2015 Red Burgundy
We’re at a bar in Fort Worth, where I’m visiting you for the week. We’re still just friends. When we talk, it feels movie-like, witty and rapid-fire, saturated. It is this quality that makes me feel really alive.
You sample the Sauvignon Blanc. “This wine…tastes…real bad.”
I laugh and say, “is that a Rupi Kaur poem?”
“Yes. Which reminds me: Do you think Walt Whitman ever had trouble finding an emoji to encompass his multitudes?”
“Probably. He wasn’t very good at expressing himself.”
“Right? It’s like, seriously, Walt, pick up a dictionary.”
I’m nervous, nervous you’ll sniff out that I’m not shiny like you, that this spark of conversation will go cold and I’ll lose the warm glow of your attention.
You ask what we should get instead. I want to follow your lead. You choose red burgundy. I remark it tastes like a Flemish-style sour ale, with vibrant fruitiness and a funky vinegar finish. You are just beginning to change my allegiance from beer to wine. I am just beginning to realize I’m in love with you.
Giddy from the wine and quiet intimacy, we hop into your Solera and drive the wastelandish stretch of I-30. We sit in electric silence as each exit passes. The Taco Casa/gas station combo. Your brother’s high school. And “Temptations,” the Texas-large strip club with “BYOB” and “18+” signs.
Straddling the line between hoping and knowing, I place my hand on the automatic car’s gear shift between us. When yours gently follows suit, I get this buzzing sensation so alien that it frightens me. And this bottle would stand for doing it even though it’s scary, for putting your hand into the wound, as you like to say.
2016 Montalcino
After I tell you I am in love with you, for 6 months we don’t talk. We’re too afraid. Until one night you call from Scotland. It’s 4am there and you are so drunk I can smell the whisky through the phone. The buzzing feeling reawakens like a lost memory. It swells week after week into a nauseating swirl, like that feeling in your stomach when you’re on a roller coaster that suddenly accelerates. I soon cave and book a weekend flight to surprise you for your London performance.
After the show, it is Montalcino you drink while carting me around making introductions. It is Montalcino you take a big sip of as you say, “come to the bathroom, I need to reapply lipstick.” It is Montalcino you hold in one hand while I—completely oblivious to the machination you’ve conspired—hold onto the other. And when it finally dawns on me, in that cramped bathroom stall, the air hot and weighty, it is Montalcino that stains your teeth as I press you against the wall, placing my lips on yours. And it represents realizing 4 years is long enough to wait to do what I’d wanted to do from the start.
2017 Cabernet Sauvignon
I send it for your 23rd birthday. Although we are on the outs, I can’t stand not giving you something. When you receive it, you are pissed, but not pissed enough to throw it out, although you make a show as if you will.
Two years later, we finally crack it open. And while it was never very good—it’s a Washington Cab, after all—its hiatus in your parents’ house has made it completely undrinkable. We pour down the sink all but the two soggy-horseradish sips that had regrettably passed our lips. And this bottle would represent how sometimes you wait too long and good things turn bad.
2018 Rosé
We are in Languedoc, where it is unseasonably warm for October as we chance upon a tiny village, feeling as if we’re in on a secret. We stumble on a winery and decide on rosé. Softly pink like fainting cheeks, it is deliciously juicy, not quite Provencal but still classically strawberries and cream. We sip it reverently, feeling giggly and alive, the bottle sparkling in the sunlight the way enchanted things glow in old movies.
You say, “I just love the aliveness of wine, you know? Even wine from the same vineyard will be different each year.”
“Mm, yes. It’s like that Fitzgerald quote: ‘There are all kinds of love in the world, but never the same love twice.’”
“April is over. April is over,” you reply.
You’re reading this medieval record of a French vineyard, and we laugh that one year the entry says simply: “No crop this year. Wolves.”
I say, “let’s pick a bottle each year, something we feel buzzy about, to commemorate our time together. Like this rosé can be our 2018 wine.”
“Like a memento. I love it. So when we’re 60 it’s this reminder we were once two hot dykes in France spending money we didn’t have.”
“And a reminder that medieval wolves were not to be fucked with.”
Let this bottle represent everything being quaint, picture perfect, and just so.
2019 Bianco di Pitigliano | Tempranillo
Here it gets complicated. Maybe it should be the Bianco di Pitigliano—a dry, Italian white with light acid, slate-y minerality, and a straw color fit for some Tuscan-sun simile. We drank it almost daily when we lived there for the summer.
Prior to that, we’d been having these nightmare fights. Some trifling disagreement would escalate into explosive conflict. I’d try to take space while you’d insist on pushing through, until I felt trapped and you felt abandoned. So I’d hurl insults or storm off, or, usually, both. And you’d pick me apart and talk about our relationship in the past tense. Eventually we’d make limp promises never to do it again.
But in Pitigliano there is no fighting. Instead, on Wednesdays we walk to the market for fresh produce. We cook beautiful food while cool air glides in through the door. And to nourish our budding fascination with the Etruscans—Italy’s first winemakers—you read passages from D. H. Lawrence’s Etruscan Places.
It is an anomaly that we never fight here. I conclude there is something magical about the place. My conviction redoubles when our very next fight is on the train out of Pitigliano, the endless sea of poppies dancing in the train’s wind as it carries us away.
I will find the wine at a shop in Berlin 3 years later, just weeks after we break up. I’ll share it with a new woman I’m dating because I know how much it would hurt you. The same wine that punctuated our reprieve also will taste like the dark pleasure of saying “fuck you.”
