wine always
frustrate that desire as a condition of our relationship?
Far from it. But I was asking the wrong why. I was
asking why couldn’t I know everything about wine? I
needed to ask why I couldn’t, why none of us ever can.
The essential uncertainty exists ineluctably, or so it
seemed, and the most productive questions finally
became clear. What purpose does this uncertainty serve?
What does it want of me?
One answer was immediately clear: there would be
no “answer.” There would, however, be an endless stream
of ever-more interesting questions. And questions, it
began to seem, were indeed more interesting than
answers. In fact it was answers which were truly frustrating,
for each answer precluded further questions. Each
answer quashed, for a moment, the curiosity on which I’d
come to feed. It seemed, after all, to be questioning and
wondering which kept my elan vital humming.
The less I insisted on subduing wine, the more of a
friend it wanted to be. Now that I know that wine is an
introvert which likes its private life, I don’t have to
seduce away its secrets with my desire to penetrate. The
very uncertainty keeps it interesting, and wine has
grown to be very fine company. I’m inclined to guess that
the uncertainty wants to remind me to always be curious,
always be alert to the world, always be grateful that
things are so fascinating, and to remember to be grateful
for the hunger. Because the hunger is life. Accepting the
irreducible mystery of wine has enabled me to immerse
myself in it more deeply than I ever could when I sought
to tame it.
Immersion has come to be the key. I am immersed in
the world, the world is immersed in me. There are filaments
and connections, always buzzing and always
alive. The world is not a commodity destined for my use;
its cells are my cells, its secrets are my secrets. And every
once in a while, usually when I least expect it, wine
draws its mouth to my ear and says things to me. Time is
different than you think. A universe can live inside a spec of
flavor. There are doors everywhere to millions of interlocking
worlds. Passion is all around us always. The earth groans
sweetly sometimes, and small tears emerge, and tell us everything.
Beauty is always closer than it seems. When you peer
through the doorway, all you see is desire.
You hear these words and it all sounds like gibberish,
a stream of sound which doesn’t amount to anything and
only confuses things more. But if you’ve ever held a
restive infant, there’s a little trick you can do. Babies like to
be whispered to; it fascinates them. They get a far-away
look on their little faces, as if angels had entered their bodies.
And so I do not need to know what wine is saying to
me; it is enough that it speaks at all, enough that it leaves
me aware of meanings even if these don’t fall neatly into a
schemata, enough how sweet it feels, the warm moist
breath of beauty and secrets, so soft and so close to my ear.
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