After a morning of reloading the chamber and gently reminding me to wait, he could see we were going to run out of shotshells while I aimed, repeatedly and poorly, too far forward, anticipating too eagerly and always incorrectly, the flight path. Finally, he reached out and touched the elbow of my outstretched arm, slowing its drift towards the future, and hollered “good shootin” when the neon orange clay shards rained down in the woods.

I think it’s always been this way, maybe mostly recently. I try my best to keep the sightlines clear but allow my focus to get pulled towards What Comes Next somehow still. One could be forgiven, I suppose, for calling that hopeful when really the opposite is true. It’s a symptom, I think, of a lack of trust in the present tense.

Because life has a way of racing headlong and I have a habit of chanting can’t wait, can’t wait. Can’t wait for the hard parts to be over, can’t wait for the next sweetest thing. I spent the growing season of 2019 hoping that the rain would stop and 2020 hoping for rain. Can’t wait/can’t wait. This is less, I think, a question of meteorology and more a question of focus, a certain flawed forgetting.

I worried about the 2019s while I was making them, afraid that what was hard about that season would be apparent in the wines, and worried again at the blending table, once we saw the wines come together with a shimmering crystallinity and Rötgenian resolution, that I would never be able to make something that felt like that again. I’ve spent too much time in the future tense, trying to anticipate the next shortcoming when the only evidence of something going right was still rising in front of me.

The wines will always narrate the story in the first person, the story of the season in full form. Vintage after vintage and moment after moment, the wines act as carefully ordered dispatches with uncertain fates that assume this temporal given, vulnerably, as a fleeting and nominal neon orange cell.

We have an unwritten rule at the blending table, a handshake agreement marked by our particular brand of earnestness: no matter where we leave our notebooks, none of us are allowed to read each other’s tasting notes. But if you walked into the cellar on the final day when the blends were complete; if you flipped open my book to the page with these wines — this chardonnay and the last pinot noir we’ll be able to offer until 2023 — you would see two words at the very bottom of the page. My little note to myself about these wines and that vintage, about the present tense that is rising right in front of us.  Everyone else would be confused but you and I know exactly what it means.

Good shootin. 

 

Maggie