Vintage Attraction (23 page)

I waited for her to continue.

“How, like, you don't want fine dining to be so stuffy, so serious. How your concepts make it easy and accessible. That's what I've always wanted to do with wine. Arm people with information, but not the kind of information that makes them irritating and snobbish. Just well prepared. Prepared so they don't have to feel intimidated. So they have
fun
. I think we're trying to accomplish the same thing, just you're doing it with restaurants, and I'm doing it with wine. Don't you think?”

I didn't know what to say. I reached for her hand. I laced my fingers between hers and left them there like that, atop her thigh.

Ktima Pavlidis, the winery, was the only building on the sprawl of green grass that fronted the acres and acres of vines. It looked like a giant marble mausoleum. Inside the building, we saw the Pavlidis stainless steel fermentation tanks and walked the long bottling line, which was not currently in service. There was a room where hundreds of full bottles yet to be labeled were hanging out in open-faced crates. Then we were taken downstairs.

Here was the tasting room, in the center of two dark, cool cellars in which wine fermented and aged in barrels. The tasting room had an oil painting of a ravishing fire on a large, rectangular canvas on the back wall. They'd set a sleek mahogany table with benches on either side of it for us. There was a white and a red glass for each person. In the middle sat a silver spit bucket. Pavlidis had eight wines for us to taste: Tempranillo; Assyrtiko, the grape we learned about at last night's dinner; three versions of a product called Thema: the white a blend of Assyrtiko and Sauvignon Blanc, a rosé made entirely out of Tempranillo, and a red composed of Syrah and Agiorgitiko; and three non-trade samples that had been taken out of their barrels within the past four weeks and hadn't yet been tried outside of the winery.

I began with the first wine. I hefted my glass by its stem and spiraled the juice inside. Across the table, Dick and Maddie took their glasses by the bowls. This was a faux pas, the mark of amateurs. But swirling was as far as my impersonation of a wine-industry insider would go. Even though Izzy and George tasted and expectorated into the inelegant reservoir without a second thought, I decided, defiantly, that I was not going to make use of the spit bucket. The wine was too good to waste. How much bad could come from swallowing a few sips of each varietal? As I progressed, I caught myself draining the glasses. The sample pours were
pours
, quite the opposite of those you'd find at a walk-around tasting for consumers, where you'd receive thimbles. In short order, I got quite unmistakably tanked.

My head was a tumult of waves. When spanakopita, a flaky layered phyllo pie filled with feta cheese and spinach, came out for lunch, I gobbled several triangles, but it was too late to counteract the gallon of wine I'd drunk. The cheese was acidic and scorched my throat. I hoped Izzy couldn't tell I was wasted. She was reviewing some notes she'd jotted on the Assyrtiko (“Nervous,” “Clean and citrusy,” “Goes well with ceviche”). I was glad she didn't look up at me when I excused myself. I climbed a cement staircase and found the men's room. There I puked in a toilet. It managed to restore me. After I rinsed my mouth out with water from the faucet, I returned to the group. I was able to stay composed for the remainder of our visit by keeping my eyes averted from the glasses and the remains of the tasting. I feared reacquainting myself with the instruments of my momentary demise would unsettle my stomach's now-precarious equilibrium. While the others engaged the remaining bottles, I drank water I poured myself from a pitcher that somebody had brought out while I was away.

On the bus, I sweated and slept off the rest of my stupor. We arrived two hours later at our next stop, Nico Lazaridi. Here we'd have another tasting, followed by dinner at the winery. How did people survive this pace? I supposed I was ready to go at it again. Maybe this time I'd go at it a little more cautiously.

Lazaridi was more rustic in comparison to Pavlidis Estate. Here the grass was a little wild, overgrown. A goat roamed around, chewing uncertain comestibles. The tour revealed that the facilities, too, were decidedly less pristine. The tanks were dinged up. Their double convex exteriors were pitted and not as shiny as the ones we'd seen earlier. I could tell the grimy floors had been hastily hosed prior to our arrival. We went below ground to see the caves in which the château's sparkling wines were fermented. The walls were craggy with ancient, mineral-rich golden soil. It was as though they offered a rare glimpse at layers deep into the earth. Upstairs, the tasting room wasn't fancy. In fact, it wasn't really even a tasting room at all. The staff set up guests in a winery conference room with seats that had side panels you could swing up for a writing surface, like those classroom chairs many rooms on campus had been outfitted with and I'd sometimes encountered in my previous life.

