"I could be your cute American..."

Archive (30th September 2010)

I have received a proposal of marriage.  Her name is Linda and she’s a singer.  She’s American and older than me.  She listens to 104.5FM and likes Bill Cosby.  That is pretty much everything I know about her.  I have never met her although we have spoken briefly over the phone (with thousands of people listening in) and she has sung for me.  She knows very little about me.  She just likes the sound of my voice.

The publicity trail for my book has followed an unusual path to get me to the point where strange unknown women are asking me to marry them.  It starts over lunch with StrayCat.  Those of you who have actually read the book (and I’m very grateful to you both) will recognise StrayCat as the pink puffball skirted, pop sock-clad skating coach of Central Coast Roller Derby team, the roller skaters of Roller Skaters and Wine Makers.  Having hung out almost exclusively with wine makers since my return to California, I think it’s time I restored the balance.

Over the back table of a downtown sandwich bar, I read StrayCat the chapter of the book in which she features.  I am very nervous.  One of the things about writing a book about real people, especially one in which you try to be funny about them, is how they might react when they hear about it.  “What’s with the Burt Reynolds thing, Nick?  I don’t look nothin’ like Burt Reynolds,” Keith Kelsey has said to me a dozen times and there are a couple of Anglophiles that have now found at least one English person they’re not so keen on.  I’m just waiting for the moment when those two San Luis Obispo gun sellers discover that I call them Goldilocks and Cinderella and I come home to discover the Airstream peppered with .22 calibre bullet holes.  I am hoping that StrayCat will see the funny side of my depiction of her favourite game.

Thankfully she is as good a sport as I’d hoped she was and laughs all the way through, interrupting to fill me in on little embellishments about her team mates, until I wish I’d had her sitting in the trailer with me when I first wrote the thing.  She is determined to help me publicise it.  Who better than a skating coach to help get things rolling?  By that night, the book is all over roller derby blogs and Facebook groups and has received more tweets than a costumed Jonathan Ross knocking on doors at Halloween. 

A text from StrayCat the following day sends me back to the Paso Robles Event Centre, where the Central Coast Roller Derby announcers, Chica Libre and Senorita Cheeba are expecting me.  As I arrive, the bout is kicking off, in the ‘sleeves-rolled-up-mayhem-ensuing’ way that you’d describe events on a Newcastle City Centre street at closing time.  Even the referees are sporting the black and white Zebra stripes of the Newcastle United strip.

Many of last year’s heroes are at the centre of the fray.  ‘10 Cent’ is good value as pivot while ‘Golden Delicious’ streaks through the pack in a flurry of elbows, doing nothing to keep the doctor away.  Shockingly violent in pink, ‘Zona Hussy’ is sent back to the sin bin by another Zebra referee.  I can’t spot Resident Vixen but somehow that makes me feel safer. 

A host of new challengers have arrived to jam with the Central Coast girls and as usual the names tell most of the story.  Gwen Tsunami, Elle Bow Again and Geni Cydal loop the track vigorously while outside Marilyn Gun Hoe and Retro Bution are psyched up by their coach. 

Chica Libre shamelessly promotes the book over the tannoy with every pause in play, “We’ve got this great book, Roller Skaters and Wine Makers, by our friend Neck Lennurd.  Say hey to Neck everyone.  I don’t know about you, Cheeba, but I reckon this would make a great Christmas gift for ALL my family.”  By the end of the first bout, the people of Paso Robles are probably heartily sick of this book and this Neck guy but I reckon that if Chica Libre has a big family I am still well ahead of the game.

I have a copy of the book which I get everyone who features in it to sign.  Well, nearly everyone.  We’ve discussed the gun selling contingent and, even more deadly, Chuck Liddell is unlikely ever to sit down with me for a cosy reading and signing.  The closest we came was when I approached him at the Thursday Farmer’s Market and he cut me off with a nod sharper than a shiv.  He’s a lot taller in the flesh than you’d think.  I’d put somewhere between nine and fifteen feet tall.

Of course Chuck’s not the only sporting hero in San Luis Obispo with an autograph.  I already have Stray Cat’s paw print in my book, not to mention Cheeba’s and Chica Libre’s.  And after the first bout, Cheeba takes me off to meet the team, brandishing a list of every player mentioned in the book.  Totally star-struck, I am led from Cindafnrella to Golden Delicious to the stunning 10 Cent.  April Fools signs with a snarl and StrayCat later tells me that she will have been furious that I managed to photograph her.  I am even brought to Resident Vixen, sitting out the bout as she is expecting a baby.  ‘Are you having a Derby Girl or a Zebra,’ I want to ask but something about her, even sedate on a rug, cows me and I proffer the book through an awkward silence.

I meet Big Joe, the head of ‘Sk8curity’, and his partner Iva, the Ivanator.  They are now Facebook friends and came along to a ‘Signing and Wining’ Event I held in an art studio in Paso Robles, bringing with them a girl who introduced herself as ‘Melon Brawler’. 

