Tasting
by Suzanne Parker
We were going to try the wines of Chianti. To do this, we had rented a car and driven up some very long roads on very steep cliffs that surprised us as we had thought that all of Tuscany was as unobstructed and undulating as the postcard image we carried in our heads across the Atlantic and into the rental office and onto the highway we could not exit because Italians seem to like expressing from one side of their country to the next. It had all started with a map and a thought that an obligation—to taste, to buy, to become the figures beside the emblematic tree—must be fulfilled, so we had driven from one vineyard to the next. Many were closed or locked behind ornate iron gates with a family crest like a wine label impressed upon them. We passed one, talking ourselves out of going in, then two, and on a third stiffly u-turned out of the long driveway, sure that cameras watched us and guards laughed. What were we afraid of? Being made fools, possibly, slurping from our tasting glasses, secretly whispering that we thought the cheap stuff best. There seems to be nothing as imposing as knowledge to which you don’t have access—a classic, a Tolstoy or Dickens, assigned in school but, instead, you went sledding and then ate ten Oreos dunked in milk, crumbs scattering the sheets and smashed between the pages of the book used as a plate then kicked to the floor as the dog hauled himself up and curled against you in sleep. Or simply, we were feeling yet again our American natures. So often I cram what is in front of me, swallowing because the time is passing, another forkful already in transit, and because there will always be more, because I am American, and there will be an endless supply of takeout containers. Knowing this, I consume with more force than passion, with speed too impatient for the subtleties to be deciphered with the nose or eye. Having finally chosen a vineyard based upon the hour and threat of everyone closing, we found ourselves lifting our glasses with a Sicilian couple on vacation as we listened to color gradations and though—red. Swirling the we’re-waiting-for-the-cue mouthful in its big bellied orb, I hoped for a genie to rise and announce—clove, vanilla, a back hoe of oak. It was all lovely and polite and formal even though we found the wines shallow, fast disappearing, which we thought for their cost was a bit unfair. Instead, we bought olive oil, a grassy, green magic that in winter we would open and it would be summer again and the long drive through stepped terraces to the winery and how we stopped on the way out to pet a huge white dog sprawled in the middle of the driveway and then returned to the road and another steep climb to more vineyards we no longer wanted to enter. Once, we had been ignorant and faked it, we thought, convincingly. Twice, might be a mistake, so we decided on dinner in Greve and the owner-tested wine list, and it was lovely sipping our litre beneath the lights and waiting for a food that would return us to confident people who knew the chingale, the boar stew, is delicious and tender and only a fool refuses to order it in this part of Chianti.
Suzanne Parker is a winner of the Kinereth Gensler Book Award from Alice James Books. Her poetry collection, Viral, is a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and was included on the American Library Association’s Rainbow List of Recommended Books of 2013. Her poetry has appeared in “Barrow Street,” “Cimarron Review,” “Hunger Mountain,” “Drunken Boat,” and other journals. She is a winner of the Alice M. Sellars Award from the Academy of American Poets and was a Poetry Fellow at the Prague Summer Seminars. Suzanne’s creative non-fiction is published in the anthology “Something to Declare.” Suzanne is the managing editor at “MEAD: A Magazine of Literature and Libations.”
Photo courtesy of the author.
Comments are closed.