2005 - Spring - Water, Wine, and Time
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Death Valley received threefold its normal rainfall this winter, lighting the fuse for the floral explosion of a generation. Contrary to the image of the desert as a salt-encrusted wasteland, every crease between pebbles launched flares of yellow, red, and purple. Flowers unseen for decades sprang toward the light. The fragrance of honey, heliotrope, and exotic fruits filled every hollow and gully, while bees hallucinated shamelessly. It is still going on….
Beyond the bright splash of ephemeral blossoms in the desert, there is something much harsher about water in a place where the earth walks naked. While volcanism and tectonic wrenching have vaulted the mountains miles above sea level, the abrasive carving of water has sculpted the raw land. One walks up broad alluvial fans, treading upon gravel a full mile deep, carried over eons from the crumbling mountains above. Probing the mouth of a narrow canyon cut into black schist, an explorer may turn a corner to find a mature pinon trunk wedged two stories above his head…12 miles from where it grew. For the careful eyes, gritty slurries have opened clutches of fairy crystals in limestone walls, burnished basalt into glinting iron plates, resurrected trilobites from their million year sleep, and, perhaps, exposed lacy threads of gold. All this takes time….
Standing among fluttering poppies beneath a sheer cliff of polished marble, it is tempting to think of water’s work as something that takes “forever,” something long before our time. Diluvian cataclysms were all beyond ancient, it seems—an asteroid striking Yucatan, sending mountainous waves all over the world, or an apocalyptic deluge when Babylon was still Paradise. Maybe it really was a torrential rain instead of greed, violence, and germs that drove the indigenous people into oblivion…. A long time ago, before the Carter presidency….
Beyond the bright splash of ephemeral blossoms in the desert, there is something much harsher about water in a place where the earth walks naked. While volcanism and tectonic wrenching have vaulted the mountains miles above sea level, the abrasive carving of water has sculpted the raw land. One walks up broad alluvial fans, treading upon gravel a full mile deep, carried over eons from the crumbling mountains above. Probing the mouth of a narrow canyon cut into black schist, an explorer may turn a corner to find a mature pinon trunk wedged two stories above his head…12 miles from where it grew. For the careful eyes, gritty slurries have opened clutches of fairy crystals in limestone walls, burnished basalt into glinting iron plates, resurrected trilobites from their million year sleep, and, perhaps, exposed lacy threads of gold. All this takes time….
Standing among fluttering poppies beneath a sheer cliff of polished marble, it is tempting to think of water’s work as something that takes “forever,” something long before our time. Diluvian cataclysms were all beyond ancient, it seems—an asteroid striking Yucatan, sending mountainous waves all over the world, or an apocalyptic deluge when Babylon was still Paradise. Maybe it really was a torrential rain instead of greed, violence, and germs that drove the indigenous people into oblivion…. A long time ago, before the Carter presidency….
One doesn’t really think of mountain gouging as a contemporary act. This year, however, it happened on our watch. Flash floods scoured the canyons then ripped up 30 miles of highway into Death Valley. Millions of tons of rock shifted in a single night, then grated and rumbled further downhill with every successive storm. A ghostly river flowed through the driest place on earth, and the mirages became real. Today, the scars are fresh, the mud still dark, the fissures barely separating and warping in the spring sunshine. A curious cumulus cloud drifts above.
We are, after all, part of an evolving natural history, a transient flicker in geological time, not likely some glorious evolutionary endpoint. We may actually witness some of the events that will shape the land and the life of the future. Keep your eyes open and your shoelaces tied!
Such grandiose reflections merit a toast. I generally drink lukewarm water in the desert during the day, but when the sun is low, it is time for Salamandre. Primitivo, naturally, matches the spirit of the wild and rough, but this year I have high praise for the Sauvignon Blanc, Pinot Noir, and our new burly Merlot (forget the idiot comments in Sideways). By the time you receive this newsletter, I will also have evaluated the Ménage à Trois Vins and the Syrah, sitting on a warm, freshly scuffed boulder in a dry wash next to a beavertail cactus in extravagant bloom under a canopy of ancient starlight. If that can’t coax your cork out, you seriously need help. We’ll help.
Come join us at our Spring Invitational Tasting and taste these desert-vetted wines with mischievous people under a virgin redwood tree, and see where that leads you.
Wells Shoemaker MD, Winemaker
We are, after all, part of an evolving natural history, a transient flicker in geological time, not likely some glorious evolutionary endpoint. We may actually witness some of the events that will shape the land and the life of the future. Keep your eyes open and your shoelaces tied!
Such grandiose reflections merit a toast. I generally drink lukewarm water in the desert during the day, but when the sun is low, it is time for Salamandre. Primitivo, naturally, matches the spirit of the wild and rough, but this year I have high praise for the Sauvignon Blanc, Pinot Noir, and our new burly Merlot (forget the idiot comments in Sideways). By the time you receive this newsletter, I will also have evaluated the Ménage à Trois Vins and the Syrah, sitting on a warm, freshly scuffed boulder in a dry wash next to a beavertail cactus in extravagant bloom under a canopy of ancient starlight. If that can’t coax your cork out, you seriously need help. We’ll help.
Come join us at our Spring Invitational Tasting and taste these desert-vetted wines with mischievous people under a virgin redwood tree, and see where that leads you.
Wells Shoemaker MD, Winemaker