huevos con vino

During the dot com boom, I lived in San Jose.  I was in the middle of obtaining two undergrad degrees at the University of Washington and I recognized two things about my chosen profession (technical communication): 1) The tech industry was basically the only place I could apply my skills as a tech writer, and 2) the dot com boom was going to burst very quickly, and when it did I wanted to have worked at a company that would still be well known ten years later.  Therefore, as part of the internship requirement for my TC degree, I went to work for IBM in the Silicon Valley.

I was there for about a year, from April 1998 until the end of March 1999.  At about the same time, my dad and stepmom moved down from the Seattle area to Sonoma.  In fact, they bought a house that was within spitting distance of some Gundlach-Bundschu property, which was pretty cool.  I wound up spending most weekends hanging out in Sonoma.  I spent a relatively small amount of time going to wineries, but we did visit several.

One particular winery story stands out, though, but not for the wines or the location.  In fact, I forget the name of the winery at this point, but even if I could remember it I wouldn’t include it here.

My father, stepmom, and I drove up a relatively steep hill toward this particular winery.  The scenery was quite lovely: It was a summer day, there were lots of trees to provide shade from the heat, and the rolling hill that led up to the main building was quite nice for a brisk walk.  We drove up and parked near the tasting room. 

As we got out of the car, I noticed a family having a nice picnic at a table under a tree.  There seemed to be about 8-10 people eating together and drinking some wine that they probably just purchased from the winery itself.  A short distance away, another group of people were eating and lounging on a large blanket in the sun.  The whole setting seemed quite idyllic, as if taken from a Seurat painting, but with the men in Dockers and the women carrying clutch purses.

We went inside the tasting room and began to look over the offerings.  The room was a long rectangle, with the entrance and tasting table at the front, the restrooms to one side in the middle, and a hallway back to the fermentation tanks and other elements of the winery.  The place was empty inside except for two tasting room attendants and the three of us.

I turned 22 while I was living in San Jose, so this was one of my first tasting room experiences where I could actually join in the fun.  In the past, I had been on several winery trips and tours, particularly as a teenager through Napa, but I was never able to do anything more than look at the merchandise and wonder what the wine tasted like.  That got old very fast.  But by the time I was “of age,” according to the US government, I still didn’t know much about wine.  Mostly I was drinking beer, gin, rum, and everything except wine, really.  Wine posed two problems for me: It wouldn’t keep once I opened it, and it cost a lot more per glass than, say, Tanqueray or Lagunitas.  I wasn’t ready for wine yet, frankly.  I was still hitting video arcades and going to see disaster movies like Deep Impact.

So, on this particular day, I decided to partake along with my family.  I was about to taste my first wine when I heard it.  This sound is impossible to describe, but it was a blood-curdling noise, the sort of thing you assume you might hear during a traffic accident involving a kindergarten class.

It was a shrieking, high-pitched cry that seemed to be combined with a bellowing, deep-pitched howl.  The combination made me believe that someone was being stabbed to death in the men’s room.  That’s exactly what it sounded like, anyway, a man confronting another for some reason, knifing him in the gut.  And it was incredibly loud.

That’s a very disconcerting thing to hear while you’re leisurely standing around, chatting with folks who are pouring free wine and discussing the terroir of the vineyard.

I didn’t quite know what to do.  I wasn’t about to go open the men’s room door to find one man savagely attacking another man with a knife.  The shrieking and bellowing went on for a few more seconds until one of the picnicking people came running inside.  It was one of the parents from a group outside, and he ran into the bathroom.  Suddenly, he emerged holding a crying young boy who had been trying to use the bathroom.  The two of them together bolted out of the winery and went over to the picnic table outside, where their family was sitting.

But that noise wasn’t explained simply by a boy.  There was an entirely different component to it, an adult component that made no sense to me.  A few minutes passed and everyone at the tasting table seemed stifled by the experience, as if all of the joy in tasting wine had been drained for the afternoon.

Finally, after several minutes, an older man appeared in the doorway of the men’s room.  He casually weaved his way back out of the building toward the picnicking people on the blanket.  Apparently, this guy had consumed way too much wine, so he went into the bathroom to throw up.  But, he happened to scare the living hell out of the poor little kid who was in there by himself, trying to use the urinal.  So when the older man began hurling, the little kid started screaming in terror since he had apparently never heard a grown man vomit…at a winery…in the middle of the afternoon.  I probably would have screamed too.

I have never even come close to experiencing a repeat of this event.  I can’t imagine it.  I’ve been to bars where I have seen and heard people throwing up, but never at a winery during regular business hours!  Incredible. 

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