Beautiful Woman, Wine, and the Meaning of Life

The following is a draft of an article for my blog. I am taking some time to think this out because the conclusion I draw is one of those life-affirming "aha" moments, even though it may seem obvious. So I offer it here to my fellow-writers.

While living in California, I took up wine as a hobby. All around me people of the state displayed such pride in their contribution to the world of wine. So I decided to study wine. I recognized the world was a huge place and my resources in terms of time and money were limited. So I made a pivotal decision that would define my wine hobby for decades to come. My decision was to focus on wines from the "new world", specifically wine from the area where I lived.

For those unfamiliar with wine terminology, California is considered part of the "new world" of wine. Until the later part of the twentieth century California wines, and new world wines in general, were not taken seriously around the world.  Old world wines from France and Italy were considered the best and California's offerings were widely ignored. But for those of you who have lived in California know, the people and businesses in California are tenacious as hell. The state will not sit idly by and be ignored when they KNOW they have the goods. The winemakers of California worked hard at honing their craft and eventually they began taking top honors at worldwide tastings. Soon California was on the wine map. While I am sure I invite a lashing from our fellow wine enthusiasts from France, I would dare say I consider American wines the finest in the world. I am not alone in this view.

My wife, daughter and I lived in San Jose. While cruising between SJ and Santa Cruz beaches up and over the Santa Cruz Mountains (where the giant redwoods still reach for the sky), we would pass many small wineries. We even passed vineyards of giant commercial wineries such as Paul Masson (Orson Welles stating in their commercials "We will sell no wine before its time"). It started with a simple visit to some of the smaller wineries. It didn't take long to decide we had to drive the hour and a half up to formal wine country: Napa and Sonoma counties.

One trip to Napa and Sonoma and we full fledged California wine enthusiasts (aka snobs). I say we because all three of us fell in love with the green rolling hills of the vineyards and the peaceful, beautiful estates of the wineries. "We" were my wife Cyndi, my young daughter Jackie, and myself. Jackie was a baby when this began, but she very much enjoyed the trips as much as we did. Over the next decade and a half I became a pretty serious wine hobbyist. The topic could cover an entire book. I can not do it justice in a single blog entry.

So today, I want to focus on the end of an era. Around the same time I was taking an active interest in wine, my career was taking off. This provided me with an opportunity to purchase some of the finer wines being offered. My tastes soon grew beyond Napa and Sonoma when we moved to Oregon around the year 2000. I had thought I had found my varietal in Zinfandel. Don't get me wrong, I still love my zins and a nicely aged Cabernet Sauvignon, but moving to the great state of Oregon flipped my wine world upside down. The culprit that swayed me away from the charm of California was Oregon's fantastic Pinot Noir.

My job took me to Oregon and we moved to a beautiful 4000 square foot house at the summit of Cooper Mountain in the unincorporated outskirts of Beaverton. Cooper Mountain is an old extinct volcano right on the edge of the region of Oregon that has now become known for spectacular Pinot Noir. In fact, one day while exploring the other side of the mountain, we discovered two wineries less then a mile or two from our house as the eagle flies and a couple of miles by road. I just had to try the wine grown on the same mountain I lived on. Cooper Mountain Vineyards is an Organic Winery that makes affordable Pinot Noir (by Oregon standards). It was good, we liked the people who worked there and ran it, and it was available in half bottles (375 ml instead of 750 ml full bottles), something we really enjoyed due to our tendency to have a single small glass with dinner. So we bought some cases and set about exploring and researching the wine country.

My fondness for Pinot Noir grew by the week. Cyndi enrolled us in a wine and viticulture class with Portland Community College. This course was magnificent fun and a great learning experience/ We ended up taking many semesters, as did many other regulars.. Through the class we met nearly all the great wine makers of the Pinot Noir capital of the world (no not Burgundy: Oregon). I even worked the de-stemming machine one stellar vintage year side by side with a brilliant wine maker. I now understood something about what the difference between a $10 bottle of Pinot Noir and a $50 bottle was. Oregon wines due to several complex factors are not cheap. Beware of most under $10, I've been told by many-a-winemaker in the region that the basic cost to produce a fine bottle of Pinot Noir is around $20. So consider $25 and up a reasonable cost to explore the wonders of Oregon.

