Corked (7 page)

“AH!”

“This is the exit?”

“That is the exit.”

The Citroën's headlights flashed over a white sign with a word on it that spelled v-i-c-t-o-r-y.

I-T-T-E-R-S-W-I-L-L-E-R.

“Awesome.”

“We are not there yet.”

“Why do you have to be so ominous? This town is tiny. Piece of cake. Hotel Arnold, right?”

“You are on the wrong road.”

“How many goddamn roads does this town have?”

“Ah, Tootsie, that's enough,
hein?” Langage, s'il te plaît!
” His tone was a knife.

“Fine. FINE. What road am I supposed to be on?”

“Route des Vins.”

“And what road am I on?”

“Route Epfig.”

“But is this a road in Itterswiller, or have I driven out of town?”

“Turn the car around.”

“Oh,
now
you're the great and all-knowing navigator? NOW?”

“Turn.”

“Have I passed through Itterswiller or what?”

“Turn the car.”

The road was the width of a yoga mat; my three-point turn was a 38-point turn. My skull was so hot I was convinced my eyeballs would turn to jelly and ooze out my sockets. Leagues beyond frustrated, I jerked the shift around the gearbox violently and bashed my boot alternately into the brake, clutch, and accelerator.

“Take it easy, Tootsen.” He'd sandpapered the edges off his voice. His words were an olive branch. Smaller—an olive twig—but it was enough. I felt a tiny explosion of relief in my chest, allowing me to release more breath than I had been able to for the last hour.

“All right. We're almost there. I can smell it. So, we go straight?”

“Yes, Tootsen.”

Route Epfig miraculously turned into Route des Vins.

“Yesssss,” I sighed.

Dinner was cordial. I was tired, he was sick, so we were quiet. My face was a pulsating mass—I'd forgotten to buy balm for my cold sore at the pharmacy. If stuck with a ballpoint pen, it would explode. In the hotel's tidily rustic dining room, he ate plain rice, while I stabbed around at my vegetables. They were well-buttered and rolled elusively over the plate.
Isn't this supposed to be the time of our lives? Shouldn't his face be in soft focus? Today provided no material for a montage scene. Dah dah dah! We are driving! Oh yeah…here we go! To the place! And the other place! Smiles and laughs! His past, my past, here's the metaphor, emotional similarities—oh you do that too? I thought I was the only one!

I was waving my fork in the air, languidly following a fly that was buzzing around the discarded leftovers from our
amuse-bouches
: tiny chunks of salami on mini sunflower seed buns. I smashed the fork into the table whenever it settled on an item that would not break.

“How are you feeling right now?”

“Oh, up and down, Tootsie. You know.”

“And what if you can't drink anything?”

“Then I don't drink anything.”

“But how will I learn?” What I meant was,
How will I learn about you?

“I don't know.”

He shook his head a bit and pushed the plate away, then caught the waiter's eye and looped his wrist around twice.

In my room, the MTV show “Pimp My Ride” was on television. In German. Xzibit, a Detroit-born rapper with angry eyes and cornrows, was asking his car-pimping colleague what it would take to adequately pimp a teenage girl's old rattletrap of a car. I tried to follow along, but I couldn't, despite my two years of university German.

I fell asleep hoping tomorrow would be easier to decipher than this show.

At 8:30, I was woken up by some crows. I rolled out of bed and walked to the window to shout at them. I opened my mouth, but the scene below was too serene to be upset with my shouting. White morning sky, layers of rolling hills, lush and stem green and dark green and misty blue; a tall beige farmhouse, its cheery, rusty-colored roof and black cutout windows that stared at me like cute square cartoon eyes.

“CAW! CAW CAW!” said the crows. They were hiding in the Christmas trees. The trees in Alsace all look as if they should be in the living rooms of giants, in December.

I put my hands on my hips and answered them in a scream whisper. “CAW, CAW, jerks.”

At breakfast, my questions were conceived by The Clash. They were troublesome: (1) Should we stay or should we go? (2) Should we stay or should we go
now?

