Taste of Autumn

I'm getting a taste of Autumn here, deceptive for a New Englander in this hot climate, but change is in the air. I plod through the emptied chardonnay vines amidst the yellowing leaves and am transported to New Hampshire and the White Mountains. I've got a touch of melancholia and vintage isn't nearly over. Everything transforms. The seasons streak by too quickly to catch -- what is born, dies, to be reborn in a different form. Likewise the wine, memory of what preceded, is translated into something new, captured living and changing in the bottle.

Will my offspring succeed me? Will what follows match the effort expended? Does my stand matter overall? At a certain point in inebriation, and, I imagine, at the point when I die, letting go of my attachment to everyone and everything so that I can move on, will anything matter at all?

A cooling wind has risen off the sea and is shuddering through the peppermints. I stand in the gentle rain of thin purpled fragrant leaves and see signals of endings everywhere. The light is dampening and I’ve only begun. 

Last night I saw a mother kangaroo and her joey hopping across the road and to my horror the oncoming car didn’t stop until it had nicked the joey. I saw it struggling up the hill, mother zigzagging in panic. They disappeared out of sight and I was left with a dread in my heart. Could it survive that? If it did, what would it’s future be like? Was it suffering? Clearly its mother was, and I still am.

Such thoughts must be consequences of the hour and of the time.

It’s the turning of the season, the waning of the light. Dawn arrives noticeably later, and darkness falls earlier. I can smell rain on the wind, feel the prayer of the expectant parched earth. Those unbearably hot days are mostly behind us. The harvest moon is waxing towards fullness, the Cabernet is ready to come in.

In the US I’d be hearing Canada geese winging southward, the crunch of dead leaves, apple spice in the air. Endings are new beginnings. Wine is this moment, captured. The year lives in the bottle. Autumn is the death that sets up rebirth. I taste the bitter in the sweet, the dark in the light.

The green green terroir of home

I'm not exactly homesick, yet I'm drinking in terrain that I've been missing.

I'm visiting the States and have subwayed and sashayed across the island of New York, skipped through various crisp New England leafdoms (with borrowed dogs!), run barefooted amongst throngs of shorebirds along the Florida gulf, window-shopped with the tourists and homeless on Chicago's Michigan Ave. And in California, to paraphrase Paul Simon, I've been Golden-Gated, Napa-Valleyed till I'm blind. I miss all of this in Margaret River. America's landscapes and cityscapes live in me and I'm indescribably refreshed by being here.

And every day I open multiple bottles of Cloudburst and taste what is now home. And I'm wondering about the whole idea of that. Is it in the bottle, or in my head? I've met with some super-educated palates here, with long histories of tasting Margaret River wines, and everyone has claimed they taste my particular terroir and the various distinctive qualities of Margaret River. I drink and smell the bush, hear the ocean, see my children, my wife, the sky, the landscape. Am I delusional?

Can a random taster with eyes closed intuit, envision, get the lay of my land, the energy that enfolds my enterprise? I honestly don't know. I do know that wine connects in so many profound ways. And on this mad crazy whirlwind journey across the States and back again, Cloudburst is connecting me with my heart, my home, and my land.