WTN: 2003 Pirouette (Long Shadows)

[Jenise]

Incredibly beautiful night last night: warm (something like our 28th straight day without rain, a June record) but lightly overcast and windless which turns the sometimes violent Georgia Strait we live on into a giant, still, silvery pond and all the islands beyond into cool indigo shadows. We settled into the cedar rockers on the patio to observe. Herons fished in the shallows, a kingfisher hovered overhead in search of its dinner, bald and golden eagles flew over canvassing the shoreline, the haunting calls of loons skimmed over the water to us from far, far away, and a cruise ship, lit up like a white carnival, skirted by Pender Island some 20 miles off to the west.

There wasn't another soul in sight.

After five years of living here, I still can't wrap my head around the fact that one can have the whole theater to onesself on a serene t-shirt night like this. There are other houses here with people in them, and there's a small park at the end of the row where lots of people bring their dogs so it's typical to see a few other people enjoying that which we can never resist. But not last night. Last night, we had it all to ourselves, so though we'd not planned to have wine with dinner we decided that we needed to celebrate just being here with a Washington wine made in the year we moved up. I chose a 2003 Pirouette. Part of the Long Shadows project where celebrated winemakers from elsewhere come to Washington to make wine, the Pirouette is a collaborative effort by California's Philippe Melka and Agustin Hunneeus made from Cabernet Sauvignon (56%), Merlot (22%), Syrah (10%), Cabernet Franc (9%) and Petit Verdot (3%). I've not had this wine before. It's excellent: dense black cherry and plum fruit, spice, cigar box, a tiny bit of herb--basically, all the usual classy new world Bordeaux-y stuff enhanced by some nice secondary development. Tannins are soft, perhaps more resolved than I expected. But what we thought was so special was that at one point or another, we could taste or smell every grape in here, kind of like when mid-song a band briefly stops playing as an ensemble and introduces each player with a little solo. It's in a good place right now, and I'll plan on drinking our one other bottle within the next three years.

Very nice notes, Jenise, on both the physical setting and the wine. I've been impressed by Melka's wines but usually find them beyond my budget.

Dittos on JC's comments, as I've tried a few of M. Melka's California wines and have enjoyed them.

sounds beautiful up there right now. Living inland an hour, we've really had a lovely June. About 5-15 degrees below normal, crisp winds, a nice fog bank reaching as far inland as Fairfield. of course, the inner Bay Area is suffering under a looming wall of fog, but...

[Jenise]

If Philippe makes the Hundred Acre, then that's all I've had of his wines myself but for this, and fortunately this didn't carry the usual Melka price tag. The Long Shadows wines run $50ish, which frankly is still a lot to my mind for a wine that has a ten year tops life span.

Very nice notes, Jenise, on both the physical setting and the wine. I've been impressed by Melka's wines but usually find them beyond my budget.

That wine is not above my budget, but the house on the ocean is. I think my only regret in life is not having bought one when I could have. But, thank God Jenise can paint such a poignant picture of what is like for the rest of us to live it vicariously.

I wish she was not so responsible. Otherwise I could look forward to living vicariously the thrill of drinking wine while driving my Jaguar with the top down in the sea breeze on a warm Washington summer night.

[Jenise]

I wish she was not so responsible. Otherwise I could look forward to living vicariously the thrill of drinking wine while driving my Jaguar with the top down in the sea breeze on a warm Washington summer night.

Well, I *could* tell you about the thrill of driving a golf cart around my neighborhood with a glass of wine--and an extra bottle in the club holder--but somehow I don't think that would suffice for you.

Well, I *could* tell you about the thrill of driving a golf cart around my neighborhood with a glass of wine--and an extra bottle in the club holder--but somehow I don't think that would suffice for you.

I have to tell you that I am in a reflective, faraway mood today, with a long shadow. I want to go through a looking glass to someplace else. My mind keeps going to a '53 Ford convertible with a Merck 312 engine, glasspacks and three on the column. I want to drive it around in the mountains with my bottle of wine. I have found a mechanic in a shack of a place that I think can care for it and keep it running.

Very nice opening there Jenise! Cheers from a misty-eyed Doris.

[Jenise]

of course, the inner Bay Area is suffering under a looming wall of fog, but...

