Letter From the Void
The bartender stares blankly at me. I am in the lobby bar of an old, downtown hotel in a medium sized city. The hotel has been beautifully renovated, rescued from its fate as a cheap residence to resume its role as an urban hub. People go to the restaurant for Sunday brunch; the bar is an after-work hotspot and a late-night romantic rendezvous. It is now, early on a Friday evening, packed with the city’s stylish folk. I have asked if the bar has any Sauvignon Blanc, and what I get in return is incomprehension.
I simplify my question, thinking the noise must make it hard for the bartender to hear: “What kind of white wine do you have?” I expect to be handed a list.
“Chardonnay,” she answers, and that is it. I have come out of a hot summer afternoon and do not want the kind of Chardonnay I am sure to get in a place where the answer to “what kind of white wine do you have?” is only “Chardonnay.” I order a beer. They have 21 varieities to choose from.
Two hours later, in a “nice” restaurant in the same small city, I am ordering dinner. It is a festive place, casually elegant. There are 12 wines on the list: 3 Chardonnays, 2 Pinot Grigios, 1 White Zinfandel, 3 Cabernet Sauvignon and 3 Merlot. I have been in restaurants with 12 wines on the list that stretched far enough that I didn’t feel deprived. Here, it’s like I have no selection at all. The multiples of the same variety are all expressions of brand loyalty rather than stylistic range.
I order a Pinot Grigio expecting not much. I get a small glass filled to the rim with rank wine that has been open in a refrigerator for a month.
I am not, you might gather, in wine country. I am, instead, in a place as removed from “wine culture” as it is possible to be without the application of Sharia Law. This is not a moral failing. It doesn’t mean the people surrounding me are stupid or provincial or inferior. It just means that wine has not reached them yet.
There is a theory of cosmology that posits that the expansion after the Big Bang has not been uniform, that the universe is not so much ever-expanding ball as it is inflating sponge, with invisible pockets of nothingness – no light, no matter, no time – contained within a web of what we can observe every day. The wine universe is like that, and I am in one of the invisible pockets. Forty miles to the east is one of the best wine stores I know. Fifty miles to the west is a larger city with a vibrant wine culture. Here between them is the cold darkness of the void.
I’m thinking: if I were a more adventurous soul, I would colonize this place. Open a small wine store and give tastings and lessons and co-host dinners with any restaurant that would have me. But I am not a more adventurous person. I don’ have the patience or passion to colonize new territory.
But someone will come along, and a few years from now this rare absence of wine culture will be gone, captured at last by the ever expanding universe of wine. For some reason, that makes me sad.
July 18th, 2011 at 8:58 AM
What a treat to read this on a Monday morning. You must be in Cincinnati.
July 18th, 2011 at 10:46 AM
Loved this Tom. Sadly, my big town in Southern California is just far enough from LA that the wine lists we encounter are much like you’re describing here….sigh.
July 18th, 2011 at 1:55 PM
So I guess I shouldn’t ask if they had any local wine?
If it makes you feel better, I had the same thing happen to me about 12 years ago in Washington state. So there is hope.