I couldn't do this without him, and staring into his cloudy eyes, I knew that I likely would not be doing it with him.

“What's the deal? Are we on today or what?”

“Yes, we're going.”

“Good. Great! So you'll taste with me?” Relief.

“We'll see.”

“We'll see?”

“Yes, that's what we'll do. See. We will see.”

My dad rose and hovered over me. He pursed his lips and squeezed out a wide teardrop of spit.

I looked up at him. “I dare you.”

The spit space between the bottom of the tear and his pursed lips grew longer and longer.

“Don't. Don't don't don't. I don't dare you anymore.”

Right before the dribble hit my ice water, he reached out and deftly caught the blob. He cackled and wiped it on his jeans. What was he thinking? Where was his sense of
decorum?
Where had he put it? Would he find it again in Rémy Gresser's cellar? I shook off my nervousness. This is what I love about this guy. About us. We fake spit on each other. That's our thing. Team Borel.

“Let's get this show on the road,” he said.

“There is no doubt. You are a show.”

“Oh yeah? I
theenk
you are a show,” he said.

And so we left the hotel, put our show in the car, and took it on the road.

 

 

W
e were to meet Rémy Gresser at 10:30. My heart was racing the way it had on the plane after those sips of bog-water wine. I confusedly stumbled over my reasons for being in that car, on this road.
Death. Dad. Chemistry. Wine
. Layered on top of my anxiety to conjure real feelings for the wines we would taste, was the realization that I'd actually never been to a professional tasting in my adult life.
What's the protocol? What questions should I ask? When should I spit and when should I swallow? What if the wine is corked and I look like an idiot again? How much am I even supposed to talk?
At the breakfast table, I'd thought about my complex love for Peter years ago, and how at first I'd kept it to myself, conspiratorially. Weeks went by as I'd stabilized my core and strengthened my tongue enough to form the Three Big Words. Much of me was afraid that the words and feelings wouldn't match up, and once they were uttered, they'd no longer be applicable. They'd somehow sound wrong and just flop around like suffocating fish and die. Finally, one night, when we were lying in bed about to go to sleep, I felt him twitch. When I looked over at him, I saw his eyes were locked on the ceiling and wide as moons. He began to scavenge nervously for words. He was making half-sentences, quarter-sentences. He'd stop and start again. After a minute or two, I realized it was a preface, the preface I needed. I blurted, “
I know, I love you too
.” Then we both began laughing hysterically. My words had curled up into him perfectly. We built our love out of language, and it was a grand and beautiful home.

But then the accident happened, and all the words we invented turned into those awkward flapping fish.

Over breakfast, I'd mentally noted a brigade of unconventional wine descriptors.
Develop a language framework, like you did with Peter
. My father had always loathed the standard fruits-and-vegetables descriptions for wine. He thinks pairings are a sham and snorts at those who propagate old wine snob clichés (“ABC—Anything but Chardonnay!” or “I only love big jammy Australian shiraz!”) As I had been systematically annihilating the pastry basket, I'd also been thinking of pastry-related words that could also apply to wine, maybe, depending on the wine: flaky, doughy, fragrant, pointy, spongy, ephemeral, airy, golden, delicious, croissant-y, icing-stuck-to-the-plastic-top-of-freezer-aisle-cakey. I moved onto adjective for tannins, not knowing exactly what they were.
Tannins. Red wine has tannins, but I actually have not a hot clue what they are. In a tasting, tannins always come up. People say, “Smooth tannins”…“Broad tannins”…I should prepare a sentence including this word. Does white wine have tannins?
My father stared out the window, and I watched his eyes flicker lazily from left to right and left to right and left to right as he watched the Alsatian Christmas trees zip by on their yellow grassy carpets.

“Does white wi—” I stopped myself. This question was stupid, I was sure of it. This question would disappoint him.

“Huh?”

“No. No, nothing. I was going to ask you something, but I answered my own question. Carry on.” I had not answered my own question, but it was probably one of those questions that would be answered for me, in time, if I kept quiet and observed the interactions between my father and the viticulturists, and my father and the wine.
That is, if he participates. If he participates, I will employ this perceptive process of elimination
.

