Nurse the Hate: Master of Wine Chase

 

A couple months ago I took the entrance exam for the Master of Wine program.  I had expected to take the exam last year after spending a long weekend in Dublin at an introductory seminar.  I sat next to a guy who was Scottish that lived in Germany which resulted in him having an accent that was impenetrable.  I laughed at almost all of his jokes though I can admit now that I only understood about every eighth word.  He would lean in now and again and say something like "Dah... Ehh ohh duh jah rah doh" and smile.  Frankly his enthusiasm carried it for me.  He called a Pommard something crazy like a Napa Cabernet in a blind, but he seemed pretty with it for the most part and helped close down a pub with me at the end of the weekend.  Good bloke (as they say).

In theory I would have gone to Austria to take this exam in 2020, which is a test to see if they will let you take a bunch of more tests and write a very involved paper across the next 3-5 years.  At the end of all of these impossible tests, if you somehow prove your mettle, you could become the 420th Master of Wine in the world across 31 countries.  Obviously, this is no fucking cake walk.  The problem with this subject, like most any other subjects in which one immerses themselves, is that the more you know, the more you realize you don't know.  I have passed that blissful stage when I felt like I was an expert, and despite knowing ten times as much as I did then, I have even less confidence that I know anything at all.  It makes me wonder if Picasso was at his easel after decades of transformation and thought "Fuck... I'm a fraud." or if Bob Dylan picked up a guitar in the late 1990s filled with the fear of knowing too much.  Maybe that's why rock musicians so often write their best material when they're young and don't have any idea of what they are doing.  

Covid harpooned my trip to Austria to take the exam last year.  This is a shame for two reasons.  1.  I really like Austria, and it would have been a great excuse to waltz around with purpose.  When's the last time you had an excuse to go to Austria?  2.  There can't be that many more high stakes reasons for me to fly across the earth for a winner take all sit down at a table.  Doors and options continue to shut close in the world of the aging man.  If nothing else, I have nerves of steel, and I would have liked to walk into that room for this test in a completely foreign atmosphere.  No one is more American than me in jeans and boots in an Austrian wine test.  Alas, I wound up doing that exam this year like everything is done in 2021, via an online app.     

I took the test in July.  I haven't received the result.  I open my email each morning awaiting word from the London based organization.  "Sorry chap, you're out!" or "Good day.  We are pleased to welcome you to a chance to fail sometime in the future.".  I assume, like all of Europe, they are somehow off all August, living comfortable lives in Southern France or Ibeza while I am bobbing in an anxiety pool of grim despair in the American digital work force.  Eventually someone across the pond will have a spot of tea and politely yet sternly tell me my fate.  It has to be next week sometime.  They have to eventually go back to their officially sanctioned work stations.

There are only two potential results.  If I failed, I will re-double my efforts and take it again.  If I passed, I am now on a one year beatdown where I need to immerse myself in wine facts and tedium unlike ever before.  For fuck's sake, I took a winemaking and fermentation chemistry class last winter just so I could get a better grasp of the process.  I made five gallons of Semillon in my garage.   Normally if you make booze in your garage, you're a fucking hillbilly, BUT because it is Semillon, it's possible to pass it off as an academic pursuit.  Sure, that's a goddamn lie, but it's POSSIBLE to MAKE THE ARGUMENT.  Either way, I am trying to give myself a fighting chance to pass these exams.

I am proceeding as if I have already been accepted into this program.  Every night, when you are watching Netflix or putting firecrackers in toads or whatever it is that you do, I am sitting in my windowless basement office grinding away.  I am reading about viticulture.  I don't even like to garden, and I now have opinions about rootstocks and soil compositions.  I am doing a deep dive on Spanish wine.  I'm not talking Rioja here.  I am looking at Vino de Pagos like Dehesa del Carrizal.  I am remembering names the Spanish give the winds like the Levante.  Side note, next time a massive storm blows down a tree on my asshole neighbor I will refer to it as "The Will Of The Levante".  Chew on that Jerry.  This wine shit never ends.  The more you learn, the more it becomes obvious that "mastery" of the subject is as elusive as a ghost farting in the wind.  So, what am I doing?

Ultimately, the real reward is the chase.  If I never pass these exams, I still will not have completely failed.  The exercise of gaining the knowledge is the gift.  The shiny pin at the end is only a symbol of the struggle to get to the level of knowledge necessary to pass the test that was asked of you that day.  The next day, maybe you wouldn't have known the answers or been tasting the wines well.  Still, failure is not an option.  So I grind away.  Tonight was Catalan.  Tomorrow is blind tasting.  The day after is plant disease.  And I'll keep checking my inbox for that result.  And I will keep grinding.

