Wine

As usual, we begin this month’s wine column with a digression, about thinking and the emergence of taste, eventually returning to wine:

In classes I taught at LCC, we had a rule: no use of cell phones during class (exceptions for possible emergencies). One morning, I was filling the whiteboard with notes and noticed a student in the back row looking down at his cupped hands. My students might think I’m a bit dim about their current stratagems but I knew what was going on. “Kyle,” I said, “are you on your cell?”

Day-um! We just zipped through another year and it’s time again for our annual gushing about the Wines of Love.

But this year we begin with an adventure, a journey into the Hundred Valleys carved by the various forks and myriad creeks of the winding, wilding Umpqua River.

Election’s over and Santa sent Artie back to Cave Junction with a lump of coal, also Gov. Poopiehead back to Ogden or wherever, so we’re ready to red-line the jolly-meter, even if it’s mostly pretend (the Refumblicans are still dangling America’s economy over the fiscal cliff). Folks who know me are aware that this time of year I morph into sap mode; I get giddy with giving gifts.

Glorious autumn: I’ve sojourned in Eugene nearly 50 years and I don’t recall an autumn more lovely. I just want to wander the streets, besotted by colors and aromas, tipsy with nostalgia for autumns of my childhood, lingering now in the autumn of my life. For viticulturalists (grape-growers and winemakers), autumn 2012 has them trembling; despite our soggy June which reduced crop size, these long stretches of warm days and cool nights have led to rising sugars and deepening colors in the clusters, promising what could become a classic vintage. Harvesting has already begun.

At last we’re getting hot. Well, not actually hot, at least not here in the moisty Willamette Valley. Elsewhere, all across the country (and wider world), people are baking in drought conditions, crops drying and dying, herds starving, swarms of locusts consuming every green leaf and shoot. “This is what global warming looks like,” said one climatologist.

This year, after decades as a teacher of writing and literature at Lane Community College, I’m finally retiring, takin’ off my chaps, hangin’ up my spurs, drapin’ my guns over the bedpost, kickin’ off my boots and slouchin’ to the rockin’ chair. And lest some tax-dodgin’ right-wingnut works up a froth about my becoming a PERS burden, I’d like to point out that I’ve paid my dues: I’m 69, started paying taxes when I was 16, taught my first college-level class at UO in 1966, did 10 years at UO, five years at PSU, taught my first class for LCC in 1981. I’ve never had a summer off.

Micah and Laura Bodner’s winery could fit in your garage, if your garage had a little more head space for punching down a 1,000-liter open-top tank. To facilitate the dynamic process of opening a winery, the Bodners first needed leverage. So they removed the ceiling in a barn and squeezed in equipment wherever it would fit.

Lord knows you don’t need to be a wino to get a taste for grapes. It’s delicious, inhibition-loosening and, under the right conditions, extremely refreshing. The weather’s been beautiful lately, and while snatching up a bottle of Three-Buck-Chuck, dragging a couch into the middle of your lawn, cranking some UB40 and getting sloshed might sound like refreshment enough, there’s also a city full of invigorating wine — and easy, fun ways to select what’s right for you — just beyond the driveway.

Something is happening in folksy little Pleasant Hill. And I don’t know what it is.

Maybe most people hate making mistakes. I know I do. Last month I tried to do a little good for some fine people: I mentioned the fundraiser wine auction on behalf of Start Making A Reader Today (SMART), an event involving my old pal and wine maven Larry Malmgren. Unfortunately, I sent interested readers to the wrong place.