Birthday Wine

Amy and I spent my birthday yesterday quietly, highlighted by a trip to Grand Bay to enjoy the beautiful weather surrounded by the mossy loveliness of the swamp, and Amy gifted me most delightfully with a t-shirt featuring the artwork of our friend, Tobias Mostel. Then a nice dinner of grilled pork tenderloins and mashed potatoes and salad, and later still the continuation of a ritual I've begun with Amy, opening a cellar classic to see how wine can age gracefully. I hope drinking good aged wine will at least carry over into the living spirit, if not the flesh.


Three years ago I opened a 1982 Chateau Latour, still dense and full and alive and complex, with aromas of rich red fruit remaining vibrant behind the cedar and a lingering spiciness laced with smoke. Then next year, joined by wonderful visiting poet Robert Wrigley and dear friend Jessica Fellows two years ago, we opened a chest-thumping 1982 Mouton Rothschild. It wanted out and needed air and it visited us all evening with its hints of mineral and earth over the fruit. Last year it was a very fine 1985 Caymus Special Selection, complex, even opulent, in the nose, but slightly thin on the finish, perhaps opened two or three years past its prime. Still, it opened up toward the end into berries and a touch of the Caymus smoke I love.

Last night I ventured away from cabernet, opened a 1982 Guigal Cote Rotie La Landonne, a single vineyard Rhone syrah I bought before Guigal's fame launched the single vineyard prices into the stratosphere. It's color surprised me first, bright ruby barely fading to berry-brick at the edges. Its aroma was fruity and complex, but didn't quite deliver the bacon smoke I like in great Rhones. Still, the wine branded my tongue with a laser of fruit that went on and on, underscored by a healthy acidity that suggested I could have left it alone for another ten years or so. I have a few good bottles left, so, with luck, I'll see you next year here (old wines don't travel well), and we'll drink what's left. Cheers.

Correction. In an earlier version, I erred when I said, "Last year it was Margaux, an '86, and it was very fine, improving into an excellent wine with some airing, but its famous violet bouquet was understated beneath the complex fruit." I didn't err about the wine, but it wasn't for my birthday. I opened it for an old friend, T. R. Hummer, and a new one, John Holman, when they were here for a conference last fall.

Dinner with friends, Panthers, and a Fisk follow-up

Amy and I had the pleasure of dining with our friends the Mostels this weekend at their home in North Florida, not far from here. The house is wondrous--a spatious, high-ceilinged metal building housing all kinds and eras of art (Toby and Aileen are both artists, as well) and artifacts from their years in Manhattan and Maine, as well as more recent productions and acquisitions, on fifteen acres or so boasting a three-alligator pond and snakes aplenty. They're wonderfully warm and generous people and they've helped make the transition to life in South Georgia easier. And Toby's a fine cook, so I don't mind taking a good bottle of Brunello or Cab there to share (this time a fragrant 96 Casanova di Neri I found locally at a closeout price). The large open front area of the house really belongs to Albert, Toby's chattering parrot, who tolerates the cockatiels and enjoys Toby's devoted attention. Albert loves to listen to him sing and play the two Steinways that sit side-by-side there, and he lets the rest of us hang out as long as we abide his commentary.

We spoke of politics and opera. Well, Toby spoke of opera at length, with Aileen adding an anecdote about a particularly moving final performance by Joan Sutherland at the Met. At any rate, Amy and I listened, since our arcane pop sensibilities couldn't add much here, but we enjoyed listening to stories about opera's golden era, looking at photos of the magnificent staging of Billy Budd.

Finally they also spoke of their encounter with a rare Florida panther. Aileen walks her four dogs, each named after some article of luggage (Trunk, Valise, etc.), every evening. Last week, the dogs went nuts off a scent. A deer caught in a fence was strangling itself, and Aileen tried to help free it, but couldn't before it collapsed and died. Meanwhile, the dogs went into hiding. After failing to free the deer, Aileen looked for Toby to help disentangle the dead deer. He walked down to examine the situation, watched a nearly nine-foot panther saunter away up the roadway, looking back over its shoulder at the prey and the man. Later that week, the dogs treed a panther cub on the property. Whether this is a true panther or a wandering cougar transplanted in a program to expand the gene pool, it ain't supposed to be in these parts. A big cat on their property. We talked about how frightening it is. We talked about how promising it is.

Fisk update: His own article on his visits to Cairo and Valdosta, http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article2387832.ece

100 Point Wines

The AWP conference was its usual gathering of hedonists and post-hedonists, writers and wannabe writers and booksellers and publishers and teachers and all forms of imaginative whores for the word. (I include myself.)



Photos: Madison Smartt Bell and Wyn Cooper front the Skylarks with Glen Phillips guesting on guitar. Photo at the bar with Shawna, Andrea, and Amy in front. A visit to the notorious Clermont Lounge followed. The rest are mental.

Ann Hudson with her lovely smile walking into Salon A for my presentation.

Thom Ward lounging on Kurt Brown's bed while we (Amy, Katie Coles, Scott Cairns, Wyn and Shawna) tasted the fine '96 Casanova di Neri Brunello and the divine '90 Ch. Montrose (RP 100 pts.)

Lunar eclipse ghosting through clouds over Atlanta as Amy and I walked back to the car.

Overtime

or what happens when you don't know what this might be about, what time I'll have to work on it, why it even exists, except that my old friend Barry Spacks started a blog on poetry and I had to sign up to write to him. The title, from an XTC classic, suggests, I hope, eclecticism on the sensual side. I might talk of poems and poetry (that oldest music), new music, or I might just spill "ink" about a damn fine day in the South like today, 74 degrees right now, hawks nesting in the woods behind my house, students frolicking (do people actually frolick any more?) and sunbathing on the lawn in front of VSU.

I suppose a blog would have been useful when I arrived home exhilarated from concerts, like the recent Yo La Tengo collision with the Sun Ra Arkestra in Jacksonville, two forces blowing full speed through an intersection. The crash was spectacular, but somehow I survived.

Califone at The Earl in Atlanta for the Roots and Crowns tour, a show so fine even the muse put her beer down and listened raptly at what Jim could do with a fiddle, what Tim could do with his pen and guitar and cigarette-soft voice, Joe timing chaos, perfect, precise.

Kim Addonizio reading poems, microessays, stories, blowing her harp at the Warehouse in Tallahassee. I still say she's the sexiest poet in America.

Turley strutting fine Zin legs on our glasses when Scott Cairns was in town.

Or I may just blow my top from time to time in this time when common sense seems to have gone on a bender and passed out behind the trash bins in the alley.

Welcome. Now get off line and go change the world.