As we drove into Gresser's tiny town of Andlau, a Ferrari hurtled by, spraying the side of our Picasso with dust that went
clink clink clink
. I yelped; he sighed.

“How can you buy a yellow Ferrari?” he said with exasperation, hand clutching his stomach.

“Dad, can you keep on the lookout for Route de l'Ecole, please?”

“Only a sick person buys a yellow Ferrari,” he responded.

“We're late,” I said. My nerves were tingling.

“I know.”

By the time we pulled up to the Gressers' low-roofed L-shaped house, made of gray stones, moist and shiny from an early morning shower, we were an hour and 20 minutes late. I slammed the car door and saw that beyond the house were vines, endless rows of vines, ascending up, up, up, like lines of calm, patient millionaires waiting to pick up their opera tickets at the box office. The ones in the distance were tiny dots. Where the dots ended, the heavy, eroded slope of the Vosges Mountains began, lush and green. Their old, eroded crests met with the sky, smoky with cloud.

“Bonjour!”
a disembodied voice called. Immediately, a hairy, goofy-looking mutt began barking salutations, bouncing up and down, as if on a pogo stick, within a wire mesh enclosure. A big, rugged man emerged from the house, wearing a light blue short-sleeved button-up shirt and gray work pants. He looked like a kindly bus driver. He had a nose a little like a fingerling potato and droopy lips. His French was accented with a German singsong. The ends of his sentences were all melodic questions.

“Les Borels? Bienvenue. Rémy Gresser.”
He smiled, obviously indifferent to our botched arrival time. My three-tiered panic about being loathed by this man for disrespecting him by being late—as well as being nervous about feelings and language, as
well
as my ill father—was downgraded to a familiar, straightforward panic about the two latter anxieties.

“Philippe Borel. Ma fille, Kathryn,”
my father introduced us.

“Je suis journaliste!”
I exclaimed moronically. I'd intended to convey some sort of general credibility, and to remind myself that language and understanding were never so far out of reach. I sounded like a talking doll with a pull string.
Math is hard!

“Ah! Très bien!”
Remy nodded and continued to smile. I flushed and picked a woolen ball off the sleeve of my sweater.

He led us through the gate, through a door, and down to his cellar. I breathed in a cobweb.

“How long have you been doing this?” I asked, coughing away the clingy filaments. My French felt clunky.
Incorrect conjugation!
My question drooped in the air.
God, it sounds like I'm trying to pick him up
.

“Oh, a while. I'm a direct descendant of Eberhard Gresser. He began making wine in 1575. I'm the thirteenth generation.” He was uncorking the row of green bottles, sleek and feminine, the shapes of stretched-out bowling pins.
Four hundred and thirty years
.

“Wah-ooh,” I wowed in French.

“Did you feel like you had a choice in the matter?” I tried to make my intonation sound light and innocuous, but with a trace of solemnity, in order to leave open the possibility for this kind man to break down on my shoulder and sob about the true passion that slipped through his fingers long ago…artisan chocolate maker? Pediatric oncologist? Pilot? Steeplechase jockey?
Are these the right questions to be asking? I'm being too personal. I should ask about his family of bottles. People love talking about their children
.

“I didn't ask myself the question, you know, of whether I wanted to do something else. It was the only life I wanted.
On est maître chez soi
. Sit down, please.” He motioned toward the bench, where my father continued to sit, now with both hands splayed out, in a pain trance. I wondered if he would vomit. I hoped he wouldn't. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see his hairy fingers, the skin taut from his flat grip on the table.
Don't vomit. Don't do it. Don't mess this up. Don't mar the bouquet of the wines
.

The labels on the bottles read as follows, left to right:

Duttenberg 2004. Riesling.

Moenchberg 1999. Riesling. Grand Cru.

Wiebelsberg 2002. Riesling.

Kastelberg 2003. Riesling.

Wiebelsberg 1985. Riesling.

Wiebelsberg 1997. Riesling.