In this configuration, it was very difficult to balance one glass while trying to taste the wine in the other. My desktop seemed to be the only one that slanted. We tried a blend of white Monemvasia and red Mandilaria grapes that created a Bordeaux-style dry rose. A sweet white the color of amber sunshine made from the Muscat grape was called Moushk. Perpetuus, a local Dramatic blend of Sangiovese and Cabernet Sauvignon, was much juicier than the comparable lighter varietals we'd had so far. The tasting dwelled on a heavy red called Magic Mountain. It was a mélange of Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, and Merlot.

“That's funny,” I said, mostly to myself.

“Why's that?” Dick replied. His big hand seemed to grip his desk more tightly.

“There's this Thomas Mann novel, called
The Magic Mountain
. It's about a guy who admits himself to a TB facility in the Swiss Alps.”

“TB is funny?”

“Well, no, but to name a wine . . .” When Dick countered with stony inexpressiveness, I added, “Well, if all else fails, I guess it could be a popular by-the-glass placement at sanitariums?” I evoked a broad smile, which went unreciprocated. “Amusement parks?”

Dick exhaled an audible stream. He directed his attention to the ebb and flow of the Moushk tide in his glass. Here his eyes remained, until someone else stepped in with a remark that more closely resembled insight.

After the tasting, we were led to the winery's art gallery. In the center of the room, a round dinner table had been set for us. Servers began to open lids on chafing dishes lined up on a long cloth-covered folding table adjacent.

Izzy fashioned a tasting menu for me from the buffet. She ladled onto my plate large lima beans in tomato sauce, a heap of stewed greens, and a square of a casserole that looked like macaroni and cheese with a spanakopita topping, pastitsio. On the table awaiting us were the open wines that we'd sampled during the tasting. In between us sat the winemaker and the enologist and the marketer with their modest portions. Dick schemed the pyramid of Corked4Less, Maddie and Barry brought out pictures of their children, and Izzy talked about running a fine dining establishment and her work on television. As I ate greens and drank rosé, I admired the art around us. The giant oils depicted their scenes in broad strokes. Operatic sailors stood on a thrust stage. A fire raged at a horizon, with geometric structures of pink and blue in the foreground, lots of moons, blazing suns.

At a lull in the conversation, Nico Laziridis, imaginably in an attempt to jump-start things, turned to Izzy and said, “Sooo, Osama? Or Heellary?”

Sunday, March 23

Naoussa

A new addition to the group, Barry, showed up a few minutes
before we were supposed to board the bus to Halkidiki the next morning. In an open-collared, apricot-colored polo shirt and with his rolling suitcase beside him, he introduced himself to Izzy and me. Barry was from upstate New York and worked for a company that provided food service to colleges. His flight to Greece had been delayed two days ago. The delay had cascaded a series of contingencies, which resulted in his arrival late last night. Barry was short, squat, with dark, Italian coloring and a heavy East Coast accent. He spoke in the terse, colloquial, innocuous manner of, I decided after we took our rows, a Little League baseball umpire.

The Tsantali Winery was located in Peligros, Halkidiki's capital, a peninsula sixty-nine kilometers southeast of Thessaloniki. Here we saw copper stills and an unconventional vertical press. The vertical press was a hulking machine of steel and wood designed, we learned, to maximize the “must” (the quantity of juice) that could be derived from the “pumice” (solid grape matter) without compromising quality. Winemaking was always a negotiation between technology and the natural processes that resisted it. If winemakers interfered too much, things could backfire. They'd end up losing valuable extractions crucial to vinification, instead of gaining them. Machinery only helped to a point. Ultimately, one had to defer to the idiosyncrasies of the grape.