However, the most exciting was Zona Hussy, described in the book as ‘my personal favourite’ for so many reasons.  In the flesh, there’s nothing of her fearsome track persona about her.  She seems much calmer and sweeter and I am instantly smitten.  StrayCat tells me Zona Hussy is getting married soon and I wish her well (and consider going off and joining some foreign legion somewhere.  To forget).

The momentum continues.  The following Monday, Cheeba is still wondering how else I can promote the book.  ‘Did you know I work in local radio?’ she asks me over email.  Fifteen minutes later, I have turned up at the offices of American Radio and she has introduced me to Adam Montiel, host of the Up and Adam in the Morning Breakfast show on 104.5, who books me to appear on his show that Friday.

Adam takes me out for drinks on Wednesday, to get to know me.  I am enormously impressed by his work ethic.  I bet Michael Parkinson doesn’t drink shots with Clive James before a show.  If Jeremy Paxman had bought Michael Howard a beer or two, he might not have had to ask him the same question fourteen times.  Is this an American thing?  Do Jay Leno and Larry King and Oprah Winfrey meet their interviewees in the bar beforehand?  Is that what went so wrong for David Letterman with Crispin Glover?

Adam’s technique works.  By the time I arrive at his studio at 7am on the Friday morning, we have got to know each other.  I’ve met his dog Ally and heard his Chuck Liddell stories and his views on Californian girls.  He’s read some of my book, seen my trailer, asked me my views on California and its girls.  The interview is no longer making me nervous despite a late night at the previous evening’s Full Moon Ride.  In fact, it is just like sitting down at the bar of the Black Sheep with Adam, except we are not drinking and there are two large microphones between us and a red sign that says ‘ON AIR’.  Despite his extensive research, Adam leaves nothing to chance and a board behind my head reminds him who I am, what my book is called and that it’s about the Central Coast.  Adam introduces me and over the course of the next two hours, between songs, we chat like two old friends, which of course we now are.

He asks me about the book, about writing it and publishing it. He persuades me to read his favourite bit (suspiciously near the beginning) and laughs heartily.  He makes me tell his listeners what brought me to San Luis Obispo and how they can get a copy of the book.  He involves me in a rather disastrous telephone wind-up when his listener is so confused by my accent pretending to be an English butler that she hangs up within twenty seconds.  He overlooks my shameless plugs for my friends’ bookshops and wineries and gets me to gush about Derby girls. 

Adam makes me relax and that’s when I am foolish enough to make the kind of joke on the air that, if I ever do meet and fall in love with and marry and move in with an American girl, will have the immigration people breathing over my shoulder and asking me awkward questions about toothpaste brands and bathroom habits for the rest of my life.  Bear this in mind, any American girls who may have entertained such thoughts.  It won’t be easy with me.  Sure, I’ll love you and honour you and all that but there will also be a certain amount of sitting in small windowless rooms showing complete strangers all our holiday snaps.  If you can put up with this, we’ve got a chance.

Adam asks me if I’d like to stay in California and I tell him that I’d love to although I’ll need to find a cute American to marry for my green card.  It’s a fairly crap joke but shortly after the phone rings and the caller introduces herself as Linda and offers to be ‘that cute American’, adding that if she wins the Bill Cosby tickets in the on air competition she’d love to take me with her.  Adam and I exchange horrified glances over the table.  It is the first moment of hesitation I’ve seen in him.  ‘Er, how do we know you guys would be suited, Linda?’ he asks.  ‘How old are you?  What are you into?’  Linda admits that she is a ‘fair bit older’ than me but she reveals that she’s into singing and gamely lets herself be talked into belting out a tune for us.  She doesn’t win the Bill Cosby tickets and I feel a slight sense of relief.

In the back bar of the Black Sheep, during one of several follow-up sessions so essential to his work ethic, Adam post mortems the interview with me round a table with half a dozen of his American Radio colleagues. 

While the rest of them squabble over the next round, Jojo from 106.1 WiLD FM and I talk about California girls and relationships.  Now Linda is in my life, I feel like I have something to say on the subject. 

To be entirely honest with you though, I’m not sure I will marry her.  Not without meeting her anyway.  But it’s always nice to be asked.

The Coup de Gras

(Archive - written Saturday 25^th September 2010)

I am concerned about Ralph.  Ralph wears an aluminium bib, corrugated like a griddle pan that he hangs over his shoulders and strokes with spoons or bottle openers.  That is not the reason I am worried about him.  Those of you who have boned up on your zydeco music, the modern American folk variety that evolved from the Creoles of southwest Louisiana, will recognise this peculiar wardrobe feature as a ‘vest frottoir’ and some of you may even recognise Ralph as a pivotal part of the band, JT and the Zydeco Zippers; obviously not the JT part.  I am concerned about Ralph because he has been in an earthquake.

It is a very hot day in See Canyon, just up the road from Avila Beach.  Ralph, like many of us, has very sensibly been drinking copious amounts of water and, like many of us, has to visit the restroom on occasion.  It is while Ralph is enjoying such a moment alone this morning that the ground begins to surge in various directions and Ralph feels himself, and the restroom with him, jerk sharply upwards in a north easterly direction.  Earthquakes are usually described by insurance men trying to get out of paying for them as Acts of God.  Ralph’s earthquake is an act of Keith.

