The Intuitive Palate

What we feel about natural wine is connected to how we feel about being natural

The thick, cool air sticks onto my bare feet, and I’m reminded that as mama or Sistah Sonia used to say, “There will always be change.” After an emotional summer heat, December has brought cool rain and breeze in Miami. The papaya tree bursts with sweet, almost-seedless fruit. The moringa tree branches swing over the back fence like the arms of dancing women, dancing women filled with the spirit. After a few weeks of sun scalped bareness, they are full of leaves again.

I always find it curious to walk into local department stores and supermarkets at this time of the year only to hear songs about dashing through the snow, sleigh bells ringing, winter wonderlands, and yuletide. I actually had no idea what yule means, so I Googled it. Wiki says, “Yule is a winter festival historically observed by the Germanic peoples that was incorporated into Christmas during the Christianisation of the Germanic peoples.”

My point is: This isn’t a Miami Christmas. Yet like most cities, these themes are part of the city’s identity during this time of year–Santa and sleighs on freshly mown grass. Where are the carols about honking horns and rice and beans, glistening waves, pelican dreams? Back in 1987, Run-DMC dropped the iconic, Christmas in Hollis:

It's Christmastime in Hollis Queens

Mom's cooking chicken and collard greens

Rice and stuffing, macaroni and cheese

I was thinking something like this:

It’s beginning to look alot like Christmas

Everywhere you go

Customers sighing in the checkout lines

People honking at Santa–the homeless guy

Sweet papaya bursting from the trees

Iguanas missing from Miami streets

Presidente full of condensed milk and plantain psalms

And the Venetian is fresh with Botox and lips pumped raw

The Salvation Army lady won’t stop ringing that bell

And the insane traffic is a sign that, well, all is well

What is it in us that holds on to these songs that have nothing to do with our real experience? My father loved Dean Martin, and he liked to play the 8-tracks with “Winter Wonderland” and “Let it Snow” even though most Christmases, we spent in Jamaica where the full moon hung low and local markets were like festivals of reggae music, bickering market women, warm patties, laughing children, and wandering goats.

When I started my wine journey, it was so important to me to explore wine in a way that felt natural to my experience. I grew up in Miami in the 80s and early 90s with a Jamaican mother and amazing cook whose pure, relentless curiosity about the cultures and people around her informed my food identity. Our refrigerator was a kind of Miami United Nations–mortadella and Sicilian salami from the Laureno’s Italian Market in North Miami Beach near the monastery, whitefish salad, Gefilte fish, and “nova lox” as my mom called it from the Jewish market at the strip mall near the late Blue Note records, thyme, dried red beans and chorizo from the Opa Locka-Hialeah Flea Market. Sistah Sonia was a wanderer. She moved intuitively through her food journeys. Her curiosity was her guide.

Sistah Sonia taught me the joy of the wanderer, but as I became more obsessed about being “right” in the wine world, prioritizing memorization over imagination not for the purpose of knowledge but for the purpose of appearing knowledgeable to important wine professionals and editors, that wanderer became malnourished.

What the study of natural wine has done is reunite me with Dinkinish–Sistah Sonia’s daughter the wanderer–my own kind of anthropologist–lover of people and witnessing how cultures sustain and expand food and wine traditions.

I was having a conversation with Bianca at Paradis–a natural wine, bread, and bookstore in North Miami. We were talking about a Sonoma wine she was selling that I had been hesitant to try again. Years ago, I received a sample and found the wine loud and difficult to hear. It was heavy and calamitous, even rhythmless. The oak had overtaken the wine. But what was clear was that this was not the intent of the wine. There was a song, even an experimental sound. Dare I give it another try? I’m thinking Nina Simone.

I did. At first, “It was like the wine was farting oak on my palate,” I told Bianca. But as the wine sat in the bottle–the notes came together. The rhythm came in the form of structure and the oak found its place. It was a lovely wine–a wine that has gotten the attention and press it deserves (DM me if you want to know what it is).

Bianca reminded me that if you’re looking for wine to give you a kind of instant satisfaction, “that’s not what natural wine is.” Ah, the glorious cruelty of the wait. In a city where running the red light has become its own traffic rule and you could get run over on South Beach as the waves caress the sand, have we become so addicted to now and instant that the divine pleasure that can be the wait has become a purposeful reluctance, a seething, social repulsion. Is the wait from one sip to the next that agonizing?

I get it. I’m with you. Natural wine is a lesson in humility for those of us who came up under the age and study of typicity. Bordeaux’s right bank merlots taste like this, Rioja tempranillo tastes like that. Where would we be without the sauvignon blanc’s cat pee?

I remember sitting in a Hennessey tasting in Cognac and sharing that I picked up a sweet plantain note with the cellar master and him twisting and turning in his chair like Linda Blair in “The Exorcist.” Back then, I was still me–the proud descendant of West Indian storytellers, sharing notes as honestly and as purely as I could.

The study of wine is the study of life, our palates evolving as we do if we allow them. The idea of being natural or drinking natural wines is deeply connected to our ability or inability to be natural–to star in our wine tasting moments as ourselves, comfortable with stories that helped form who we are–the broken hearts, the insatiable passions, the healing, the rage, the lost traditions, the found ones, the rice and beans, the bodegas, the shit we don’t know.

As 2024 approaches, my goal is to find my natural a little more each day. It’s not easy. It requires a deprogramming and deliberate deconstruction of what has been learned in a mechanized formality, so one is content in being unheard, disowning the beauty and uniqueness of one’s own palate. But here I am. Here I am–blistered, broken, full of beauty and bountiful words, connected, sooo connected. In the words of Alice Walker’s indelible, iconic Celie in The Color Purple, “I’m here. Dear God, I’m here!”