The goddamn wine

Today was dividing-up-the-wine day. The house has been sold, Julia's moving, the china cupboard that once crossed half a country in a covered wagon is coming to live with me, and now I have picked 17 bottles of Dad's wine, my communion supply for the rest of my life. Is it wonderful or horrid, to have this tangible, intimate, but fragile and finite legacy? I certainly don't love wine as Dad did; I wish my legacy were a letter instead, some words, clear and explanatory, meant just for me. I would trade all the half-bottles of Chateau d'Yquem in the world for that letter.

But Dad & I shared our best words over wine. I wish it weren't so, but it was. I needed to be the littlest bit drunk to unlock my tongue with him, and wine unlocked him too. I remember talking one night long past dinner about wine and wool and terroir, the quilts of Gee's Bend and the aesthetics of authenticity. I remember him telling me once, in tears, some while before Henry was born, how much he wished his mother had lived to know him as a full-grown man. We drank champagne on his father's 100th birthday. We tried out variation after variation on rum punch, trying to recreate the cocktail that was a la mode in November of 2000 in Paris, where we spent a month together, eating and drinking our way around the neighborhood restaurants. Most often, whatever we talked about, we seemed to me to be using a code of indirection; I imagined us as miners, pointing our (wine-burning) headlamps not at each other's faces, but at the same vein of ore in the rock, each knowing the other was seeing it too.

So a letter, telling all, would have been entirely uncharacteristic of our relationship. Wine is a much more fitting patrimony. Dad's wine was memory: this wine he had drunk on that occasion, with this person. He bought wine to drink with his grandchildren when they grew up. Dad knew, far better than I did, which wines I had drunk before and liked, which wines I would like that I hadn't yet drunk. His remembering, and paying attention, was like--or was?--love.. Without Dad's thoughts behind it, without Dad to talk to while drinking it, without Dad to invest it with meaning, without Dad to tell me which is good, which is valuable, I don't know what to make of the wine by itself. It just IS.