Today sees the annual Kelsey Wine Club party in which the winding roads of See Canyon reverberate with the sounds of zydeco and Mardi Gras as two hundred wine club members descend on their favourite winery, festooning themselves in garish masks and twinkling necklaces to celebrate another year’s production and top up their cellars.  Before they are allowed in the gates, there is much to be done and, although assisted by his family and a large team of winery workers and winery groupies, Keith Kelsey seems to be doing more than his fair share of it.  As the rest of us set up tables and stock up tasting stations, Keith charges around in battered shorts and an even more battered forklift, getting straight into each task, be it setting up a stage, transferring a grape bin, upturning a barrel and, unfortunately for Ralph, moving the portaloos around.  Ralph’s small and focused earthquake is because Keith has cheerfully hoisted Ralph’s portaloo up on the prongs of a forklift truck and is preparing to drive it to a more shaded area of the winery.  Fortunately Ralph’s shouts are heard over the forklift’s engine and his unconventional journey is prevented before it can go any further.  Ralph brushes himself down and, apologising over his shoulder, Keith tears off with the newly vacated portaloo.  The party starts in an hour.  There is a lot to do.  We follow Keith’s example and knuckle down.

Along with Mexican Chris, I’ve become a bit of a regular at Kelsey Winery, hanging out at the tasting bar with Chantal and Cheryl, a perky pair of part-time pourers, nursing a glass of the Black Box Zinfandel and squirming as Chris shamelessly steers customers towards copies of my book which, having grudgingly forgiven me my comments about her glass dolphins, Delores Kelsey has now put on display at the back; watching Keith feed the dozens of peacocks who roam the winery; lounging in a little golf buggy, glasses of chardonnay in hand, as we tear about the estate (and sometimes joyride up the road to Bluegrass festivals at neighbouring ranches), tasting the sugar content of the pinot grapes on the vine and eating apples and plums straight off the trees; filling bottles of the new Zinfandel and Syrah ports and helping Dick Kelsey seal them by dipping their necks in a mini deep fat fryer filled with sealing wax, turning the bottles continuously to get a smooth spread before dunking them in water and passing them to Dick to finish off with a handheld propane burner to pop out any air bubbles and give them a gloss.  Keith and Chris and I end the day over a beer and a burger in Buffalo, handing out free tasting cards to anyone we come across (let me know if you want one) and discussing ways to introduce their apple wines to the UK, although we may have to sneak it past my sister.  Kelsey kindly provided the wines for a reading event that I did in Paso Robles and I did my best to mention the winery as often as possible during a radio interview I did to promote it.  You can understand why I am determined not to miss the Kelsey Wine Club party, can’t you? 

I say this to an Opodo representative over the phone and, perhaps a little surprised at the level of detail I have just confided in him, he agrees to help me extend my stay, which is why I am there to lend a hand at the party: to ferry joyful revellers, guys with names like Butch and Marian holding hands with women in sequinned dresses and lurid masks, between their huge trucks and the party in my golf buggy; to eat jambalaya and funny cake (looking for the mini plastic babies that will win me a bottle) at a trestle table set up between steel fermentation bins; to hide my third glass of Red Tug from Delores’ eagle eye; to introduce Ben to beautiful girls from San Diego; and, most importantly I feel, to offer solace to Ralph.  

But Ralph has no need of comfort.  He dons the Frottoir and joins JT and the Zydeco Zippers in playing vigorously all afternoon as people talk and taste and toast and tour the vineyard or take shelter from the ferocious sun under umbrellas and gazebos or in the cool of the barrel room.  They place excited orders for cases of wine, tasted from four fabulously festooned tasting tables, and line up to claim their raffle prizes.  They pose on the tractor or lounge on the fork lift while Mark and Keith fill barrels with berries and Frank Johnson prepares for his debut.

Frank Johnson has been preparing for his debut for a long time.  An awed spectator last year, he tells me he has been scrutinising video footage and perfecting his technique ever since.  I think fleetingly of Fabio Capello sitting down Rooney or John Terry to analyse the Brazilian forwards or Argentina’s handling of the ball, but you can tell that Frank Johnson is a different breed of athlete to these two.  He is focussed and I can see that he won’t get over-confident or even upset if he gets booed or paid less than a thousand times the national average.  Frank Johnson is a true contender.

Frank adjusts his paunch and smoothes down his white beard before climbing barefoot into the end barrel with his wife and taking up his stance.  The referee blows his whistle and three pairs of stompers grasp the rail firmly in both hands and begin to flail his knees about like Michael Flatley on Red Bull.  After a couple of minutes the whistle blows again and the pails that have been collecting the stomped down run-off grape juice are held up and compared and I am pleased and proud to see that Frank’s preparation has paid off.  Despite being twenty years older and twenty pounds heavier than most of the competitors (or perhaps because of it) Frank and his wife are the winners of their heat.  They scrub the worst of the grape juice off their legs in a bin full of water and take the stage with the winners of the other heats to claim their prizes.

