On travel and wine

My last night in Rome I sat with friends, ordering dinner along the banks of the Tiber River. Giovanni, my host, ordered a ribolla and, when I asked him about it, he told me that it was about 80% ribolla grape and 10 or 20% chardonnay. I was impressed that he had this information on the tip of his tongue so I asked how he knew so much. "Did you study about wine?" I asked him.

And Giovanni turned to me in that charming way of his and said, "I never study the great pleasures of life." We both laughed and we both knew what he meant.

But, despite what Giovanni says, I took a wine class last week. WINE 101. Wines from the Piedmonte region of Italy. I headed off to my local wine store, Red, White, and Bubbly (highly recommnended) where I walked into a room of about eight people and was given a seat with ten glasses in front of me. Tyrone, our local West Indian sommalier, was pouring.

It occurred to me from the start that I might be in trouble. For years I thought I should quit drinking. Give up wine. Probably I drink a little too much, like it more than I should. So I tried. I made one or two efforts and then realized it was pointless. As the Italians, or is it the French say, a day without wine is like a day without sun. I found that if I drink in moderation I'm fine. But the ten glasses before me, even just for a tasting, seemed daunting.

Still I couldn't agree more with that old saying. The truth is I love the taste of a great rose, a buttery chardonnay, a berry-on-the-nose pinot noir. I really don't know how to talk about wine that much and I'm not sure I care. But what fascinates me, as it does with literature, is landscape.

Terroir. Specific wines come from specific regions. The rain, the soil, the sun. It changes the whole thing. Similarly I have found with stories. The narratives that came out of the island country of Greece are not the same as came from the sweeps of Russia, the expanse of America, the tiny, tidy island life of England. The same with wine. What grows one way in volcani Sicily won't be the same wine on the North Fork of Long Island.

I guess what draws me to wine is somewhat what has drawn me to journeys. Maps. Terrain. So giving up wine would be the equivalent of giving up stories. And that would be the equivalent of giving up on journeys. And it is so intertwined I can no longer tell the one from the other. Nor do I particularly want to.

So I am not really going to learn more about wine per se. I am really going to learn about geography. What makes one region produce something different from another? And what exactly are all those different kinds of grapes?

In fact the class did not disappoint. I knew I'd come to the right place when our teacher, Tyrone, told us that every bottle of wine contains a story. When you open it, you can tell if it was hot or dry that summer. If it rained a lot. You can smell the earth from which that wine grew. A bottle of wine is a time capsule. It contains our past.

I graduated from Wine 101 and staggered in to the night with my fellow classmates. I learned that wines can smell like diesel, barnyard, cat piss, and pencil shavings. And then there are the hints of bitter apple, berry, mushroom, bacon? Beyond the story in the bottle, each sip requires a lot of imagination.


I don't plan to study the great pleasures of life. But it can't hurt to understand a little more. So now each sip is a small journey to another place, another time. Each sip, even on my terrace or local bistro, takes me away.

On Swapping Homes

A number of years ago, more than a dozen now, a friend inquired at a basketball game of Kate's, if we'd ever considered swapping our home. I said no I hadn't and wasn't sure I'd want to. "Well," she said, "this very nice family from France wants to visit and we're already going to Spain."

She gave me the website and I told her to take a look. And I did. I saw this crumbling French farmhouse, surrounded by wheat fields and a garden that seemed to be from Eden. A vision from Manet.

So we made an exchange with the Massons, our first exchange family. We met the Massons in Paris over an espresso and croissant. They handed us the keys to their son's apartment in Paris, to their farmhouse in the Loire, and to the Renault. We gave them a Metrocard, a subway map of NY, and the keys to our house. That was it. We said good-bye.

This was the beginning of what has become more than a dozen exchanges for us. France, Belgium, Catalonia, San Sebastian, Florence, Todi, County Clare. We have lived in all of these places. One of our most recent swaps was to a second home of a Madrid family. It was by the sea in a place called Mojacar. Mojacar is a white washed city where Arabs, Jews and Christians once all got along. It is a steep and hilly place and was difficult to navigate with my broken leg, which I had at the time. But I loved being by the sea and a part of me felt as if this was where I belonged.

I will share more stories on Mojacar and our house swaps from time to time. But we like to live in a place when we go there and we have lived in all of these. I am happy to talk about house swaps with anyone who wishes to engage me. I believe more and more that it is the way to go. Especially with a family.

Sketches of Spain

Perhaps it's right to evoke Miles Davis here. There was something haunting and beautiful about this place. Everything slowed down, but I didn't mind the slowness, the empty spaces. The view from our window was across the river to this little town. A small skiff ran between our two villages and we often rode back and forth many times a day. There were good seafood restaurants where we had leisurely lunches of fish, pulling right from the sea. San Pedro where we lived was an open, lively place, but we found San Juan more isolated.

Only a thousand people lived there and they had lived for generations. Basque separatist flags flew from many of the houses, especially during the fiesta time. There was an undercurrent that we sensed, but could not quite describe. Our neighbor explained for us. Half of that village votes for the party that favors ETA. It is a strong bastion of the Basque movement.

As we walked the streets, we observed posters, mainly written in Basque, with hundreds of faces. It seems that the Spanish government had sent prisoners far away from their families and the families were asking them to be returned to prisons nearby. This was a major political issue in the area. We were aware of this tension, but we were taken up in something else. The txacoli that they poured from on high at the bar around the corner, pintxos in the evening, the strange rowing dance they made Larry do on the ground of the plaza.

Then there was the walk through the mountains that the pilgrims take to San Sebastian, the giant freighters, bound for Newfoundland and Kazakstan, cruising by. The rhythmic grunts as the rowers raced by. When the children were jumping from the seawall, I joined them. I knew it was high tide.