Corked (11 page)

Nast served two inches of four different wines and placed the bottles in front of our glasses, labels out, in sequence. I copied the label haltingly. Clos Château Isenbourg, 2002, Pinot Blanc. Château Isenbourg, the name of our hotel, the hotel that used to be an actual château. I nervously circled
clos
. The translation was escaping me.
Clos clos closcloslcos
….

Clos
. Closed. En
clos
ure. The château had been surrounded by a short stone enclosure. A tiny victory. I bucked up a little.

The second was a blend of Pinot Blanc, Riesling, and Tokay Pinot Gris. Les Tourelles, 2004. Then another Les Tourelles, but exclusively Riesling, 2002. And a Pfaffenheim Grand Cru Steinert, 2001.

I slid my index and middle fingers around the stem of the first glass, rested my hand over its thin base and swirled confidently and smoothly, so the light golden liquid shimmied up the sides of the glass in swelling waves. I pinched the stem in my claw, brought up the glass to my face, and shoved my nose in deep, way below the rim, as if I were a junkie huffing turpentine. I sipped, drew in a little air, and rippled my tongue against my upper palate to let the air circulate, then swallowed. Nast was doing the same, as was my dad. We set down our wineglasses. My moves were accomplished. These were moves I'd learned from my father. I relaxed and waited for the words to come.

My father's eyes were fixed on my face. I averted them and looked at Nast. Nast was staring at my father. I looked back at my father, who was now staring at the bottom of the glass. Air rumbled in my trachea as I gargled some unformed words. When I opened my mouth to breathe, the sound came out like a low, dying animal groan.
Not yet, not yet
. Nast stared at me; I tightened the corners of my mouth into an awkward metal grin and stared back into the wine in my own glass.

My father took another sip and took a note. Squinting slightly, hopefully inconspicuously, I cast my eyes sideways toward the writing—illegible. His writing was always crushed and dramatically horizontal, easy to forge, impossible to read. Finally, Nast opened his mouth to speak.

“January was cold in 2002,” he said.

I nodded knowingly.
Yes, a cold January. Cold Januaries are cold. January is one of the top three months people choose to commit suicide. That is a fun fact I know about January
. How a cold January affected grapes, I did not know.
Aren't grapes picked by January?
I lightly pressed the lip pencil onto the lines of my desk calendar to mark “cold January, 2002,” under a gray circle that told me that on June 10, I'd apparently had a meeting with my friend Stuart Berman. The fatty plum wax gooped onto the page again and smudged as my hand dragged over the writing. This was insane. I needed a real pen.

“M. Nast, could I trouble you for a pen or pencil?”

He reached into his shirt pocket, smiled, and fished one out. My dad knocked my leg under the table. I couldn't tell if it was playful or disdainful.

“The spring was rainy, but what salvaged the grapes was a big heat from August to September.”

I scribbled away. We tasted the next wine, Nast gave a précis of what the circumstances were, and then we tasted the next. At the fourth, my father was moved to comment.

“Mmm,” he said.

I took a desperate sip, fervent to follow along. “Mmm,” I mimicked.

OH RELAX
.

Loosening my shoulders, I took a deep breath. Then something happened. The wine, which had disappeared down my throat, reappeared in fragrance. But it was bigger than the initial flavor. It was
huge
.

I took another sip, swallowed, and it performed the same trick.

“Oh…mmm!”

“
T'aime ça
, Kathryn?” Nast said.

“
Oui! C'est
…uh…long.”
It's long in the mouth. It sticks around. It's getting in one last good flirt with my tongue before it disappears, turning around at all angles so I can check it out
.

“That's one of its qualities—it has a presence, this wine,” Nast said.

“Yes. Presence, yes!” I nearly shouted.

“
Belle étoffe
,” my father said.

“What's
étoffe?
” I asked.

“Material. Silky material,” he answered.

“Yeah, like there's a tiny, fancy housekeeper and she's putting a sheet on a bed by snapping it up and down, letting it billow around the mattress. It's like that pocket of air underneath the billow,” I marveled.

“Heh, not a bad image, Tootsen.”

I beamed, he beamed. The last time I saw him beam like this was when I volunteered to make a hollandaise sauce for asparagus he was steaming for dinner. He said, “When I was a cook you had to wait years to be allowed to prepare the hollandaise.” I said, “Dad, trust me.” I shoved a wrapped stick of butter in my back pocket, walked around the house for a few minutes, then whisked a bowlful of textbook hollandaise. He fell silent with pride and told me I was amazing.

“What's the grape?”

My father dragged the bottle close.

“Pinot Blanc,” he said.

“Fresh,” I said.

“Viny,” he said.

Nast poured a round of 1999 Tokay Pinot Gris. We tasted.

