When Aldo asks me what it means to call a wine “haunting,” I assume this is another instance of his endearing childish literalness - this is Halloween season, after all. And so my first instinct is to provide the most childishly literal explanation possible. I tell him of the legendary bottle of Clos d’Escalier that for generations has struck terror in the hearts of the Escalier family of Provence.
It is their vineyard that produces the wine, and it is their family that suffers by it. The story goes that whenever a bottle of the long-depleted 1787 vintage appears unbidden in the dumbwaiter connecting the dining salon to the cellar, someone at dinner that evening will be dead by sunrise, as surely as Poe’s raven croaks, “Never again,” or “Oh no! Nurse!” or whatever. It all has something to do with a curse brought down on the Escaliers by a Madame Defarge-like crone at the time of the French Revolution. I believe the family refused her a 10 percent discount on a case.
This, at any rate, is a wine that could be called “haunting” with absolute accuracy.
“Thank you for that ghost tale,” says Aldo with a noticeable lack of blood-running-cold fear, “but I was referring to this wine review I was reading. The writer refers to a riesling spatlese as possessing, and I quote, a haunting beauty. I’m trying to think what that would be — a wine that haunts, let alone a wine that haunts beautifully.”
“Ah!
“What?”
“You’ve hit on a favorite topic of mine, the overreaching wine writer. I take it you never have had a quote-unquote haunting wine?”
“No.”
“And that would be correct, because the fact of the matter is that wine is not haunting, does not haunt. The only person it haunts is a wine writer overreaching for effect. I think we can agree that a wine might be memorable?”
“Yes.”
“Or even unforgettable?”
“Possibly.”
“But to say something haunts — that usually is underlined by a thin frisson of something disturbing, or negative. Much the way an image of a skull might haunt a person as a memento mori.”
“You mean a reminder of death.”
“Well, certainly not a reminder of lunch, Aldo.”
“Cheap sarcasm wounds deeply, Mr. Vivos. You know that.”
“Sorry. At any rate, a man could be haunted by the memory of slapping his mistress -”
“Now that’s an odd example -”
“Or by the memory, say, of killing her by conking her on the head with a bottle of wine and then disposing of the body before his wife finds out —”
“What is this, Desperate Housewives?”
“What I’m getting at is that wine writing tends to be imprecise to begin with. And when left in the hands of a writerly soul who may already be poetic and is made even more so by the ingestion of half a bottle - the phrasing melts into gush and then slush. I have had thousands of wines in my adult life, and I have not been haunted by any of them. Just like you. And neither us is any the poorer for it. We don’t need to be haunted by a wine, or thrown into the ecstasies of St. Teresa of Avila.”
“All we need is the corkscrew –.”
“That’s correct, Aldo.”
“– Which releases the spirits in the bottle. I wonder if that means a writer could describe a bottle in terms of Linda Blair.”
“Head-turning.”
“Levitating.”
Then Aldo does his impression of Linda Blair swearing at Ellen Burstyn, and the conversation ends.