Half a dozen peacocks trot in a careful line through the gates like awkward latecomers picking their way along the back row of a wedding pew, terrified that they’ve arrived during the ‘speak now or forever hold your peace’ moment.  The Zydeco Zippers start up again and Hawaiians Cammie and Bill twirl each other around in circles while others steal spare instruments from the band and fill the dance floor.  A few people begin to slip away, balancing their buys on the backs of the golf buggies.  Mexican Chris feeds Cheryl a handful of grapes and Ben fumes as saucy San Diegan Diandra bops with her boyfriend.  Dick and Delores Kelsey clink glasses and talk to long-standing members while Queenslander, Aussie Chris abandons his official photographer duties for yet another golf buggy joyride with yet another group of gorgeous giggling girls.  Keith’s daughter Devon pours herself a glass straight from a two ton tank of new Cabernet.  An older woman, to whom I have not been introduced, returns three times to hug me goodbye before falling into a passionate embrace with another older lady.  Her partner looks on indulgently.  A conga line forms and romps past us and around the courtyard scattering peacocks and pourers in its wake and more people take their leave as the light begins to fade until the courtyard is bare and above it the stars and the stripes flutter in a long-awaited evening breeze over a sign which reads, ‘Thank you club members.’

Once the guests have left and we’ve tidied the party away, I take a moment alone, wandering down to the empty field to fetch a sweater from the car.  All I can hear is the soft ‘chee chee chee’ of the crickets and at the end of a row of apple trees a solitary deer nibbles a clump of grass in the dusky twilight.  I approach quietly but the peace is pierced with the ‘EEEaaow’ of a peacock and the deer canters away into the darkness.  I return for a last glass in the tasting room with Dick and Dolores and Devon and Keith Kelsey, and Chantal and Cheryl and Ben and an Aussie and a Mexican who are both called Chris; along with numerous others who have helped the winery entertain its members. 

I am sure that Frank Johnson is at home with his feet up, probably admiring his trophy, and I hear that Ralph, with the taste of Mardi Gras in his mouth, has gone on to play at another gig.  I hope they don’t have portaloos there.

Rookie Takes Bishop

(Archive - written Wednesday 15^th September 2010)

Ten, nine, eight, seven, six…  A lanky looking Cal Poly student with one arm in a sling and the words ‘sad bad n rad’ etched in green neon on his black tanktop is lifted upside down and handed a freshly filled plastic cupful of beer to down in one while his classmates cheer him on.  It’s a scene that is played out in bars or at ‘keggers’ at student houses all over San Luis Obispo and doubtless all over America.  But this one is a little different.  It is happening at the precarious summit of Bishop’s Peak, fifteen hundred feet above San Luis Obispo.

My mountaineering career is limited.  Crampons, ice axes, even ropes are not to be found hanging in my garden shed (even if I had one).  The only carabiners I ever use are the big rubber coated ones hanging off the handle of my god daughter Annabel’s extra funky children’s buggy for holding your shopping.  Give me a crevasse you can hop over.  Give me a chimney you can light a fire under.  Give me a mountain you can walk up. 

On paper, I have one impressive-sounding mountain under my belt.  I walked up Kilimanjaro a few years ago, having been talked into it by my friend Bruce to whom I’d made the mistake of confiding my distress at a post-quitting-smoking weight gain.  ‘Mate, you need a goal,’ he told me, accompanied by one or two fairly graphic and uncharitable observations on what I would become if I didn’t have a goal.  I thought perhaps a weekly visit to the gym might be a good goal but Bruce had other ideas and six months of British Military Fitness, spin classes, weight training, treadmills and Alexander Technique later, I was to be found in Tanzania trudging my way up its highest mountain in a six day expedition.

It had its moments.  The evening when Bruce went into shock having been caught under-dressed and under-protected as bad weather hit us on an acclimatisation climb and the guide suggested that someone warm joining him in the sleeping bag in which he was shivering, came close to becoming my own personal Uncle-Bryn-on-the-fishing-trip moment.  On the summit day, altitude hit us with the same impact as a serious dose of alcohol.  Bruce was sick repeatedly (but somehow still managed to charm several of the girls) and I was to be seen staggering all over the place, begging to be allowed to sit down and sleep, tearfully telling one of the guides that I loved him, he was my best mate in the whole world, seriously mate… before turning on him on the way down and ranting and raving at him, convinced that he was trying to rob me and leave me for dead up there, all the while grasping the hand of the exhibition leader, my new best mate in the whole wide world.  I let my eyes droop shut for every summit photo and teetered my way back down around the precarious crater rim to the horror of Kim (a fellow climber), who was certain that I was just one step away from plummeting into the crater itself to join the body of the tragic subject of the previous day’s unsuccessful rescue attempt.  I was completely overheated, still in the ten thermal layers and three pairs of trousers I had worn for the night part of the climb, when it’s so cold that you have to blow the water back down your platypus tube after drinking to prevent it from freezing.  As the African sun rose overhead after nine hours of climbing, I was unable to ditch any clothes, having gratefully handed over my rucksack to a cheerful guide called Godson in a Wolverhampton football shirt given to him by a grateful climber some weeks earlier.  He’d walked and slept in the shirt ever since and the smell was overpowering.  Bizarrely a friend met Godson on Kili three years later and said that he was still wearing the same shirt.  When I made it back to my tent at the base camp, the last of our team to return, I collapsed into my sleeping bag and slept soundly with my still-booted feet poking out of the tent.  I was lucky.  This exact thing happened to my friend Pete a couple of years later, except he managed to get his boots off before sleeping.  He woke up with them buried in snow and didn’t get full feeling back in a few of his toes for nearly four months.