“Elegant,” I said.

“Yes, but authoritarian.”

“An iron fist in a velvet glove?” I hazarded, too quickly.

“Maybe, but you are better than these clichés, Tootsen,” he said.

“I'm trying,” I said.

“I know.” He put his hand over mine.

We tasted a battalion of 2003s from the clos, a Pinot Gris, a Riesling, and a Gewurztraminer.

“These are babies,” my father said.

“Charming babies,” I said. He nodded and took a note. “Charming babies you don't even want to kick across a room.” At this, my dad cackled.

A clearer light flooded through the window, turning the white of the tablecloth silvery and marking my father's and Nast's foreheads with a glowing square. I was a little drunk and extremely happy. Or extremely drunk and a little happy. Probably the former, and full of crusty bread cubes. Either way, my throat kept catching when I breathed in, an audible flutter of relief and joy.

Nast uncorked the final bottle, a 1999 Gewurztraminer Grains Nobles. It was a dessert wine, pale gold, velvety, and sweet.

“We do wine workshops with children here,” Nast said as he distributed the honeyed stuff.

“The children drink?” I asked.
Ah, France
.

“Yes, we give them a taste at the end of the tour. We show them the vineyards, the machines. Mr. Heinrich talks to them. They draw pictures, and then we give them little glasses of sweet wine.”

“I find children far more agreeable to be around when they are drunk. And I am drunk,” I said.

The men said nothing.

“M. Nast, ‘Grains Nobles' refers to grapes that have been affected by botrytis fungus, right?”

“Exactly.”

“The noble rot,” I confirmed.

“Oui, la pourriture noble,”
he reconfirmed.

If there were a feature-length article on the noble rot in a tabloid magazine, the title would read, “Bad Rot Makes Good.” I remembered being at home on a long weekend years ago and finding a wine manual, the 1987–1988 Sommelier Executive Council's
Vintage Wine Book
. It was ugly and blue and appeared to have been put together by teenage workers at Kinko's. Before I left, I stole it off my parents' bookshelf, thinking that I would study it for an hour every day until I came home again and blow my dad's mind during our next tasting. It was a short-lived attempt. Peter and I broke up a few weeks later and cast aside the project. Given the circumstances, I
had
retained one fact—the difference between shitty normal rot and the noble rot.

The noble rot is the Midas touch for certain sweet wines. The process is magical as the shit kind of rot and the good kind of rot come from the same fungus,
botrytis cinerea
. This fungus is gray and filmy, and forms when the weather is a special certain type of wet. If the weather remains wet, and the gray rot forms and sticks around, the grapes are, as the French say,
foutu
(fucked). The grapes become deflated, stanky, and unusable. But! If the moist weather is followed by a dry spell, the fungus begins wasting away the grape, sucking out its water content, and turning it into a more raisin-like berry. These berries are picked, sometimes one by one, crushed, and used to make sumptuously concentrated sweet wines: Sauternes in the Bordeaux region, Tokaji in Hungary, Beerenauslese and Trockenbeerenauslese in Austria and Germany, and Grains Nobles here in Alsace.

Maybe you are not riddled with shitty rot after all. Maybe your confusion about Matthew, about men, is like that initial rot—it can go either way
.

We thanked Nast for the tasting, and thanked him again when he hurried back and forth across the store to make us a gift of three bottles of Pfaffenheim wines.

“Merci beaucoup.”
I leaned in to give Nast the
bise
. He returned mine. We waved at him through the car window, and I did two little blasts on the horn.
Yip yip
.

“You were very charming today, Tootsen. Very charming, very smart. Nast liked you very much, it was clear.” My father was looking straight ahead, down the road that would lead us to Burgundy.

“Thank you,” I said. There was helium in my chest.

“And this evening, we will arrive in the land of Pinot Noir. You are a—”

“A Burgundy, I know. You said that before. Why? What do you mean?”

“You will see, I think, when we get there.”

The narrow road became a highway. I sped up.

 

 

“Y
ou obviously had an early penchant for wine, Tootsie. You became drunk six months after you were born at Christmastime.”

We were speeding south. My father was telling me my story. His story. All the stories. My heart was full to the brim. Occasionally, when I pour water into a cup, I'll look away and fixate on a thought, or an item in the room. Then I will hear splashing, look down, and realize I've poured water in the cup, filled it, and the water has begun to trickle down the edge of the counter like a tiny waterfall and is splashing onto the floor. Now it was my father's turn to do this, but my heart was the cup. For now, we had found our language.

He paused. “What year were you born in?” He is excellent at history, can rattle off the birth dates of most of the bottles in his cellar, but not the vintages of his children. Occasionally I'll quiz him about my birthday. “June 20?” There is always a question mark at the end of his answers. “June 23, Dad. You're getting closer.” He used to think it was June 17.