The career was still going strong and through the onsite classes at the wineries I began amassing a wine cellar full of absolutely delicious Pinot Noirs from Oregon vintages of 1999, 2000, 2001, and 2002. Those years each had something interesting to offer and a couple of those vintages were the best of the decade. Oh how I loved my Pinot Noir. I still had some treasured California wines in the cellar, but my focus was firmly on the Pacific Northwest. I explored Cabs and Merlots from Washington state too. But I kept coming back to Pinot Noir, my lasting love.

The "cellar" was actually a wine storage device capable of holding several cases in temperature controlled environment. We quickly outgrew the first cellar and invested in another. The love for Oregon wine continued to grew. We got involved with raising guide dogs and were known throughout Oregon wine country as "those people who have those cute guide dogs". We brought three different guide dog puppies to the wineries, plus the occasional extra puppy when we puppy sat or puppy switched with other guide dog puppy raisers. The hobby had grown to become almost an obsession.

Then we were abruptly pulled back down to earth when my wine tasting partner, and life partner, passed away after struggling with terminal illness. Suddenly I had no one to share my hobby with. I didn't want to open a $100 bottle of wine alone when I drink no more then one glass. Who knew how long it would be until I would rejoin the "dating" pool. I was sitting on a large collection of fantastic wine but had lost some of my zeal for the hobby.

Those who have read my other writings know a strange and wonderful thing happened in my life. I reconnected with my high school sweetheart Sue who I had not seen in 22 years. We were email penpals over the years ever since she wrote to me after seeing an obituary for my mother. Sue and I shared family details so Sue knew of the fondness for fermented grape juice that Cyndi and I had.  Confession: I have always loved Sue since the moment I met her when I was 16. Time and distance separated us, and we build lives with spouses and had kids. But the love never left. True love never really goes away. It goes into remission when it must to ensure your survival. Bottom line is I have always  been crazy about Sue. I had met the man she ended up marrying once before moving to California and I was happy she had found somebody and had a nice family. Suddenly and remarkably she and I found ourselves single again and thinking back to how fun and hot our teenage years had been. Sooner then I would have expected I was madly in love with her again. It tried to balance all the concerns, because my marriage was wonderful and it was forever. But forever was cut short by a rare but almost-always terminal disease.

Sharing my wine passion with Sue was tricky. I could tell Sue wanted to respect Cyndi's memory by letting her traditions and hobbies with me stay unique to her. Sue and I could develop new traditions and hobbies. But Sue knew how much I loved the wines of Oregon. She accompanied me on several trips to favorite wineries. I wanted her to experience the wine, but I was also sensitive that this was shaky ground because this was very much mine and Cyndi's thing. It turns out Sue has a preference for white wines, which helped us define a new dimension that was our own. Sue, I know you will read this and you have no idea how much it meant to me that you were willing to participate in my wine passion and give it a chance to develop in a new way for us.

Before we knew what hit us, my daughter and I were moving east so I could be with Sue. I was in love with the Pacific Northwest and the west coast in general, but I was crazy in love with Sue. So all I needed was my daughter's blessing to move and I was racing 3000 miles across the country. Moving the wine was a challenge. I was not going to let it sit in 120 degree desert heat in some moving van line truck. I called many professional wine shipping companies and found their solutions beyond my financial reach.

I decided to rent a U-Haul trailer. I had a trailer hitch put on my Acura MDX and bought a bunch of coolers. Sue and I lovingly wrapped each bottle in bubble wrap and placed it gently into the cooler. I think the fact that we wrapped the wine together helped Sue bond with the collection and begin to feel a sense of ownership too. We would encounter both heat and cold unsuitable for the wine throughout the trip. I felt comfortable knowing the wine was in my possession and safely guarded from temperature extremes. There is no one else who could have moved the wine with the same concern for its safe passage as I had.