The best moments of all were the return to civilisation: that first cold Coke on the way down when all you’ve been drinking are the six litres of vaguely filtered tarn water required daily to combat altitude sickness; the bottle of Kilimanjaro beer that you’ve been too superstitious to drink before you’ve conquered the mountain; the first shower after a week of wet wipes.  And of course there’s the energy.  Obviously there’s a natural buzz that comes with it but one of the ways in which the body reacts to being six thousand metres above sea level, where the air is half as thick, is to produce more haemoglobin to carry what little oxygen there is around your bloodstream more efficiently.  As you come down the mountain, you feel more and more energetic and it doesn’t wear off for at least a week.  I felt it acutely and was awake and chattering over-excitedly from nine o’clock the next morning, all the way to Nairobi, through a five hour wait at the airport, an eight hour flight home and most of the way through the following day.  Come to think of it, that may be why Bruce avoided me for most of the following week.

Kilimanjaro was a lot of fun.  It’s a walk, a hard walk, but not a technical climb and I’m happy with that.  Mexican Chris doesn’t consider it to be climbing mountains unless he’s making his way up the smooth face of Yosemite’s Half Dome with a couple of crampons, a bucket of chalk and an iPod full of Johnny Cash, but I’ll stick to walking.

Today’s walk is Bishop’s Peak, the tallest of the Nine Sisters, a row of volcanic plugs that stretch from San Luis Obispo to Morro Bay.  It’s named because of the jagged crags at the top that form a sort of crown or mitre.  Kilimanjaro has been some time ago and I’m less sure of myself so I opt to do it alone, at my own pace.  Not perhaps the wisest move.

To get into the mood, I take Gary’s pick-up truck.  Nine feet tall, nineteen feet long with five different four wheel drive settings and a diesel engine that rumbles like the not-so-distant sound of thunder.  Gosh, it makes me feel manly. 

Which is just as well because fifteen minutes out of the parking space and up the peak, I am feeling like a little girl.  Not one of those stoic little girls either; more a little girl who complains a lot and cries easily.  On the dense and winding trail, the only time I am not easily overtaken every couple of minutes by a strapping local is when I lose the trail and have to hack my way straight up through the scratchy shrubbery, convinced that any moment a couple of snakes, hopelessly hypnotised by my pearly calves, will appear.  The sun beats down and I scramble slowly over the rocks, keeping a careful distance from the edge as San Luis Obispo recedes below me.  Tick follows tock as rock follows rock and I keep my head down and press onwards and upwards.  The summit above me looks no nearer than it did fifteen minutes before but the blonde dreadlocked guy who jogged past me five minutes before in a pair of Baywatch shorts, not even out of breath as he uttered a quick ‘hey bro’ at me through the side of his mouth, is just reaching the top.

Shortly after, I am there too.  It has taken me over an hour to climb and Mexican Chris will later tell me that his best time is 29 minutes.  I am out of breath and ready to chill for a few minutes and enjoy the view in silence but, over the next rock, there is a party going on and I crash it instead and meet Rusty and Trevor.

It is WOW week at Cal Poly and Cuesta College.  WOW stands for Week Of Welcome and is similar to our Freshers week.  Rusty and Trevor are part of a gang of twenty students who have taken it in turns to carry a keg of beer all the way up to the top of Bishop’s Peak, in a bin slung between two long bits of wood.  Whoops and howls echo around the peak and a pretty girl in jogging shorts offers me a cup of beer while the guys tell me that this is the second year in what they hope will be a long tradition of WOW keggers on the peak.

I sip my beer and enjoy the view before starting down again.  Tonight in the pub I will casually slip Bishop’s Peak into the conversation, mention I climbed it today and feel the acknowledgement of my peers.  On the way down, I pass more students hurrying to the top, worrying about missing the end of the keg.  I take another wrong turning and walk miles out of my way but it doesn’t matter because I am happy.  I have conquered Bishop’s Peak and when I get back to the pick-up and gun the mighty engine, a song called Ladies Love a Country Boy comes on the radio and I find myself humming along as I head through the dusty sunset back to the homestead and again I feel like a man.

Then I get home and Marianne sends me out shopping for soft furnishings.

The Sexiness of Panthers

(Archive - written Monday 30^th August 2010

Veronica Corningstone: My God, what is that smell? Oh.
Brian Fantana: That's the smell of desire, my lady.
Veronica Corningstone: God no, it smells like, like a used diaper... filled with... Indian food. Oh, excuse me.
Brian Fantana: You know, desire smells like that to some people.
News Station Employee: [Disgusted] What is that? Smells like a turd covered in burnt hair.

