Rural Rhapsody

This elegant beauty engages you
with raspberry and dried herbs,
the tasting notes tell us.
It plays with you like a guilty pleasure
hinting at something deep, dark
and hedonistic, an earthy minerality
that hovers on the palate …

like that kestrel hanging
outside the winery window,
adrift on the Autumn air.

Our wine country journey began
five million years ago
when a tectonic shift
unfolded these hills
along a trisecting fault line.
The coastal plate lurched and
the Santa Lucia Mountains were born

then gradually unborn,
a controlled erosion that
produced a chalky topsoil
and caused a modern-day land rush.
Barns were raised,
cows led politely out to pasture,
crops uprooted to make way
for orderly rows of Rhones and Burgundians—
Syrah and Grenache, Cabernet and Merlot
now blanketing these hills as far as the eye can see.

Advancing quickly from the Pliocene,
our trip has reached its zenith
on a sunny patio at Denner Winery.
Elation alights nearby and pulls up a chair.
You pass me the olives and
flash me a glance, a look
that could carve mountains,
acknowledging the precious sediment
unswirled at the bottom of our glasses,
foraminifera fauna with igneous overtones
of granite and basalt.
It’s a perfect pairing

you and I,
perched on the edge of
this antediluvian uplift.
And so we pause to savor
the earth’s fermented essence,
all those concentrated flavors pulled up
through the flinty shale
to create a ruby masterpiece,
savored on the tongue and lavished
with every imaginable adjective—

from violets to pepper, espresso to clove,
and our personal favorite
after three days of indulgent sipping:
a 93-pointer that can
roll its own tobacco
and recite Shakespeare.

In the end, we decide to dispense
with the flowery language and
sum it up more simply:
Our drug of choice
—red wine consumed slowly
over the course of an aimless afternoon.

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photo credit: Susie Baum