Moenchberg 2000. Riesling.

I didn't need my father for this. I could decipher what the labels meant. Duttenberg, Kastelberg, Moenchberg, and Wiebelsberg referred to the towns in which the vineyards were located. Riesling was the grape from which the wine was made. The years were the years in which the grapes were grown. Grand Cru meant the wine had been given a special classification for its superior quality.

“What soils are they grown in?”

Rémy blasted through a list of soils in his pretty accent, da da DA, da da DA, and that's all it sounded like to me, da da DA.
Oh Christ
. The 2004 Duttenberg was grown in
argile. What's the translation for that? Clay? The Grand Cru in calcaire something, something about fossils and calcaire, which is calcium. Calcium? No. Calcium dirt? Nonsense. I'm translating wrong. I'm going as fast as I can. What's grès des Vosges? Grès…granite? Isn't gres des Vosges a cheese? The grapes are grown in cheese? Why did I ask about DIRT, of all things? I only did passably in that section of Grade 8 geography, when we studied the Canadian Shield and I got kicked out of class for attempting to endear myself to my fellow classmates—I was once again the new kid, this time in Quebec City—by doing what I thought was a really funny impression of a person with Down syndrome
. Now Rémy was on about the region of Alsace having relatively liberal legislation.
What does that mean? Compared to whom?

“I'll go get you some bread,” Rémy said. He left the room.

“Did you get that stuff about the soil?” I asked my father nervously.

“No. I wasn't listening.”

He was swirling the first wine. I mimicked him, swirling the second one. I sniffed it and tasted. He sniffed it and put the glass back down on the table.

“I can't,” he said, “I'm too sick.”

I swallowed and tried the next one. There was no spittoon, and we—rather, I—had seven wines to get through.

“Dad.”

“What.”

“I can't drink all these. I'm going to be hammered.”

“Then spit them out.”

“There's nowhere for me to spit.”

“Spit on the floor; that's why it's unfinished.”

“On the floor?” I inspected the floor for evidence of others' vinous dribbles.

“Yes. This is the traditional thing to do.”

“I don't feel comfortable doing that.”

“Try it.”

Forcing the wine to the front of my mouth, I squeezed my lips together. It gushed all down my chin and onto my sweater. Humiliated, I turned away from him and wiped my face with my sleeve.

“Am I supposed to finish the wine in the glasses?”

“You can if you want.”

Rémy reentered. He asked us what we thought.

“
Très raffiné
,” my father said definitively.

“
Merci, monsieur
.”

“It has a nose like gasoline, a bit, doesn't it?
Comme le pétrole
,” he continued. I was full of envy and curiosity.
Gasoline!

“
Exacte, M. Borel
.”

Rémy then looked at me. I smiled and nodded and stared at the third glass in the row, trying to disengage. The only emotion I had was impending tipsiness.

Rémy explained the variety of wines he had set out for us: “
Je fais des vins pour chaque instant
.” He tried to make a wine for every instant, for every occasion. He said there were easy wines, ones that required no concentration, but sometimes he liked to concentrate on wine. These were his meditation wines. I nodded some more and drank wines four, five, and six. I couldn't tell which ones were his meditation wines. I was meditating on what words I should be saying. What words I should have been stringing together into meaningful sentences. Nothing. I had nothing.

My father pushed one of the glasses forward and drummed his fingers along its base.

“This one is exceptional. It's…it's….” He held up his finger and drew a straight, quick horizontal line through the air and made a
ssssst!
noise. “It's so clean, almost like licking a stone—fresh, full of minerals.”

Both men were now smiling at each other. They chatted more about the meditation wines. I became lost.

“What do you think, Tou Tou? These are great,
hein?
” my father asked. He was fighting through his cramps for me, eager to engage.

“Mmm hmm. I definitely caught a whiff of minerals. And, yes, gasoline—that too,” I lied.

“You've got the palate, Toots.”

No I don't
. I felt annoyed and ashamed.

My father scratched some brief and illegible notes in his leather-bound day planner and snapped the thing shut savagely with a
thhhppt
.