I guess it's the heat that creates the fog. Here in the cooler north, we have way less marine layer issues than we did in Huntington Beach. Glad it's cooler in Napa, though, and though I realize it's early yet the winemakers must be pleased to have this slow, cool start.

[Jenise]

My mind keeps going to a '53 Ford convertible with a Merck 312 engine, glasspacks and three on the column. I want to drive it around in the mountains with my bottle of wine. I have found a mechanic in a shack of a place that I think can care for it and keep it running.

You should get it. Bob refers to the Jag as my "toy car". Everyone needs a toy car.

My mind keeps going to a '53 Ford convertible with a Merck 312 engine, glasspacks and three on the column. I want to drive it around in the mountains with my bottle of wine. I have found a mechanic in a shack of a place that I think can care for it and keep it running.

You should get it. Bob refers to the Jag as my "toy car". Everyone needs a toy car.

Only if you have a place to drive it. You need two-lane blacktop, real diners, and few other cars on it. I don't think a toy car in Rockville, Maryland, for example, would do the soul any good at all. In most places now only a toy lobotomy would help. Did you know that the Adirondack Park is the largest park in the entire continental US? I think you can fit the next three largest parks, Yellowstone being one of them, into it.

I have made a mental note of all the songs, like the Toy's Lover's Concerto, I will assemble to play on CDs, well hidden, so as not to remove the nostalgia. Then I will drive until I can relive the day in 1961, when I was driving such a car in the mountains and happened onto a 16-year-old girl who looked like Daisy Mae and just happened to be the prettiest girl in the world at the same time - and again offer her a ride. This time the girl will for a moment freeze, but then she will look into my eyes, and smile, - not getting in, of course - but letting me know that she would not be afraid to.

My romantic encounters have mostly been on trains. The German soldier who invited my friend and me to a Fasching party at the house of a University of Heidelberg fencing club overlooking the Neckar River and the Heidelberg Castle. The terribly handsome dentist from Minnesota who needed a ride to the American army post in Giessen to meet up with his younger brother who was on guard duty at the time. I drove him to the post and the brother threw the aparment keys over the metal fence to the dentist. As we approached the guard post I was saying "Don't shoot. Don't shoot." I then drove the dentist to his brother's apartment.

However, one of my real romances started when I was in a minor accident coming back from a Christmas party in Frankfurt, Germany to Darmstadt. It was snowing and my windshield wipers weren't doing the job properly of clearing the windows. I was only blocks from my living quarters when I hit the back of a large truck (no street light nearby and the rear reflectors were covered with mud.) I bumped my knee on the dashboard and scraped it a little bit. An ambulance came from the nearby post to see if anyone was injured. The medic took me back to the clinic to clean up my knee and asked me to another Christmas party. (I had met him already through a mutual friend but we weren't dating at the time.) This led to quite a romance. When people asked him how we met he would say "I picked her up on the streets of Darmstadt" and I would say "You could say we met by accident." (Here's to you, Scottie.)

[Jenise]

Only if you have a place to drive it. You need two-lane blacktop, real diners, and few other cars on it. I don't think a toy car in Rockville, Maryland, for example, would do the soul any good at all.

But if you have it, you make places for your soul to go. Reggie, my toy car, was never finer than when driving topless (him, not me) down the Vegas strip one night in stop-and-go cruiser traffic, with Sinatra singing "That Old Black Magic" on CD. Old timers and teenagers alike called out to me. I also remember one trip through the lonely landscape east of Fresno, California, from which I was making my way over to the El Dorado wine region. I had a Flaming Lips CD on, and the song was called something like Waiting for Superman, and it was so incredibly heartwrenching a juxtaposition to be driving through this falling-down youthless old town whose Superman would never come. It was like a scene from a movie. I felt guilty. And then there was the time I drove through Yosemite National Park on a crisp November morning, and I played Chopin. Sure, it was chilly, but Yosemite is so vertical it deserves to be seen this way. Up here, I have even fewer excuses to drive '"topless" but sometimes just needing to feel the wind in my face, I go.

But if you have it, you make places for your soul to go.

I hear and relate to all that you said. The '53 Ford only works in the mountains, though. The other venues you mention require different kinds of cars, and for me, motorcycles. Personally, I can't go back there, again. You still can. It's an age thing among other reasons for me. You will be spared stories and examples, because they involve stuff that I really can't post to the world. The best of the best can never be shared.