from a journal

In It

Sometimes people from past pages just hop into your sight and thinking. For me it most often happens in the morning. Today while driving to this coffee spot on Stony Point as I so many times do, especially lately, I thought of this guy Dave. I met him while helping Arista Winery as I did in 2015 and just a couple steps into ’16. He has a house out here with his wife, a vacation home I believe being retired from insurance for over 30 years or something like that. From Minnesota, if I remember right. Either way, Dave, or “Big Daddy Dave” as someone I worked with called him and it just stuck, loved Pinot Noir, loved wine, wine country, and even had a little blog he kept of his time out here. Not the fanciest or most impressively scribed pieces I’d ever read on wine and they didn’t have to be. I’m glad they weren’t. They were heartfelt, honest. They were true, true to him, what he believed wine to be and how he wanted wine in his life. One entry describing how he pulled up to the open gate on his first day, greeted by one of the girls waving and smiling, and he was convinced it was meant to be. That’s what made his writing impressive, and engaging, and why I’m thinking about him now, this morning, reconsidering and rebuilding my wine writing identity. What wine is supposed to be is what we want from it, how we want wine believed and communicated, singing to us.