Some of you may recognise this as the cologne ‘Sex Panther’ immortalised in the film Anchorman, the Legend of Ron Burgundy.  (Some of you are more civilised than that).  However the descriptions could also apply to the contents of the thirteenth wine glass in a very special tasting at Veris Winery, Paso Robles.

This very special tasting actually doesn’t involve any of the wines that are produced and sold at Veris Winery so don’t go away with the impression that they produce wines that taste like used nappies filled with Indian food.  Not only is that completely not the case but were Matt, the owner of Veris, to hear that I’d been spreading such rumours, he’d be after me with a blunt stick; and Australian Chris would be there to help him. 

In my experience, Australians and subtlety belong together like Romeo and Stacey, but Australian Chris has a very subtle palate indeed.  It is the secrets of this subtle palate that he is attempting to share with us.  I am part of a group from Kelsey Winery, joining a Technical Tasting, an event hosted by Veris Winery presided over by Chris, its winemaker, for the local winemaking industry.  The guest list of about forty of us boasts winery owners, workers, pourers and journalists from all over San Luis Obispo County.  I am part of a group from Kelsey Winery that descends on picturesque Veris just as the sun is beginning to set: Mara and Chantal, pourers from the tasting rooms; Mexican Chris, informal wine-making apprentice and self proclaimed inspiration of the ‘Deported’ dessert Zinfandel; Keith, the winery owner; and me.  There is little to qualify me as a member of the wine industry but Keith has pushed the title of my book to make me sound like a well-known wine writer and I feel like a fraud and hope no one from Veris has read the account of my joyful floundering in the cabernet grapes at Silver Horse.

Once we have all congregated and been given our ‘hi, my name is..’ stickers, we are ushered down to a white wooded wine shed, where a long table is laid out between two rows of shiny steel fermentation bins.  We are all excited about getting stuck in to some decent wine but laid out in front of each place are seven glasses with what looks like water in every one.  Five minutes later, I am wishing that they were water.  Chris begins the technical tasting by telling us about the different taste nodes on the tongue and around the mouth.  There are five types of taste: acidity; sweetness; bitterness; saltiness and the recently introduced Japanese term ‘umami’.  It’s the sort of word I can imagine Vic Reeves using to announce a special round on Shooting Stars but apparently it means ‘savouriness’.  A different part of the mouth detects each of these elements at a varying pace.  Chris uses the water glasses to illustrate this for us.  We have to taste each in turn and describe the reaction on our mouths for each on our tasting sheets, after which he tells us what they really were.  The first was water; the second, which hits the side of the mouth and the gums after a short lag and makes me guess is weak lemon juice, is actually water mixed with tartaric acid; the fifth, which quickly hits the back of the gums with an almost liquorice-like bitterness is quinine sulphate.  I feel hugely impressive to be drinking something so scientific sounding until Chris explains that quinine sulphate means flat diet tonic water.

Seven glasses of weird water later and we are now enough in tune with our palates to taste some special wines.  Oh, they are ‘special’ all right - special in the way that you say that Rain Man is special.  With ‘savants’ like Rain Man, one or two settings on the graphic equaliser of their mental make-up is hugely enhanced (turned up to 11) while others are dialled down.  That’s why you get those little guys in the paper every couple of years whose communication is so poor that they can’t tell you their names but can draw three metre wide canvases of complex cityscape perfectly from memory and that’s why Dustin Hoffman’s character can count four thousand nine hundred and twenty-seven toothpicks spilled on the floor instantaneously and remember every borrowed US cell phone number I’ve ever had but still thinks K Mart is cool.  It was the same for these wines.

Tinkering about with wines that will never be sold to the public, Chris has emphasised a taste feature (sometimes two or even three) of these wines; some unfinished at various stages of the process and some deliberately ruined.  We taste six white wines, grimacing at the weird ones and drinking huge amounts of water to take the taste away afterwards and make our notes before he explains them to us.  We taste an acidic bitter wine followed by a sickly sweet one that he tells us has 15g per litre of sugar in it before he challenges us to identify a third wine, cloying and sour in taste.  None of us can tell until he explains that it’s a mix of the previous two.

Then it’s time for the really disgusting ones.  The first of the two is a greenish gold in colour, similar to the sort of wine I drank at University.  I write ‘putrid’, ‘bitter’, ‘strangling’ and turn to the next, slightly browner in colour.  When I have finished gasping, retching and choking and clutching my neck, I crawl back up to my seat and my tasting sheet.  That’s when I write ‘sex panther’ and any one of the descriptions of Brian Fantana’s legendary love musk (that, 60% of the time, works all the time) could be true of the taste of this wine.  Chris explains that the previous two wines have been oxidised.  ‘They have undergone oxidation’, he says, ‘not oxidisation,’ looking around him like a village vicar who knows there are heretics in his flock.  The first one he oxidised himself that afternoon while the sex panther’s foulness is due to age.  I ask my neighbour if oxidation is the same as a wine being corked and he embarks on a lengthy explanation of the difference that makes as much sense to me as the offside rule.

