Wine and Song on Monday Evening
In Mendocino by bottle and England in song this evening.
Enjoying a 2019 Drew Pinot Noir from Wendling Vineyard in Anderson Valley. There’s a rugged elegance to these wines from Jason Drew. He’s been making wine on a Mendocino County mountain ridge 1200 feet up and three miles east of the Pacific Ocean since 2005. Wendling Vineyard, the joint where the grapes come from, is even closer to the ocean than Drew’s estate, so close that its western edge slopes steeply towards the coast. Wendling vines love the cool coastal air and fog they share with the surrounding land, sea, and sky.
Right out of the bottle this Pinot Noir is aromas of guava, ripe strawberries, black tea, and fresh herbs. It’s dynamite. The wine has been in my glass for ten minutes or so, all fragrance and spice that I haven’t even tasted it yet. Taking a taste, it’s rich ripe red berries, streaks of acidity racing across each cheek, more of that tea spice at the start of the finish, then that finish, all fruit and fog blended from coastal mountains into the bottle and glass. It’s divine. Sometimes that’s all you need to write about something this good and delicious.
Speaking of good and delicious, the song “The Whole Point of No Return” by The Style Council fills the room. Simple elegance to match the muscular refinement of the evening’s wine. Just Paul Weller’s voice, soft and melodic, accompanied by a resonant hollow-body electric guitar and a vintage amp. The music flows and charges with a lyrical incrimination of England’s rich and their methods of insulation and segregation from the “every man” and his class.
Weller had a magic method of crafting clever pop music with cutting lyrics, most always with a progressive tone, always a man of the people. He left the overt defiance of The Jam behind and shifted into the subversive activism of The Style Council, their pop populism rooted in social soul. Weller sings “The Whole Point of No Return” with a genuine sensitivity, alone with his guitar, his vulnerability and bravado in stark sonic view. Brilliant.
A choice wine and music pairing, in the present, spontaneous, serendipitous.