The wine all arrived safely with us 4 days after leaving Oregon. This was almost 3 years ago now. About 100 bottles of the most exquisite wines you could ever dream of were now safelt relocated in Massachusetts. You may wonder what has prompted me to put these words to paper now? There's  a very simple and moving reason. This weekend we drank the last bottle from that treasured collection of Pinot Noirs. The last bottle was a Patricia Green Cellars 2002 "Hirsch". This was a special wine because Patty, a celebrated Oregon wine maker and pioneer of what I like to call the Oregon Wine Trail, said it was one of her personal favorites. The grapes actually came from a select vineyard in Sonoma county. So this wine gave an interesting dimension to the battle between Sonoma and Oregon for best US region for Pinot Noir. It was Oregon wine making know-how grafted onto Sonoma's finest fruit. In my mind Oregon wins that general battle hands down, but this bottle of Hirsch was certainly evidence that Sonoma could grow some primo fruit.

That bottle proved to be everything Patty Green had said it would be. I held it from release in early 2003 until 2008. I served it up after breathing it for 2 hours with our first Porterhouse cooked outside on the grill of the season. I won't even try to explain how delicious this wine was other then to say it was a religious experience. It was in the top 25 best bottles of wine I've ever tasted.

It was a bittersweet event. All that hand picked, lovingly cared for wine was gone. That wine that I shared with two very different woman who have one thing in common in that they mean everything to me. Thank you to my late wife Cyndi for not only allowing me my indulgence in fine wines, but getting me involved in the wine class and the guide dog program, both of which helped me explore some of the finest vineyards in the world in Willamette and Yamhill county Oregon. Thank you to Sue for being patient with me while I figured out how to introduce my old passions into our new lives while defining our own spin on them. There are four other girls I want to thank: Jackie, my daughter, who has been smelling corks since she was a baby and making some very observant remarks on the wine. She is 18 now and in a few years we will share a wine from her birth year, a year that produced fantastic cabernets in Napa valley.

The other three girls are the beautiful guide dog puppies who each brought their own sweet personalities. To Ruffles, our first guide dog puppy that helped me realize the role dogs play on most wineries. Most every winery has a resident doggy-in-chief. Ruffles yellow coat was a welcome site to humans and canines alike at the wineries. To Clarabelle, the only black lab of those we raised. Clarabelle stole winemaker Patricia Green's heart. Patty asked "if Clarabelle doesn't make it as a guide dog, can I adopt her?" Living on twenty-something acres in wine country would be a lovely life for a dog, but Clarabelle made it all the way, as did Ruffles, and they both now guide visually impaired partners.

Finally to a puppy who has seen me through some of the toughest moments of my 45 years on this planet. Amiga, you are very special to me for reasons to numerous to list. While I am sad you were unable to pursue a career as a guide due to your skin allergies, I couldn't have wished for a more pleasant surprise then that phone call when I was given the opportunity to adopt you after being apart for nearly a year while you were in advanced training.

Life has thrown me many curve balls over the years. Someone I have great respect once told me that I have lived and loved more then a dozen men combined. I've gone from homeless to wealth just about back to homelessness again. I've had a wonderful marriage, a beautiful daughter, and I am engaged again to a girl I have loved most of my life (30 years is a long time).Yes, it is possible to love someone who had been special once before without taking anything away from your existing marriage. Love is not something you turn on or off. You can love the girl who you spent every possible teenage moment with forever without compromising your new life with your new love. I know this is true because I lived it myself. Cyndi was the queen of my universe and she knew it. When she was slipping away she asked me to find someone to love who would be good to our daughter. I hadn't realized when she said that how strong the pull across 3000 miles between Sue and I would become. These beautiful women have shared my special passion for wine and in doing so gave me the gift of a passion for life.

In closing, I want to write more about some of the wines and experiences getting to this moment when the collection is gone. But I do want to share some wisdom the whole experience has taught me. It's been said before, but it is worth repeating. A fine wine is a nice thing, but sharing a fine wine with a beautiful woman you love is something too profoundly wonderful to put into words. I think the lessons I learned here actually have nothing to do with wine at all. I think I may have stumbled on a fundamental truth of life here. So here's to hoping you all have the opportunity to share something you love with someone you love.