Good Grape Wine Company

November 9 2007

The Best Bottle of Wine I’ve Ever Had

It has been almost nine years since the story began that led to the best bottle of wine I’ve ever tasted.

When I was just a year or two out of school, still reticent that I hadn’t taken a European jaunt after graduating from college, too damned over eager to conquer the cubicle beast who lives for 40 years, I took a 10 day trip to Baja California on a hippie adventure travel bus called the Green Tortoise.

Legend in San Francisco, the Green Tortoise is a free-wheeling exercise in communal vacation—30 – 40 of your closet new friends on a tricked out old bus that, yes, sleeps almost 40 people—your packed in like sardines head to tail, but everybody has a spot.  Food stowed in gigantic coolers packed for the whole of the trip, everybody pitches in and cooks, memories are made and friendships are built that last a lifetime. 

I went solo.  A backpack, over packed with khaki shorts and a Nike hat that screamed a level of commercialism that immediately marked me as the wide-eyed kid that hadn’t seen a whole lot, which was true.  It would be another year before I made my first business trip to New York City and stayed at a rundown Best Western by Madison Square Garden, the only room left in the city in December, a homeless man sitting Indian style on the sidewalk vomiting into his lap, warmly greeting me to the city and the last of my wide-eyed idealism.

The Green Tortoise isn’t luxury travel, no.  It is guys and gals from the Reagan era that wanted to live in the Nixon era, lots of young Europeans, some people from parts unknown looking for something different, or getting away from something normal, and, well, a couple of categories of people that defy description--description obviously meaning something for which I had a frame of reference.

Take, for example, a guy named Matt, allegedly an art dealer in San Francisco, a fact plausibly borne out by the Picasso and original Cezanne on the wall at his walk-up, a sexual switch hitter who homered from both sides of the plate while on the trip, independently wealthy, and a member of the Israeli army who was involved in some surveillance activity that he couldn’t reveal, but afford him both a girlfriend and a live-in boyfriend, neither of whom made the Baja trip though his male live-in paramour cooked a mean rack of lamb for the post trip dinner complete with mint jelly, a taste my childhood Easter table never saw, leaving wide berth for the ham and green bean casserole.

Or take the couple, Marcy and Tim, that at the end of the trip, whilst at Matt’s San Francisco home, revealed to a sub-set of the group on the trip that Tim, who had more arm and chest hair then I have on my body, used to be a Tina.  They confide this, they said, when they are amongst friends, the kind of bonds that form over 10 days of constant contact in intimate environs.  The young Australian girls, looking decidedly better with lipstick and not nearly as haggard as was practical after a week of no showers and self-administered vegemite breakfasts, giggling through a haze of sweet smoke; the Austrian girl, who loved wine spritzers, looking like a rubenesque Natalie Portman, pulling me outside so she could smoke a cigarette and say, “You f-ing Americans are crazy.”

So many other vivid characters—Frank the supposed Frenchman who, I guess, was really an ex-pat Russian, but didn’t reveal that because of some regionalism that only guys with 40 stamps on their passport can understand.  A couple of Germans that helped me understand that stereotypes are rooted in the truth and they, in fact, really don’t have a very acute sense of humor.  Ed, fifteen or more years my senior, a California lifeguard, who lived in a van for six months of the year while working San Clemente and Salt Point, a free diver who catches abalone and lobster like I go to the store to buy a head of lettuce, no, like I go to the store to buy bagged salad, a world traveler, so amiably giving, so open, so Easy, that he wore the name ‘Easy’ as a nickname, earned years ago in Thailand, Bali, or some other place forbidding to outsiders with less understanding of human nature and more hubris.  He’s also the only guy I would ever agree to do the ‘Amazing Race’ with, provided he would stoop to reality television, a guilty pleasure, like many things, he likely finds interesting and peculiar in my Midwestern stock.  Ed is also something of a wine mentor, always drinking his wine from a coffee mug, free of any pretense.

The bus started at the greyhound station in San Fran., drove through the night to San Diego where we picked up other folks and traveled down through Ensenada, a blur of tequila shots with the aforementioned Matt and the Austrian girl, down through Playa Escondida into the bowels of Baja California to a stretch of beach that we would call home for 6 days of camping, Negro Modelo’s purchased on site from the camp house mom, herself a societal ex-pat with a bouffant haircut and the weathered look of 40-something woman who has seen 50 years worth of late nights and early mornings.

The trip was too much fun in fact, the last time I had a carefree moment, like an 11 year old catching fire flies, a blur of eating, relaxing, eating, relaxing, eating, guitar plucking, singing, a campfire and much drinking, including wine.  ‘American Pie’ by Don Mclean, a song known the world over, followed closely by the theme from the Flintstones, sung with a range of accents.

‘Easy,’ who would later become a dear, close friend, courting Jen from Connecticut, likewise now a dear friend, an office worker at American Airlines, together on a beach in Baja California, fleeting circumstance sparking a relationship that led to marriage, which I attended at a small chapel in the rolling hills of Connecticut at falls color peak, reading a passage, their relationship later offering a daughter, Jade.

The best bottle of wine I ever had was an unmarked bottle of homebrew vino, brought by Ed, pre-9/11, on the plane, on a later visit to Indianapolis, drunk in my apartment before going to get some fruitti de mare at an Italian joint, before going to a local pub to reminisce and ill-advisedly follow wine with draft beer.

The best bottle of wine I ever had was of unknown origin from an unknown grape, in a second-hand bottle with an inexpensive cork brought by a guy who I never should have met, who is now one of my best friends, who married a woman he never would have met were it not for colliding circumstance on a bus in Mexico. 

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