We try two reds that taste very different – one is slightly bitter while the other hits the tip of the tongue with its sweetness and the gums with its acidity.  ‘Why,’ demands Australian Chris, glaring balefully round us all, ‘do these two wines taste so different?  What’s the difference between them?  I’ll give a pallet of wine to anyone who can tell me.’  Matt the winery owner and the probable sponsor of this enormously lavish prize, squirms uncomfortably in his seat opposite me and his beautiful wife Amy puts a reassuring hand on his knee.  But Chris is confident.  Not one of the industry cognoscenti sat around that table can come up with a guess that’s anywhere near and he tells us that the only reason for this obvious difference is a variation in the type of yeast used for the fermentation of the two otherwise identical wines.

We learn some other interesting things.  We learn that the clear crystals on the bottom of a white wine cork are called ‘tartrates’, salts of one of a dozen different types of acid used in winemaking.  We learn that tannins cause a chemical reaction which precipitates the protein in saliva which stops lubrication and makes our mouths dry; that putting a bottle of red in a fridge for two hours will make it taste much more bitter (and colder obviously); that you can get away with raising the sugar in a wine if you also raise its pH level as the resulting acidity will offset the sweetness and you can enjoy the chemical changes of the sugar addition without being forced to race for your toothbrush; that the reason Californian wine does so much better in California than it does anywhere else is the same thing to do with the climate as the reason you can’t smell grass being cut in Paso Robles until you get up really close to it, but what that thing was completely escapes me...  We learn many more things than this but unfortunately in the process we drink eighteen different wines and a small glass of vodka (to learn about dehydration) and so we forget far too much of it.

What I do come away with is the sense that wines are tremendously complex individual things.  They are sums of dozens and dozens of different factors of nature that do better in different environments or reach their best potential when you nurture different parts of them.  Wines are like people; like friends or lovers, with different personalities and effects on you.  Some will cheer you up when you’re down and others will just make you want to drink more; some you’ll want to stay with for years while others will get considerably ropier with age; some will cost you a fortune and some of them will be worth it; some, when you pair them up with others, will produce offspring that are nothing like either of them; and some, like wine thirteen tonight, will leave you feeling disgusted and faintly violated.

Disclaimer - None of the wines described above are issued by Veris Cellars.  No panthers, sexy or otherwise, are harmed in the making of any wines at Veris Cellars.

The Chalk is Strong in this One

(archive - written Saturday 11^th September 2010)

Whatever bleaching you might expect from the California sun, San Luis Obispo is actually a pretty colourful town.  The buildings and shops of the downtown streets are a riotous array of pastels and ochres and everything else seems to follow, from the fresh fruit and sunflowers that crowd the stalls at the Thursday Farmer’s Market to the seventy saliva sodden shades of gum stinking up the streets around Bubblegum alley; from the book jackets filling the windows of The Novel Experience to the lurid tones of its owner Jim’s favourite Hawaiian shirt as he grabs a sneaky smoke on the street outside; from the red velvet or rose petal pistachio vegan frosting on the ‘Amy Bakes’ Cupcakes on the counter of the Granada Bistro to the vibrant bunches of assorted Nipomo roses sent to its bartender Dayna by a hopeful admirer; from the tattoos adorning the forearms of nearly everyone in the Frog and Peach to the shimmering pastels of the traditional Dutch tandems riding the happening and the sparkling tin foil and neon glows of the riders’ costumes, thrown together to follow September’s ROBOTS theme.  Even the Cal Poly sweaters come in a range of colours and you should hear the language in Mexican takeaway Tonitos at three in the morning.  Yes, San Luis Obispo is certainly colourful.  It’s good to be back.

This weekend, San Luis Obispo is more colourful than ever.  Hundreds of SLO citizens have turned out to paint the town red; and blue and green and yellow, not to mention violet and lime and purple and ochre and crimson and brick and magenta and mauve; in fact, any colour of chalk you can get.  Down on Mission Plaza, it is the annual ‘I Madonnari Italian Street Painting Festival’.  Several streets have been blocked off, allocated into large squares and sold to local business sponsors, who then send in artists to cover them in chalk.  The plaza is a chaos of colour as every chalk artist sits in the middle of their painting in a pose that makes you think that they have been freeze-framed while break-dancing, one leg flung out at an odd angle to balance them as they lean forward to sponge three colours of chalk into complicated shades to catch the shadow in the springs of a colossal mousetrap while a four foot mouse slavers over a giant (perfectly shaded) hunk of gruyere in front of them.  Tigers and bikinied surfer girls jostle for position with the Statue of Liberty, Madonna and the Madonna.  A couple of excited teenaged girls exclaim over a beautifully rendered wolf in a half-finished picture, certain that it’s Jacob the werewolf from Twilight: Eclipse but I can see the artist beginning to add St Francis of Assisi and I know they’ll be disappointed.