He explained that I was introduced to the concept of wine in our twelfth-floor converted apartment at the Loews Westbury Hotel in Toronto, where he was the manager. The apartment had seen many sparkling people. Celebrity guests at the hotel would be invited up to our place for elegant cocktail parties. They would use our eternal supply of small, aggressively floral-smelling soaps and our fresh toilet rolls—always fat and fluffy, never sad and shredded—with the last square folded and tucked into a downward-pointing arrow. We have snapshots in old family albums—my father standing next to heavyweight boxer Smokin' Joe Frazier, captured in grainy black and white, Frazier smiling on the balcony, squinting in the sun, my father, visibly stirred, stealing an emotional glance at him. A photo of Bjorn Borg, who won Wimbledon five times and the French Open six, his curly bangs tucked under a terry cloth headband, positioned behind my mother, awkward but ecstatic in her tennis whites, Bjorn teaching her how to correctly swing through a backhand. One of me, a pudgy, squishy, tomato-faced infant in the arms of the incendiary U.S. Open champion Ilie Nastase.

“He thought you were cute, Ilie Nastase,” he said, “but remember, this is also the same man who showed up to play a match against Arthur Ashe in blackface.”

“What are you saying?”

“That you were a
vahree
ugly baby. You looked like a cross between a pitbull and Winston Churchill,” he said.

“Thanks.”

He reached out, tweaked my earlobe, and continued.

Apparently, on the day of my accidental alcoholic indoctrination, my parents were entertaining a distinctly less illustrious crowd. It was December 23, and the Borels were having a family Christmas party for the Blackmores, my mother's side of the family. All British, the Blackmores had not yet wholly embraced my father's presence in their clan.

“They were wary of me,” said my father. “I am French. They found me bizarre. They did not feel comfortable with the 10-year age difference between Blondie and me, maybe. And, of course, we were not yet married. Your grandfather called me his ‘sin-in-law.'”

I snorted and drummed my hands on the steering wheel. A bug exploded on the windshield.

Given the context, the evening called for dramatic amounts of booze, so my dad ordered many bottles of wine, enough to fell a battalion of Charles Bukowskis. As the evening wore on and the bottles were drained, I was left to cruise around the living room with the help of my ExerSaucer, a streamlined contraption made of plastic and vinyl that looks not unlike a cross between a harness, a lounge chair, and a small spaceship on wheels—for babies who have not yet mastered the art of bipedalism. I might not have known how to walk, but I definitely knew how to maneuver the ExerSaucer, and I absolutely knew how to drink, and because no one in the room could tolerate one another if they were drinking water, all that was available for drinking on those low-lying 1970s-style tables were the red and white alcoholic dregs at the bottoms of various glasses.

“And that is what you drank,” my father said.

“Did you take me to the hospital?”

“No. Blondie found you in a pile in your little machine. You were crying a little bit. When she removed you, you began screaming and being sick.”

“Funny.”

Funny. A harbinger of what was to come. I might not have been born with wine in my blood, but at least I had the good sense to put it there at a very early age
. I stared at a weird bird that was hovering in the sky, in the distance. It was like a little baby pterodactyl, coasting in wide, swooping ovals. I thought about how this story—the first involving me and wine—set up the relationship I'd been having with wine during my entire adult life.

We approached a sign for a gas station.

“Let's pull over,” he said.

“We don't need gas.” I tapped the plastic containing the speedometer and odometer and the other meters.

“I want coffee and nougat. I want to eat so much nougat.”

The sign said “
Pétrole
” and “
Nougat de Montélimar
.” A gas-and-nougat station. My father used to bring home great slabs of it when I was a child. He would make sure to buy the kind that came wrapped in a dark red bow. He would present it to me with a flourish, pulling it out from under a pile of yacht club sweaters in his suitcase. After thanking him with my most convincing hug, I would march up to my room and place it on my small desk, waiting for the moment when he would walk in, take it, and walk out, immediately cracking open the plastic. I didn't like nougat. It was the point of contact I loved.

I dumped a handful of coins into the Nescafé dispenser in the gas station's massive gift shop/convenience store. My father stared at the wall of nougat, eventually selecting the third-largest bar available. We returned to the car and continued south.

“What about you?” I asked.

“What about me what?” he asked.

“What about the first time you had wine?”

“Mine was just as traumatic as yours, Toots.” Crumbs of pistachio and flecks of nougat coated his lap.

“Go on, tell me.”