Athiri, another new varietal to us, was the first wine we tasted. The managing director who'd taken us around, Angelos, was pleased to hear Izzy's remark that this wine's crisp green-pear flavor made it perfect for American drinkers who'd grown tired of the same old Pinot Grigio. Its floralness was also a point of interest to contrast the ubiquitous Italian standard. Izzy next swirled and took a small sip of a blend of Limnio and Cabernet Sauvignon called Metoxi. It had been poured out of the bottle and into a decanter beforehand. “Licorice,” she said. It never failed to impress me how she could detect the flavors and generate similes so rapidly. As soon as she made her proclamation, everyone else could taste what it was she said she found. This was quite the opposite of my experiences as a teacher. More times than I cared to recall, students had looked at me aghast, as though I'd dropped my pants and flashed my Melville, whenever I'd allude, offhandedly, but purposefully, to a flourishing passage in
Moby Dick
during class.

A couple of varietals later, as Izzy gave the room her notes, Barry knocked over a glass of wine. When he went to pick it up, down came a glass of Dick's. Barry apologized profusely for the commotion; he hadn't slept well, he repeated, and was still pretty jetlagged. Izzy had been looking at something in her lap during the interruption. Her BlackBerry.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Nothing,” she said. She straightened her back and put the BlackBerry on the table facedown. “Just looking up vertical presses on Wikipedia.”

“Okay,” I said.

In the afternoon, we set out for a two-and-a-half-hour drive to Naoussa, a small town of only forty-five square meters. Naoussa sat off the road linking Veria and Skydra. Farmlands lined our path to the east. To the west, there were forests and the Vermion Mountains.

Izzy slept with her head on my shoulder. This trip had already transformed her mood. She wasn't as volatile as she'd seemed for a while back home, not as tense, as defensive. She'd been affectionate again after we left Chicago and continued to be as we moved through Greece. I wanted to believe she'd left behind all the thorny parts of our past. But I couldn't stop thinking about her with her BlackBerry at Tsantali. Her claim she'd been on Wikipedia felt like a lie.

I needed her phone. As I tried to work out a plan to sneak it away from her, we hit a segment of the highway that was littered with potholes. Izzy was still asleep when the rocky stretch of terrain sent a thunderbolt through the bus. Unconsciously, she pulled away from my shoulder and repositioned her head against the glass. Here was my opportunity. Her unguarded bag was between us. I was able to open it and reel out the BlackBerry. I stuck it in my pocket. A few seconds later, I casually brought it out. I feigned surprise, as though thinking,
Who'd try to reach me now, here?
I openly squinted at the screen and made to take in imaginary information, just as Izzy always did when the device buzzed her with a real e-mail.

I looked first at the sent items. She had been texting Pacer Rosengrant from the winery. Goddamn it. His most recent missive went unanswered. He must have sent it while we were walking or eating, when it would have been too conspicuous for her to respond. I set about sending a reply now. I didn't know how much this was costing. I wasn't even sure a text would go through, out here on a country road, where there were likely few, if any, cell towers. I typed,
What time is it there?
Numbers vibrated back a moment later. It was particularly infuriating he replied so quickly. It was as though her tawdry interlocutor were on call. How could she persist in this behavior, even from here? Was she just humoring me by being amiable and, dare I interpret it, loving? That was the only possible explanation. Either that, or she really was torn between both of us. Then the BlackBerry dispensed,
You get to naoussa yet
? I returned:
On the way.
What came next was
Forgot 2 tell u
Check out Domaine Karydas if u can. Kickass Xinomavro. Super good fruit n structure spicy roasted plum wood smoke coffee notes
.
Had on BTG for a min @ Palazzo.
Was he kidding?
Don't have time,
I typed.
And I can't talk right now.
This text-messaging thing had really gotten out of control. It had jumped bail in Chicago and was now committing international offenses. Was she updating him from every step of the journey? Where did Izzy think this ceaseless juggling of her past and her present was going to lead her, exactly? At some point, the laws of nature and half-hour television dictated, things were bound to take a turn for the catastrophic.

I erased the dialogue and put the phone back in her bag. Then I closed my eyes and tried to nap off my warm, throbbing drunk. It was starting to turn into a nauseated rumble in my stomach. My esophagus and trachea hadn't really stopped pulsing and burning all day.