Wine Time

I think I will always remember Melbourne as the City of Free Hats. I received two free hats while playing poker at the Crown, one a Jim Bean hat signed by Mr. Hock and the other a Grand Prix of Australia hat from 2007 that was left under my seat.

Yesterday I won my third hat, a cowboy hat from a Yarra Valley winery. I finally went on a wine tour, finally enjoyed some of the delicious wine and forested low mountains of Victoria. Soon after the tour began, I slowly became famous on the ride up to the first of four wineries by guessing that kerosene was a common descriptor of Rieslings. Everyone else didn’t believe me, but the guide smiled and said, “We have an expert on board!” I was sitting at the back of the small tour bus, and I felt all the heads turn around and look inquisitively at this bearded curiosity.

I solidified my fame by guessing the correct grape variety of the “mystery wine,” mostly because everyone else had guessed all of the red wine varieties they had heard of and I just chucked up Sangiovese without really knowing for certain whether it was right or not. The guide, named Orson “like Orson Welles,” smiled again and put this cowboy hat on my head, “You won yourself a hat!”

After that I was asked a number of questions about wine throughout the day. People from Canada, Switzerland, China, the US, and Perth all wanted to know where I learned so much about wine.

“I only took a class a few years ago. I’ve forgotten a lot of it.”

“That’s one more class than I’ve ever taken,” stated a blunt woman from Canada.

It was an enormously enjoyable day out in rural Victoria. The sun beat down on the half harvested vines, and I did my best to find shade and take pictures of the low mountains that surrounded the valley. Some of these hills and mountains bore the scars of the fires that burned not two months ago. I don’t think I would have noticed at first because a lot of the burned land had already recovered enough to look reasonably green, but Orson pointed out the scars—and also his house—where he had lost a shed and where the flames lapped only six meters from his front door. He and all of his neighbors had to evacuate, and he considered himself lucky that he still had not just his life, but his home as well.

“I don’t want to bring down the fun at all, but this is just what happened, and to understand what this region has been through, you need to know just how bad these fires were and how helpless all the residents here were to the power that were the towering flames. I lost a shed, but fortunately that was all. I was one of the lucky ones.”

The bus grew guiltily silent, and Orson smiled and said, “But now the tours have started back up, and we’re all happy to be getting back to our normal lives and showing you wonderful people the great wines that we make here in the Yarra Valley. You’re going to have a great day today, you’re going to try up to 60 different types of wine, and you’ll all get feeling real good by the end of the day. Enough of the sad shit, let’s play a game!”