Grit, Gargoyles, and Wine for the Weary
What the late Frank J. Prial taught me about the wine story and Haitian Vodou gods
Drink wine. This is life eternal. This, all that youth will give to you. It is the season for wine, roses, and drunken friends. Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life.
-Omar Khayyam
I fell in love with wine storytelling before I fell in love with wine. In the early 2000s, my roommate and I imagined opening a wine bar long before you saw wine boutiques off Fulton Avenue in downtown Brooklyn. We spent hours reading wine descriptions she printed off the Internet (This was before the Internet became the primary means of communication, before texting and social media). We sat in Junior’s eating cheesecake, reading these descriptions that seemed like they had nothing to do with wine. “Burnt toast? Expresso? How do they get crème brûlée in the wine?” we wondered.
This was when wine was still a beautiful wonder and an innocent exploration. I read the pages of Wine Spectator highlighting and taking notes the way people highlight the Old King James scriptures. At its best, wine writing is its own literature—rich and evocative but grounded in authentic human experience. Yet, oftentimes, that’s what’s missing from mainstream wine journalism. On those pages—Wine Spectator, Wine Enthusiast were details
about the villages and the winemakers, but where was the story?
I found some comfort in Andrea Immer’s Great Wines Made Simple and Karen MacNeil’s The Wine Bible as they were women offering a more accessible, more relaxed exploration of what wine adventurism was in a culture inundated with white male interpretations of wine study, but still, I wondered—Where is the story?
Ah. It was a piece written by the late New York Times wine columnist Frank J. Prial that gave me a glimpse of what wine storytelling could be as he described how luck and convenience had offered him a seat for lunch at La Tour d’Argent. The article was titled “Postcards from Paris: We Drank! We Ate!”
Yes, there were the usual references—the mentioning of wines that seem to exist in another galaxy for everyday wine explorers like me—"Meursault-Perrières Coche-Dury, 1990 and 1989, and Bâtard-Montrachet, 1983 and 1982, from Domaine Leflaive…” But there were also clues about the writer—grabbing a tie even though “standards had relaxed at The Tour.” Prial “ambling” to Notre Dame for a Sunday organ concert.
“This was not some wimpy tasting with sips, sniffs, frowns, and scribbling of notes,” Prial wrote. “The wines were for drinking…” This, all that life had given to him “after two days on Burgundian excess.” I stared at the stunning, even mystical illustration that accompanied Prial’s article—a Notre Dame gargoyle, hand on cheek, staring awfully at the red wine in the glass. Here was a story—human, indulgent, imaginative.
Three years later, an old lover and I stayed at an apartment where we could glimpse those drunken gargoyles. I told him how much I wanted to visit the church of Notre Dame, but ah, that first night, he had no idea what he had done—my blood warm with Parisian bar wine, the view of a white man and black woman undressing in an apartment in the building across from us, those gargoyles sipping nearby. This, all that life had given to us. It was the story, and I was in it.
Deep down, as much as I admired Prial’s work, looking back, I knew what was really missing. I was missing. You were missing. Miami (my hometown) was missing. Wine stories outside of the white gaze were missing. Stories that took place with friends and sweet, tender Jamaican oxtail stew from the neighborhood takeout spot, Beres Hammond and Burning Spear singing over Envínate’s Albahra Chingao garnacha tintorera—those notes of raspberry, blackberry, and black cherry dark chocolate, ginger and mint jamming against a supple mouthfeel and freshness. This, all that life had given to us—the smell of brown stew gravy mixed with the sweet smoke from jerk pits—that thyme, pimento, nutmeg, cinnamon, scotch bonnet pepper rub that beckons those fiery Catalonian wines. This, all that life had given to us—stories of brown and black women—their kitchens, unholy, unruly ground—Sunday dominoes flying, loud voices rich with pleasure and pressure—arroz con pollo, frijoles negros y plántanos dulces and diri ak djon djon, legume, and sauce pois. Kompa blasting from the freshly tarred road. Dark men who work long hours slipping in sips when palates are free.
Stories that take place with Listan Negro in plastic cups—summer’s end offering lavender sunsets over Miami’s Biscayne Bay. Hmmmmm. On one such summer Saturday, I sat with my dear friend, Robert Carter (one of these dark men who calls himself Papí Wine). Papí Wine loves wine but has suspended dreams of pursuing WSET certifications to earn a living as a FedEx worker, so he can take care of his daughter. I met him years ago when he worked at Total Wine & More. He introduced me to Aglianico del Vulture, and my palate was never the same (Hmmmm—those sweet, dried herb nuances—sorrel, lavender, and jasmine mixed with smoky ganja notes).
Papí Wine had a way with those wine words. “It smells like my grandmother’s makeup,” he told me about that 2013 Tenuta Del Portale Aglianico del Vulture Palmenti. “My grandmother raised me, and I used to find all this old makeup at the bottom of her bag. That’s what it smells like.”
I knew exactly what he meant—the smell of time and memory in the form of an old black woman’s foundation—that creamy, waxy base she used to navigate the world with all its presumptions. What connects Papí Wine and I is a kind of wine dialect that goes beyond soil types and stereotypes.
There we sat in what has become a classic Miami story (post-pandemic)—working class Miamians awkwardly maneuvering the chaotic score of honking horns, rising rents, and new, unwelcoming residents. This, all that life had given to us. There we sat on a cement bench on the short boardwalk at the end of 96th Street near Northeast Tenth Avenue—the boundless, breezeless, Biscayne Bay before us, wreathed by homes we cannot afford. Bodega Bermejo Listan Negro in my plastic cup, I relished the rapturous ruby color, its relentless simplicity captured in notes of raspberry and red cherry, dried rosemary, sage, and Parisian thyme that grows wildly in North Miami. Then there were the Jamaican cacao and nutmeg shell notes—references to Miami’s Caribbean identity that gave us a sense of home in a time when so many were losing their homes.
“I need to get back into wine,” Papí Wine said. “But I got my daughter. All I do is work. My life is work.”
This, all that life had given to us. What would Khayyam and Prial write of this moment?
It was not a season of wine, roses, and drunken friends, but it was the life we sat in—cruel and content at the same time.
While there were no gargoyles on top of celebrated churches nearby, there were the Haitian Vodou gods and goddesses on the paintings at the local, Haitian art gallery. Their spirits thrive around us, beckon us to carry on. And as the cheery, Spanish woman walked by—her children laughing and frolicking on the boardwalk, I pulled out another plastic cup. We had been chilling a gewürztraminer riesling blend from Oregon. “Quieres vino?” I asked her. “Sí,” she answered, quickly reaching for the cup.
What a lovely post. Thank you for your storytelling.
Lovely and Poetic., just like you.