2019 is also when I throw a party upon your return to NYC. I serve a pepper-y Tempranillo, not a favorite varietal of ours but a crowd pleaser. We are still draining our glasses after the guests have left and the living room has resumed its familiar quietude. Like lighting a firecracker in a Cathedral, you shatter the facade, admitting you fucked someone else.
You say it happened during your acting gig in Philly, just a few weeks before we left for Italy. And instead of magic, the reason you give for why we never fought in Pitigliano is you were “too checked out to even care to fight.”
You say you had to tell me because you can’t stand the guilt after I’ve done something so intentional and sweet. You could stand it long enough to get through the party, I think.
2020 Cava
As an early celebration on the eve of your birthday, we cook panko-fried avocado tacos with tomatillo sauce and cotija cheese. We pair them with Spanish cava and your favorite LP: Teddy Wilson’s Cole Porter Classics. The cava’s dry effervescence marries perfectly with the tacos’ salty tang.
When the cava runs out, we switch to margaritas. By midnight, we’re drunk. Our words ooze out of our mouths, as if moving through honey. I get a pang of anxiety: I do not want to drink any more. But you will not want to put the fun down. You will not want me to put the fun down.
Telling you I do not want another drink is a delicate and precise maneuver. If I’m overly firm, you’ll get defensive and feel judged. If I’m too casual, though, you will ignore it and I’ll have to double down, which will provoke your suspicion.
I say cheerfully, “I’m happy to stay up if you’d like another!” I miss the mark. The evening’s blissful momentum is shattered. The record, now ended, plays only cotton-y static.
The problem is not that I didn’t want to drink but how I said it, you explain. I feel hopeless and defiant. You say I’ve ruined your birthday because you’ll get terrible sleep and feel like shit tomorrow. Our inevitable hangovers manage to escape any blame.
2021 Unknown Wine
The fight starts inside the kebab shop. Though I sometimes call it the worst fight, it’s an impossible assessment: Worst fight, best wine—the criteria are inscrutable, the selection pool dizzyingly large.
I hear the slight upswing in your voice signaling anxiety. Dread washes over me. The dread of feeling responsible for your anxiety; I’ve learned that when you say you are anxious, what you mean is I need to make it go away. If I don’t, you’ll say I’m not being helpful, and if I’m not being helpful, I’m not meeting your need, and if I’m not meeting your need, then why are we together, because surely it doesn’t make sense for you to be with someone who can’t meet your needs? So I live in the shadow of your anxiety. It is fearsome and unpredictable, like a war-time siren expecting me to evacuate, whether I’m eating dinner, cleaning the toilet, or fucking.
“Can we please not do this here”
You refuse. You have to, otherwise you’ll suffocate.
In the next snapshot, I am walking away from you.
I return home a couple hours later, cautiously hopeful you’ll give me space. It looks like a peace offering when you pour us wine and we sit down to talk, but I’ve misjudged. While out you’d found a new way to get me to talk: You read my journal.
I get angry. I lock myself in the bathroom. Undeterred, you jimmy the lock over and over until I surrender. I see the wine floating in your eyes. Your words wrench, sticking in your mouth like sleeves catching on doorknobs. I think about our first kiss. The image of your teeth, wine-stained then like now, contorted with new, grotesque meaning. When did they begin to mean danger?
In the last snapshot, I’m on the couch. You’re on the phone in the bedroom. You say knowingly, calculatingly, with an actor’s commitment, “I’m now safely locked in the bedroom.” I’m fuming, but I can’t do anything besides sit there. If I do, I look like the monster you think I am. The monster you tell me I am whenever things get bad.
Hungover the next morning, I feel the nauseating swirl again. I want to forget, but this last snapshot is all I can think about. Shards from your dropped glass lay in the sink like a refusal. A reminder of how even beloved things can slip from our grasp.
So this year would be for that bottle, the one obliterated from memory save for the image of it stained on your teeth. I’m not sure what it represents, so let’s go with this: No crop this year. Wolves.
2025 That boxed shit
It’s been 3 years since I last saw you. I’m in the kitchen spigotting Pinot into my glass. I take a sip and recoil. It has cherry notes like cough medicine and a leathery finish like church wine.
I think back to our last New Year’s together. We stayed in, made a blanket fort, and ordered pizza from the nice spot on the Upper West. You grabbed a bottle from the case you’d lugged around ever since that harvest outside Sacramento. Fruity with a velvetiness like the blankets that enveloped us, it was 100% Cinsault, an eccentric choice from the experimental winemaker, you explained, given Cinsault is normally reserved for blending. We laid like ancient Romans, sipping between bites of margherita and funghi, slaking salty thirst.
Though the fight in the kebab shop was only weeks prior, it felt like another world. We spent the evening writing flash poems using prompts we’d selected for each other. When you assigned me snowflakes, I wrote:
Why do I think of snowflakes
when I think of drinking that rosé from Languedoc?
Why do I think of snowflakes
when I think of your hand over mine
resting on the gear shift?
Why do I think of snowflakes
when I think about us lying under the Christmas tree,
gazes turned upward
in our cramped NYC apartment?
My guess is
because I never loved snowflakes
until they collected on my window pane
while we drank gin fizz in February
and I fell in love with you.
And because the next morning as we trod down Arthur Avenue—
you having surmounted my reluctance of the cold—
you said that something special would happen today
because many years ago you had wagered that
Snowflakes were the universe’s good fortune
and ever since you’ve piously kept the faith.
I finish the glass of bad Pinot and decide against another. I don’t miss the hangovers. I don’t miss the nausea. Sometimes I don’t even miss you. But it’s still the best New Year’s I’ve ever had.
