Aldo and I, in town for a few days, rent bikes and cycle around all afternoon: quicksilver weather, hot, cool, breezes from the ocean and the trees and the hills. Aldo is unhappy trying to figure out the gears, and the boy does not like going uphill, and then downhill he’s afraid of losing control of the handlebars. We pause in front of the Biltmore in Montecito, and the ocean view could be a Manet: Everyone moving happily in the wind and light, the red and yellow and purple flowers bursting from the green hedges. Then a late lunch – a salad – and a walk out to the end of the Santa Barbara pier.
There’s a clam shack there where Julia Child used to eat – clams, I assume, not shacks — but no commemorative bust or statue of that Sequoia of cuisine. The sun goes in and out of clouds of fog, looking more like a moon than a sun.
By 8:30 we have worked up stupendous appetites worthy of Miss Child herself.
Dinner is at Bouchon on Victoria Street. A restaurant famous for its wine list, focused so intensely on Santa Barbara County vineyards that other West Coast State wines are relegated to a separate sheet of paper, like footnotes to a grand academic thesis. The wait staff talk very knowledgeably about the local wines, and pleasantly too. Our waitress has a Sigourney Weaver angularity and red eyeglass frames that I find mesmerizing. I wonder if what I think are her glittering blue eyes are actually irises painted on the back of her lenses. This is before anything has been drunk, by the way.
I order sauteed mushrooms followed by duck with a rich succotash, and to drink? The 2003 Palmina Nebbiolo. This is a wine so big (over 15 percent) that past the two-third mark on the bottle Aldo comments that he feels as if his head were about to fall off and slide into the Pacific Ocean.
We were told that the wine would benefit from a few minutes opening up, but this proves debatable. The more it opens, the more it becomes jammy, the more every sip competes with every bite of food for attention – fights, really. It’s like a stuffed sofa that has to be shoved out of the way, over and over.
Wine should have flavor, and a nose, and body, and alcohol, and all that, but if it is to be paired successfully with food doesn’t it require a certain transparency? You want to be able to taste “through” the wine to get at that duck, or sauteed mushroom, or Poptart, if you’re that perverse.
So although this Palmina is a conscientious act of construction, balanced and powerful, well… one could say the same thing of the Eiffel Tower.
On the walk back to our hotel along State Street, just a few blocks from Boucheron, a young man with strong tattooed forearms happens to park his bicycle on the corner as we pass. He dips his hand into front pockets filled with white powder – chalk, not cocaine – and proceeds to rappel up the ornate terra-cotta front of a building. Two and a half stories, I’d say. We’re astounded: It’s like a Cirque du Soleil audition.