 The detail is astonishing.  Some of the artists will spend hours perfecting a single fold of a dress, while their partner patiently holds an umbrella over them to keep of the mid afternoon rays.  Each has a tool box with hundreds of varying shades of chalk, carefully arranged into a rainbow array.  Some of the chalk sticks cost as much as $5 a stick for the really close work, so these collections are carefully prized.  These are the professionals.  But anyone with a bit of talent can get involved too.  Further down the street, we see Cara and Maddie from Blue intent on an abstract painting, sponsored by a friend’s business.  A surfie looking guy writes ‘IN LOVING MEMORY’ beneath a picture of the twin towers, mindful of the date.  Everyone is having a go.  The kids from Nico and Isabela’s school have their own spot round the corner of the Mission and they have put together an image that looks uncannily like Archbishop Vincent Nichols from Westminster skateboarding on a blue double decker bus past some beach balls.  Extraordinary.  Of course the Mission of San Luis Obispo was named after a bishop so it’s more likely to be him but either way, it’s damn good.  Marianne and I are inspired to try our luck.

Our subject matter is simple.  Ever since I arrived I’ve been pushing my book around the local businesses and media of San Luis Obispo and Paso Robles with the hopeless optimism of a Labrador with a soggy tennis ball in the middle of a lawn bowls meet.  There are now more people ignoring my calls and emails and ducking down side streets to avoid me than in the entire course of my romantic history.  My picture features in many local newspaper offices but only in the security guard booths hanging over notes like ‘ON NO ACCOUNT LET THIS GUY IN’.  I wander into wineries with hopeful bundles of merchandising materials; flyers, posters, display cards and wander back out again with the same load clutched in my grasping paws.  I foist flyers for the book into the unwilling arms of Cal Poly students in the queue for the barbecue because I have overheard them telling girls that they like reading.  I beg bartenders to keep them behind their bars and have been besieging the SLO Bike Kitchen, birthplace of a dozen tall bikes, with armfuls of my leaflets.  I have had some success and the book is now stocked in a few open-minded wineries and bookstores and I’ve fixed up a couple of signing events as well.  It’s a slow war of attrition but gradually the locals are becoming more familiar with Cath’s little Airstream at Morro Rock drawing, even if the books themselves aren’t flying off the shelves.  I wish all readers were as excited by the book as little Nico who has his own copy and points excitedly at the pages that feature him.  The chalk art is my latest opportunity to tart the book.  I will not be found wanting.  Marianne and I set out to find our site.

Beyond the professionals, past the talented amateurs, around the corner from the booked out slots is a car park, divided into two foot squares, with a smattering of sun umbrellas shading the groups of children etching various splodges of colour and heart shapes.  This is the only place left for us.  And, we are told, we have to make it look as if the children are doing the picture.  Marianne and I get to work.  I perform the difficult and highly skilled job of holding the picture of the cover while she kneels on the hard tarmac in the baking sun and draws it out and Isabela and Nico swarm grumbling around us.  Once the design is done, it’s time to add colour.  Not for us the endlessly careful frozen break-dance or minute plastic-gloved mixes of three varying shades of the same colour.  $6 bought us a box of twelve chalks and once we’ve swapped the reds and browns for more blue, that’s what we have to create our masterpiece. 

We begin.

Half an hour later, we have used the entire box of chalk and all the sponges, cloths and spare sticks of white we could scrounge from the children around us.  There has been mutiny in the ranks when Nico decided that there wasn’t enough yellow on the Airstream and took matters into his own hands and Isabela frankly refused to be put to work.  Marianne has done everything that requires any level of skill or artistry and I have managed to get more blue onto my hands, bare legs, shorts and camera than on the sky part of the picture.

 

But, as we step back to admire our handiwork, I am thrilled.  It looks amazing.  My book cover almost perfectly rendered (if you’re not overly particular about the scale, curve of the Airstream roof, the darkness of its windows, the colour of Morro Rock or the perfect symmetry of the text).  I feel so proud.  And I can see it’s getting people’s attention, looming three times the size of the children’s artwork surrounding it.  A couple of small boys wander up, eyes widening at the sight.  ‘Wow,’ says the first one, ‘what’s that?’  I turn to him, feeling a surge of hope.  I know that this small boy will be the first of a new generation of readers, a turning point that ensures the future of my book, and of roller skaters and wine makers everywhere.  I will tell him of the delights contained within.  I will convert him.  He will skip home and beg his parents to buy a copy.  He will promise to go to bed on time so that they can read it to him.  It will become his favourite book, then that of his classmates and his friends and the youth of San Luis Obispo County.  There will be a TV cartoon, a merchandise deal, baseball caps with the Airstream logo, action figures of Mexican Chris and Scott Hawley.  It begins here, with this small boy.  I open my mouth and prepare to start this inevitable revolution but the child’s friend is too quick for me.  ‘It’s Darth Vader, man.’ he says to the boy and looks at me with respect.  ‘Ossum.’

I take another look.  He’s right.  The Airstream’s windows look like cavernous black eyes.  You can see the sinister black helmet in the looming dome of Morro Rock.  The whole effect has a malevolence to it.  You can almost hear the heavy breathing.  It really does look like him and I know now that I will never convince this particular child that my book is anything other than Darth Vader.

Marianne is disappointed for me.  ‘That boy was your last hope?’, she asks.  ‘No,’ I reply, thinking of little Nico, ‘there is another’.