My wine glass is half-full, its stem pushed flat into light sand.
I aim my camera at the glass. Click. The top part of the glass distorts giant waves crashing into the shore. Click. A haystack rock occupies space between wine and brim. Click. Sky meets sea in a blur of blue. Plus wine glass.
Dave appreciates the crashing waves while I capture the moment for perpetuity. He’s plenty ready, though, to drink some Tulip Hill 2010 Lake County Aglianico. We’ve brought a half-bottle, left over from last night’s dinner. Dave’s glass is half-full, too. That’s the way with wine: You don’t fill glasses to the brim. Plenty of space gives the wine room to breathe. And all that air is good—until it’s not. Too much exposure to atmosphere, and your wine gets flat, insipid, tasteless.
It’s Labor Day weekend, and though we live apart, my husband and I have spent some weeks together, on and off, in Italy, Nevada and California. Now summer’s over, and I go back to assistant-professoring on a Cal State University campus. Dave works for a federal agency in Reno, a long drive from me.
This fall, we begin our fourth year living apart. We’re getting kinda used to it.
For our last weekend of summer, we plan a wine hike on the California coast. I wrap empty glasses in dish towels and put the aglianico—a limited release to wine-club members—in a silk wine bag. Fancy.
Because we’re complete dorks, we don’t say “wine hike.” Instead, we baffle friends by intoning “WEE-nay HEE-kay,” which we imagine to be the Pacific Islander pronunciation. After all, Dave contends, we began the WEE-nay HEE-kay tradition in 2011, when I left our home for a tenure-track teaching job in Hawaii. That academic year, Dave flew to Oahu about seven times, checking cases of wine as his luggage. Then we’d lug bottles of our favorite wines on various hikes, many up the leeward side of the Ko‘olau Mountains. When we reached a clearing with a view of Waikiki, we’d get out the sandwiches and uncork the wine. We had earned our red, red rewards.
We went on one of our first wine hikes during the summer before I left for Hawaii. I presented an academic paper at a conference in Granada, Spain, and then we kicked around for a couple of weeks. We made our way to the Andalucia region of southern Spain and caught the once-a-day bus from Malaga to the smallish city of Ronda. We decided to explore the labyrinthine roads outside the city. At a market in the town’s historic quarter, we acquired fresh bread, salami, queso manchego and a bottle of Descalzos Viejos. The DV is a Ronda (Spanish) wine with a (French) Rhone-style blend of garnacha, syrah and merlot. We knew nothing about it. But, hey, local. Taste the terroir and all that.
While other tourists stood at the top of the world, taking photos from the city’s walls, we descended 100 meters down into El Tajo canyon. From there, we looked up at the city’s architecture, including a giant arched bridge over the Guadalevin River. Parts of the bridge dated back 2,000 years to a time when the Romans shoved its civilization down the somewhat compromised throats of Celts and Phoenicians. And Rome fell. And Islamists controlled the area through 1485 when the Christians arrived. Inquisition ensued.
Any questions?
Southern Spain isn’t unlike Southern California. Summers are toasty, arid. That day, I took photos of a blooming cactus and felt right at home.
We picnicked on a mossy stone wall along an ancient cobblestone street, along a river, with a cute little foot bridge. We sipped Descalzos Viejos and declared it the best wine ever. Tourists far above us looked tiny. We imagined their jealousy, watching us enjoy this taste of Andalusian countryside and culture. We rose our plastic hotel cups in a toast.
Que bueno caminar con vino. How nice to walk with wine.
These days, I prefer drinking from glasses of the breakable variety. Aesthetically pleasing. More photogenic. Tricky to shove in a backpack.
Our Labor Day hike involves about 4 miles of tramping along a path overgrown with invasive but elegant pampas grass. Our destination: a stretch of the Pacific Coast that’s accessible only by boat or this trail.
We locate shade under a rocky outcropping, a sandy spot with a spectacular view of crashing waves. On the beach, a medium-sized tree, uprooted and turned to driftwood, rolls in the surf.
Dave opens the bottle and declares his intention to stay a while. He can stare at waves for hours, he says. I pour and take photos, looking through my glass.
We have cheeses—Cypress Grove’s Lamb Chopper and a hard parmesan—and slices of homemade sourdough bread. Dave dips sourdough in a jar of huckleberry jam and apologizes for getting bits of bread in the jar.
Crumbs don’t bother me. Dave picked those tiny huckleberries and then spent an hour sorting them to remove stems and green bits. I made jam. That was yesterday’s date night.
Some couples spend every weekend together. Hell, some wake up every day in the same bed. I’m pretty sure we did this for, like, 28 years. Now we have space, lots of space.
We don’t twist our tongues over this. We savor our wine and flick grains of sand from our cheese. We talk about California wildfires, earthquakes in Napa, patterns in the waves and our kids. Stratus clouds form on the horizon.
Then our bottle’s empty. We drain our glasses. Best wine ever—every time. The tide’s coming in, and before dark, the Pacific will wash away the grooves left in the sand by our wine receptacles and selves.
The designation of September as California Wine Month has lowbrow wine critic Deidre Pike drooling in her cab. It’s the perfect excuse for a humanitarian trip to delicious Napa.