It was elegant, sweet and clean like sucking a marble, rolling off the tongue with declared ownership by saliva. — unknown
This is what I heard pounding in my head the next morning as I awoke. I needed to make it to the wine convention at McCormick Place. I put on my shoes after taking a shower and getting dressed. I put on a grey tie and strolled out the door and past my wine-cellar staircase and onto the street. It was a lovely day out here among the trees and sunshine. My head pounded like bouncing a ball into the sides of my head and ricocheting around before settling on the top of my spinal column. I must have slept funny.
I took the train into the city from Hyde Park. I disembarked along with another hundred or so hung-over winos. We all stumble in to show our passes and then into the main chamber. It was huge and well lit. Tall ceilings like a cathedral muffled the cacophony of sounds that hung over the wine like an angry cloud.
A panel of judges at ‘The Chicago Wine Expo’ in Chicago sat at the front table of a small neutrally-boring room. The glasses were arrayed nicely on white linen. A man with a cropped, gray beard looked at me. I leaned in, over the table. He had an old cabbie hat on his balding head. His breath smelled clean when he remarked of a disturbance to etiquette. Close at hand a woman oblivious to subtle indications that her perfume bothered this man, passed by to his sneer. This is how I met Renaud.
I walked over to a long table where several bottles were lined up with little pouring tips that both kept the wine aerated and portioned. A formally dressed woman who worked for a distributor made eye contact with me and beckoned me to join her, I jovially asked her if she had tried everything here. She concluded that she had not but there was a Sauternes that she had procured for this event that tasted of nectarines and light rare earth minerals and that I should try it. So I did.
She said the wine was like a rain coat, slippery and effective. It had the minerality of a Perrier and the elegant acidity of a fresh raindrop sliding across a wet leaf. The stone fruit in this wine was bright and ripe.
Renaud suddenly devoid of malice realizing she was speaking about his winery came over from where he has been hovering and tells us, “One afternoon when hiking through the Nevada desert, while presuming it would not rain, we encountered a taste by which this wine was inspired.”
The distributor beckoned to her assistant to take her position. The three of us filled up small flutes and walked across the floor. Yes they were selling but I am never one to turn down a good story.
We passed the cases of bottles for this display. I grabbed three small bottles of the Chateau La Tour Jaune. We sat in a few comfortable chairs laid out for guests near the center of the section devoted to dessert wines.
Renaud continued, It had taken us..., (him and his friend), ...a few days to drive pretty far out into the desert and finally up a small, rocky road, past the cattle guards and the wandering livestock. By foot we struck out and into the canyon. The clouds were non-existent and the air was dry, but cool, flowing through the narrow canyon.
He began telling us the story that inspired this wine.
We hiked in through a narrow opening in the canyon and the day was spent with clean rocks at our feet and just a slit of sun high overhead. It was a beautiful day and we had been taking turns navigating through very tight outcroppings. The floor of the canyon was without a grain of sand. It took us three hours to make it into the first stopping point and we opened our canteens and broke out the trail-mix granola. Our packs were full but light and we had positioned them well on our backs with straps. Comfortable. We talked for a while about the day and how nice it was to be so far from the roads, the people, the pollution, the dogs and the summer sun of the Nevada desert.
We had good maps and enough supplies. The canyon had been ripped in two by millennia of sand and water. There was a log that had apparently wedged itself between the walls with such violence that it would remain undisturbed for another four hundred years before it would rot.
We had counted on water pools that we could purify with a stove but three days in we realized there were none. The ranger said there would likely be water on the second day in, but it never came. We took our last day hiking to a natural bridge and found it dry as well. No water to be collected. The air was still cool. The walls were about 50 feet up. Cliffs on both sides, narrowing and widening so often you couldn’t see the sky. Great caverns were carved where we could rest and air our feet. Our packs were heavy at the end of the day and our backs felt painful, throbbing of fatigue. We made camp in a cavern trusting that the altitude of the rise in the cavern, like a stage, would protect us from flash-flood. It was cold that night. We could feel a breeze through the canyon and heard a whistling where a rock had created an instrument.
We slept in our bags and on pads and were prepared for the aching in the morning and the need to get going to stretch things out. We packed our things and headed back into the canyon.
This was the third day and no water. We got worried and realized that when we packed up the water we had left the cap off and a full day and a half’s worth of water had run out. We headed back immediately. We found our camp and headed past it for a day reserving every drop of water for the return trip.
On that second day we began to feel the lack of water at every step. We were drying out and there was nothing we could do. We thought ourselves screwed. It was cool but we were hiking hard enough to set pace but also minimize our use of water. It took us four hours of pain and deathly dehydration to realize that we were slowly going insane. Our steps were labored and our breathing heavy. Our muscles began to cramp up and our lips were chapped. We trudged on and finally sat down with our map and an hour to go. We looked one last time in our packs, for something. I couldn’t tell you what we were looking for. I don’t remember. Our pain was so great that we were hallucinating wildly at this point. We had been walking sluggishly and seeing pools of water at every turn. Every single vision was of fresh water and then on to the next disappointment. This, however, gave us little missions to get to the next. Torture, with a system for survival.
Finally, we sat down and I remembered a pocket I had forgotten. It was on the side of the packs and it contained something. I looked inside and there, like a gift from the gods, was a nectarine. It was the most beautiful vision I had ever seen. Ripe and soft. I could smell it in my feet. We sat down almost in a ritualistic decree. We cut it in half and set it down looking at it for a second. I picked up half and gave it to my friend. We were zombies. I raised it to my lips and touched its juice with my tongue. The sweetness rippled through my body instantly like a tiny pebble tossed into an icy cave pool. The juice coursed in my eyes and nose and mouth wetting it and relieving a torture so debilitating that I had wanted to die. This nectarine slid down my throat and at every millimeter offered life to a body and mind withering in the sun. I sucked on the pit the remaining hour.
I still have that pit.
The distributor and I agreed he had hit the mark and he had created a beautiful context with the story.
Renaud recommend chilling it to 55, the temperature of the bottom of the canyon.
He remarked of the necessity of always taking a piece of luxury into dangerous situations. It makes our journeys through life a great deal more worthwhile. He handed me the bottle with a handshake.
We headed into the crowd and found more interesting things to try.