Sometimes Billy wants to indulge in what might be called a revery of vinous memory. That’s a terrible turn of phrase, “revery of vinous memory,” but that’s what this is. And I am thinking just now of must, the raw juice of the harvested and crushed grape. Pagans probably thought it was blood and went berserk, foaming purple bubbles at the mouth. Civilization in time taught them the lovely, more understated truth.
I can still remember the unexpected joy and satisfaction that came to me when I inhaled the dense odor of grape must on my first visit with a tour group to a winery. I noted it in my diary, which I quote here: “Grape must — a defining moment! Also, very hot photo of John Travolta on cover of Paris Match.” I was even more keenly impressionable because, of course, at the time I was much younger and all new sensations stirred me deeply. I am willing to date myself a little by admitting that it had not been so long before this visit that I was capable of being moved to tears, for instance, by Laura’s Theme from Dr. Zhivago, and fought terribly with my poor parents because I wanted them to hire balalaika players for my seventeenth birthday party. I also wanted someone to be positioned on the roof to shake down confetti snow. What’s wrong with playing a record by the Carpenters, my mother asked. And that was what we went with. We’ve only just begun… “To barf,” I said to myself.
But to return to that afternoon in the winery and that smell of grape must…
As our little tour group moved inside the winery’s compound, the scent that greeted me hit me with such pleasurable force that I wondered if some atavistic genetic memory were being triggered. Had one of my ancestors harvested grapes and stomped them underfoot? Had I in a previous incarnation been a vine of merlot? The odor of must is, in its way, as overpowering as gasoline – or musk, or whatever it is that animals secrete that makes them go all sexually nutty in season. The raw juice smells of the grape itself, yes, and damp, earth, and cool darkness and chalky air – it is the cave distilled into cologne and sprayed over the winery like Bacchus’s own blessing.
That day I could smell the ancient process of the extraction of juice from grape and soil. And this is the great thing about wine, isn’t it? Its time line into the distant past, and the fact that we experience what was experienced then. I mean, you can love Sinatra, but I don’t think Come Fly With Me connects you to imperial Rome.
But must has an unsettling quality to it, as well. If it connects us to past lives, well, those lives are kaput – there is something of the grave as well as the cave. That first day, even in my woozy happiness, it also smelled like my grandmother’s basement, where over the years she developed a bad habit of stashing her Christmas poinsettas. They remained there and withered and dried until she herself died: When we went through the house to clear out her possessions, the basement looked like the secret cache of a floral serial killer.
This isn’t, I agree, quite the same thing as Proust nibbling the madeleine. I don’t like madeleines, for one thing, and I never got past the first 40 pages of Proust. What can I say? If I need an immense masterpiece to dip into again and again, it would be the one by Jackie Susann. It so totally belongs in the canon!
But what I am getting at is my problem with must: It is beyond seductive. It paralyzes the olfactory nerve so that no other scent can really make a serious dent in your nasal passages or even your memory for hours. When I visit a winery, the must follows me home, sticks to my skin and nostrils and clothes as though it were cigarette smoke. Imagine how your eyes would feel if you watched a big-screen 3D print of an epic like Mondo Vino wearing those cheap novelty glasses. I could be biting into a clove of garlic and still the trace memory of must would seize me, instantly transporting me back to that great recollection of the winery, but also to that sepulchral reminder of my grandmother’s dead plants in her dusty basement: not just the plants, let me add, but laundry, and old cardboard boxes, and rusty tricycles that probably had been assembled before Sputnik went up.
I wonder if my grandmother smelled like that herself. Was her housedress washed in grape must? Did she dust her hair with some sort of dried grape-must talcum? She was a good woman, my grandmother, but her presence in the persistence of grape is troubling to me. She could be a bit creepy, actually.
Luckily, she’s undetectable in the nose of this delicious vino da tavola I have just poured: Just chocolate and tobacco and a soft yet pungent spice. It’s Jackie Susann, and she’s always welcome.
