Just pulled it off the shelf in Whole Foods, Yulupa, at random.  ‘Cause I was curious about the wine from the label and the way the color scheme was situated on the label, all of it.  Finally when I was able to taste it, 3 hours after opening it—which served as a boon for sakes of natural oxygenation, no decanting, just the room’s atmospheric delivery naturally assimilating down into neck—she decided to recite, and loudly, vividly and with an unusual creative intonation.  Wild berries and spices, certain dried floral petals colluded with vanilla and something like olives, or sweetened river rock, I don’t know.  You know me, I don’t talk about wines like that.  And this Pinot is most assuredly above such a wikipedia approach and deconstruction.  This bottle makes me think of poetry readings I used to frequent in Berkeley when in graduate school.  And how I need to now write more verse, read more like I did this morning with that student in my 1B class.  This Pinot fiddles in philosophy and curiosity, epistemology and a query of its own mythology— people always talk, “Pinot…Pinot…” but don’t know why.  The being of this bottle and its contents so symmetrical and sensuous zooms its offering past your senses and then back again for another hue.

Have a little bit left in glass, just before I call the day.  Pinot Noir and I have never had any kind of altercation or momentary skirmish.  What I found today on the shelf and randomly pulled served to only embolden my affinity for the Burgundian visual—  I remember looking at the bottle in hour 1, 2, 3, while it just sat there open on the counter and wondered what I would meet.  What I felt was fantasy and form, a certain vocalization of wine’s nucleus, why we writers do what we do and why wild wine writers like me pepper the Comp Book’s sheets in such erratic spats.  First sip of last glass and I dive further into my thoughts, ignoring technology and anything too modernized.  Pinot I’ve always thought is about rawness and an impulsive expressiveness.  Unfettered, unfiltered, more understood.  Most wine “writers” would rate the bottle they’re talking about, but I just want to let you know what I’m sipping and what it’s making me think about— where it takes the writer’s scope and senses.  Where I am, on some journey or knee-jerk jaunt.  Don’t care.  I’m free.  Nothing planned, I realize, a strange note of rosemary tied to something like soy or black licorice…. Again, I don’t talk about wine like that.  Bottle’s been open now about 5 hours, and I’m sure it’d like a break from oxygen.  Cork in, and me back on couch, last glass gone.  But I’m still surveying and noting without noting physical where my understanding is with Pinot Noir.  I don’t understand it.  That’s why I keep exploring, to not so much explore as wander.  Manuscript maze, phenolic haze, structural trance… lightly disturbed by accidental enlightenment.  Sip again.  I can’t.  But I’ll dream about doing just that, staring out into Bodega Bay, or at Russian River, or at some vineyard on River Road.  This poetry is in no way bottled, contained, restrained or trained.  Cosmic autonomy, what touched my lips.  She had, has, will forever have, me.

(5/17/17)