“
Eet
was two years after the end of World War II. My father decided to put me in Scouts. ‘
Tu vas être un homme
,' he said. I was eight and chubby. The troop went on a lot of hikes, you know? This is what Scouts did. It also cost the organization very little money, which was good. One day in August—one of those oppressive days with lots of
beeg
heat—the troop was taking its afternoon hike. I was stuck somewhere in the middle of the pack, close to a group of older boys who seemed to be sharing an inside joke. I wanted to be there, with them, so I walked faster and hovered around them until they finally noticed me. They nodded to each other, laughing a little. Then they handed me a dirty canteen and ordered, ‘Drink. When you walk with us, you're a man.' I thought,
Good! I am here to be exactly that, a man!
I took the canteen. The sun was boiling, I was very thirsty. There was no wind that day, and I'd had no water all afternoon. But there was no water in that canteen. Instead, there was a boiling hot, treacly syrup, the cheapest red wine you can imagine. I didn't want to disappoint them, so I just drank and drank until the canteen was empty.”

“Did you die of death?” This was an ancient inside joke resurrected spontaneously, but it caused a twang of pain to burst inside me. I shifted uncomfortably, immediately regretting the joke.

“No, Tootsie, I did not. An hour later, I woke up,” he said. “I felt like…It felt like…
Eet
was like….”

“Like a bowling ball had been implanted in your head and there was a disco inside that bowling ball and the whole thing was trying to expand its way out of your skull,” I finished.

“Yes. Nice image, Tolstoya.”

I giggled stupidly.

“So, I woke with the troop standing over me. The older boys were laughing. My poor virginal liver! I was not a man, I was a boy, and I was a boy filled with the shame of not being a man.”

“Poor little Dad.”

“I said I would never drink again. I did not, until my downfall.” He took a dramatic breath.

I nervously switched lanes to bypass a truck that had jackknifed on the road.
Stupid death dumb driving joke idiot no death jokes while driving stupid tiny car on big road stupid stupid. Scrambled eggs brain
. I gripped the wheel hard.

“Don't you want to hear about my downfall?”

“Yeah. Yeah, of course. You saw I had to pass that truck, right? And the ambulances? And the police cars? You saw all that, right?”

“I don't care about those things. I want to tell you my story,” he said, blind to my white knuckles.

“You are a ridiculous human being sometimes.” I reached out and grabbed his shoulder. By squeezing it, I thought he might sense my nerves and complete the acrostic of my emotions.
How do you tell your father you do not want him to die?

“
You
are a
reediculous
human being” he countered, smiling, unaware.

“Obviously I am a ridiculous human being I am made of parts of you.”

“True. Here, listen. My downfall happened in April of 1960. I was 21 years old, living in Montreal, working for Air France in the catering division.”

“And you got drunk and fell down.”
Just keep cracking jokes until you're okay
.

“You're almost right. I mean, I never recovered,” he said. “I have actually never really fully stood upright since.” I glanced at his bum knee. He went on.

“That year, Air France switched its long courier fleet from conventional planes—Lockheed Super Constellations, big four-engine, propeller-driven planes—to jets…Boeing 707s. Before the
sweetch
, a trip across the North Atlantic from Paris to Montreal would have taken 18 hours. There were stopovers in Shannon, Ireland, and Gander, NewFOUNDland.” His accent caused him to trip over the name. “NEWfoundLAND,” he stopped again, knitting his brow. “Toots?”

“
Newfund-land
,” I said, enunciating deliberately.
You are in control
.

“Yes,
Newfundland
. So, with the new jets, the same trip took only seven hours. The inaugural flights in the new airplanes were reserved for Air France's most important customers. There were movie stars, sports legends, politicians, businessmen. The first-class cabin carried 34 passengers, the economy cabin, 107.”

I marveled at his aptitude for detail.

“
Zee
food was prepared in the kitchen at Paris's Orly Airport by a team of chefs, old, knowledgeable pros. The Air France chefs were ordered to cook enough to feed 150 travelers. We called them
les goinfrés
, ‘the eaters'. But just in case, they usually prepared enough food to feed 210 passengers. This was a time when plane food really meant something. The meals began with fresh beluga caviar. Then foie gras in aspic, followed by Roscoff lobster medallions with fresh mayonnaise. Next, they were served seared veal chops in cream sauce with chanterelles, and beef tenderloin in
Marchand de Vin
sauce. After that, a
petite salade rafraîchie
. The meal ended with a tray of 30 cheeses from Androuet, the greatest
fromager
in Place de Paris. And then a selection of little tarts and cakes. Each dish was accompanied with wine. To drink, they began with champagne, either Krug Grande Cuvée or Taittinger Comtes de Champagne. Then some white Grands Crus from Burgundy, sometimes Bienvenues-Bâtard-Montrachet or even, from time to time, the Montrachet Marquis de Laguiche.” He uttered the last name in a halting whisper.