Under the Muscat Moon

Change, Wine, And Folks Who Provoke Delicious

Summer has arrived, and with it, a raging heat and the piercing sense that change is upon us. Miami’s rainy season has always been moody, but these days, each second is so deliriously different from the last. The blinding ray replaced by a sudden burst of cloud, the heated pressure on your back stalled, a swift, unreliable breeze in its place.  

The relentless reminder of the constant temporary is as much reassuring as it is, well, maddening. “The things we love and hold dear will grow strangely dim,” my mother, Sistah Sonia, used to say. 

But is the nuisance that is change also the newness that can be life if you allow it, surrender to it, dare I say, welcome it? As I reflect on my years as a caregiver and the excruciating lessons of that time for a separate literary project, I also consider how my palate changed. I always used to say that the wines you drink (or attract) are often a reflection of where you are in your life at that time. 

Before I became my mother’s caregiver, I was all about the wines of The Rhône Valley, mostly the south. Off hand, some of my favorite bottles were produced by Pierre Amadieu. Then I discovered smaller regions like Lirac and Vacqueyras. I was drawn to those deep, dark earthy notes, notes that made you feel like you were being pulled underground–mushrooms, dark soil, the red mud that surrounds my mother’s and grandmother’s graves deep in those misty mountains in central Jamaica. 

My palate changed as quickly as the moon that summer solstice morning when Sistah Sonia died. Looking back my attraction to wines that pulled me underground was being replaced by wines that were springing something up inside me. 

I had been seeing a man who managed a wine bar. He used to raise goats in Vermont and loved literature. He was a sweet escape from my life that had become making sure the gravediggers had enough white rum and designing memorial T-shirts. He poured a Napa Valley sauvignon blanc that I can still taste years later. It was jumpy and ungrounded, the notes, bizarre, mostly jackfruit and soursop though they seem to change from sip to sip. The wine also looked off. There were particles floating inside of it, bigger than just the average sediment. 

What was this? Wine? No. Yes. What was this? How can a wine be sound but change from sip to sip? It would be a couple years later when I realized that this was my introduction to raw wine, natural wine, soulful wine, Holy-Ghost-catching-the-spirit wine. 

It was an adjustment, but an adjustment I was ready for as I learning a life of letting go, still learning. How can one be sound and flow with unexpected change? Holding on was part of my identity (According to Tropical Astrology, I’m a Cancer, Gemini rising, but under the Sidereal Astrology, I’m a Gemini). We, Cancer women, can be loyal to a fault. We can be the consummate holding-on-ers. But once Sistah Sonia was gone, and I didn’t die…instantly, change was no longer a frightening consequence of being alive but an exquisitely cruel inevitability that led me to levels of powerfully deep understanding I would not have experienced otherwise.

And so the idea of sipping wines that, from sip to sip, can change subtly or drastically has become a new journey. Like any new journey, there is the magnificence of a moment and the reality of disappointment. Sometimes both come in one bottle. 

I’ve also been exploring wines from unusual regions–Georgia, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Croatia–regions I would have never considered before Sistah Sonia died. Most recently, I had become curious about Japanese wines after reading about them on natural wine OG and author Alice Feiring’s IG posts. 

There was one bottle of Japanese wine left at Sobremesa–a wine boutique in a small suburban town called Miami Shores. It was a pricey bottle, but as summer solstice approached, I wanted a wine that transported me someplace new, awakened something new in me. I wanted that feeling I had when at 19, I watched Jane Campion’s “The Piano,” in a friend’s dorm room. It wasn’t the film that blew my mind; it was the score, the notes. There was a tortuous pleasure and relentless melancholy in the music that forever transformed the way I experienced music.      

It’s a dangerous thing to expect lest you are left bereft of longing. The longing can be sweeter than the thing you desire. The Grape Republic’s blend of 95% Muscat Bailey A and  5% Cabernet Sauvignon isn’t that. It is the enchanting score I have not yet heard yet is so familiar. It’s dreamy and unassuming, a moment in unabridged subtlety.

Tasted blind, I would have assumed it was a wine from The Canary Islands. The notes, ah: wet roses and plums and agua de Jamaica, Hibiscus tea, sweet spices, a whiff of cloves and cardamom, a little black tea.   

I learned that it’s very expensive to make wine in Japan. My hope is that that changes, so folks can taste their wines. In the meantime, I end this post by sharing the IG handles of storytellers who are passionate about what they do, who don’t seem locked in to the banality of repetition and trend but are provocative and inspiring in their way:

FOOD:

@TheMoodyFoody–Toni Chapman is making familiar food with soul. I love the not-trying-to-prove-anything vibe of her posts. She looks like someone I would have vibed with back in my BK days. Love her Caribbean comfort food recipes. 

@GabrielleEtienne–When I first saw Gabrielle on Netflix’s “High on the Hog,” I was drawn to a kind of mysticism in the way that she talked about black food and its history in North Carolina. She has an intuitive cooking club. 

@Owen.Han–I’m obsessed with sandwiches, and Owen’s page is straightforward and unapologetic. That ham and brie croissant and double salami and roasted onion spread looks craaazy good. 

WINE:

Shitty Wine Memes

–The South Park of wine storytelling. Brilliant, satirical, sometimes political. A total departure from what we’ve come to understand as wine descriptions.

Alice Feiring

–The OG of natural wine. Period. 

@thevinguard–Pamela Busch is a soldier in the natural wine space, hosting conversations with migrant workers in the vineyards among other conscious events. I so respect the work they are doing. They is a real one and deserves our support.