Vergano 'Americano' Chinato

My goals regarding wine have to do with precision, details, buoyancy (of mind to absorb), softness, laughter, and serious resolve. I am trying to focus. I am trying to be more precise and set, more exact and less general, less poetic. I am eternally grateful to the people around me that know more about wine than I do. I am trying to raise my knowledge and communication in ways that are crystalline, that are set in facts, that are scientific.

This, however, as a day that is ending, as a day that is an END, as a quiet and reflective day full up with emotion, I give myself the gift of blurred vision, edge-vision, a full-sensory passing through my day. And I am trying to just let it pass,,,, let the day pass,, let the day end. I am wading through the difficulties of what Rilke called Evensong, the hinge between day and night, the rising panic like smoke from the plains, the liminal moment that opens to dark.

I am trying to be quiet and arid, to remember the edge of desert towns where I have lived, and let myself become free.

I am sitting in an almost empty apartment, it is getting dark outside, and I am waiting for two last hours before I can leave, and go to my next home.

I have never felt more homeless in my life. In the midst of this, and the silence, the refrigerator hum, the lowering dusk, the panic around the edge of my day, I am deeply comforted.

I didn't realize that when I finally opened the Vergano 'Americano' Chinato (grignolino, import Louis/Dressner) it would taste like Home. I didn't really know what to expect, but I was not prepared for the rising of old scrim slideshow scenes, for the loud whirr of my grandfather's slide projector, the plastic smell of the slides and the rising dust in projector light. I was not prepared for old Christmas shades, yellow from the opened oven, yellow from the candles on the table, steam from brewed coffee, smudged smoke, laughter.

Nose: Cold mandarin orange, powdered red sugar/spice, orange peel.
Palate: Light syrup morello cherry, clean orange, white plum, orange blossom, cold oil, cinnamon bark, nutmeg, star anise, and whiff of something darker, ground bark, sandlewood.

There could not have been a better day to open this phenomenal chinato. It has the subtlety of projected color-light, it is quieter and more complex than I could have imagined. It is these few quiet and cold days of January, marking the death of someone I loved dearly. It is not the loud brash brass of Christmas Day, it is the after-image, the faded photo in the sun, it is liquid emulsion lifting quietly into air.

Thank you to my friend who gave it to me, and thank you other invisible shades surrounding. Here is to precious things, to discarded things, to dust in the wind, to pollen, to herbs drying on racks, to wind through sieves, images on the backs of our retinas that still burn.