       

Nurse the Hate: The Elephant

 

We pulled into Rumba Café in Columbus, a part of town that has now transformed into a near parody of hipster chic.  Like most of the ring surrounding the ever expanding Ohio State footprint, it is a part of town that represents a great opportunity to get a “free range organic hemp fixed gear bike” or take a “botanical thrift store double IPA yoga class”.  Set up in the alley behind the club were a series of homemade open tents where groovy versions of 2021 hippies were selling their homemade crafts, or as most people would refer to it as “garbage”.  If you needed a dream catcher, purse made from discarded jeans, or third rate water color painting, this was the spot for you.  It was a group of well intentioned people that have smoked so much weed, they have lost some key threads of the plot.  I might be too critical.  Is there a major difference between a shirtless guy with a long beard and straw hat selling a tie dyed cloth and me selling TV spots?  Not really I guess, except he’s really high.

As soon as we pulled up Sugar exclaimed “It’s a Renaissance Faire!”.  This was an easy mistake to make as there were certainly quite a few girls in peasant dresses and even a guy in what I suppose could be called “a frock”.  There were no turkey legs to eat or pints of mead however.  Just some tents set up in the dirt by the garbage dumpsters, but it was close enough I guess.  This is when I know for sure that Sugar was going to buy something before leaving the area.   She is a sucker for homespun crafts and DIY commerce.  I also knew that Leo would be buying something as well due to his long commerce history of making all major purchase decisions to wherever his path took him.  After an afternoon of a couple beers, a couple edibles and generous hits off his trusty glass pipe one-hitter, he was a prime customer for The Unlimited Temptations Of The Renaissance Faire.     

I wandered off to write the set list and attempt to find a beer that wasn’t an IPA, Double IPA, or Imperial IPA.  I am not sure when craft beer became just another way of saying “IPA”, but that happened.  I was recently staring at a wall of 200 craft beers at a grocery store looking for a pilsner, and discovered my choices were between 194 IPA variations, 4 sours and 2 wheat beers.  I wound up getting a 20 oz can of Heineken, not my ideal choice.  That was when Leo walked into the club to ask me for the van keys, beaming at his find at The Renaissance Faire.  “Dude!  Check it out!  It’s cooool!” 

In his hands was an elephant head bust made of what looked like Raggity Ann costume remnants.  An uneven patchwork of fabric scraps covered what I think was a paper mache sculpture of the elephant, but the fabric had a shabby feel to it, like it might have been left out in the rain once and dried out on a car dashboard in the sun.  “Isn’t it awesome?”.  The blank glass eyes of the elephant head stared at me.  It was decidedly not “awesome”.     

It’s important to note that in the van only an hour earlier we had a discussion where Leo excitedly told us that he recently discovered that his “spirit animal” was an elephant.  He had recently purchased a painting of an elephant for his home and even commissioned an artist (someone that crossed his path I believe) to create an elephant painting.  Now if you’re like me, you might wonder how Leo came to learn that not only that he had a spirit animal but that this animal was an elephant, an animal I had never recalled hearing him mention at any time in the 30 years we have known each other.  Yet here he was, aggressively decorating his home in elephants as tribute to this door of perception being opened for him.  “I found out from a quiz Anne gave me from the internet.” 

As a man that is active in the creation of time wasting click bait digital content, I have my doubts on the accuracy of Leo’s claim of the elephant of being his “spirit animal”.  The internet is not always a gateway to truth.  I do think his enthusiasm for this information is 100% real however, and why steal a man’s belief system if it gives him this much joy?  “Yeah this guy owes me $100 in free tattoo work because of some work I did for him so I was thinking what would be cool if I did that multi armed elephant… Ganesh… but I would put my head on it instead of Ganesh’s!  Wouldn’t that be awesome?”.

I have my suspicions that if any of 1.2 billion Hindus on the planet saw Ganesh defaced with having his head chopped off and Leo’s put on it, there might be some hard feelings.  That being said, I am very interested in seeing how this tattoo might come off.  Would it be Leo’s face on a multi armed body sitting lotus style?  Or would it be Leo’s face with an elephant trunk?  I’m not going to interfere and just let this thing come together organically.  I just wanted to let you all know, if you see some blasphemous Ganesh tattoo on Leo, that’s what the hell happened.