It’s been a big week. My past few months of relative unemployment—or low-employment, shall we say—has left my pockets tight but my schedule refreshingly loose, and this shift back into the land of alarm clocks and managers feels about as smooth as the Loma Prieta. This past weekend, with Monday looming ominously ahead as the beginning of my first real workweek in a while, I felt the need to both cut-loose and relax at the same time. So, I do the obvious: sneak away to the mountains with my pen and journal, two books, my boyfriend, and one outrageously good bottle of wine.
We arrived in Lake Arrowhead around 5pm just as the lowering sun began to cast golden streaks across the sky, mirroring precisely the shade of the turning fall leaves clinging precariously to the trees. The lake was on fire with reflected light as we pulled into Jensen’s to grab the bare necessities we didn’t bring from home: a fresh loaf of bread, some cheese, and half and half for our morning coffee. My father has a cabin tucked away in the trees in Arrowhead, and Tom and I are blessed to have access to the place as a little retreat, a quick two-hour drive from the beaches and the chaos of LA.
The cabin is built on a steep slope overlooking a small ravine with a running creek, and the back part of the porch floats about 200 feet in the air, eye level with the trees and the flying squirrels. Tom and I set up camp on padded Adirondack chairs overlooking the ravine, the severed stump of a tree that comes right up through the deck between us serving as a table. On a wooden cheese board, while I got the fire going, Tom set out big hunks of our French loaf, sliced Vermont sharp cheddar (my favorite), a small dish of olive oil with sea salt and rosemary, and some black currant jam. As the oblong shadows of the birches stretched long across the porch, I cracked the bottle and poured two purple glasses of the Sbragia Family Vineyard ‘Wall Vineyard’ Cabernet Sauvignon 2004.
This single-vineyard jewel hails from Mt. Veeder, the distinguished AVA (American Viticultural Area) within Napa Valley, up in the peaks of the Mayacamas Mountain Range that serves as a physical boundary between Sonoma and Napa Valleys. 2004 was the first year that veteran winemaker Ed Sbragia made wine for his family’s winery with the fruit of this remote vineyard owned by Duane Wall, and it’s no surprise that he got it right the first time around. Napa Valley mountain fruit is known for its structure, power, and sense of terrior, and the Sbragia ‘Wall Vineyard’ Cab is no exception.
Never has a wine more intensely mimicked my surroundings. Dense and dark, crème de cassis and cedar rose from the glass, and the heady oak from two years in French barrels matched the smell of wood embracing me here in this tree-house of a cabin. Black plum, currant, mint, and licorice wrapped their velvet fingers around me and Tom and I sat in silence, listening to the wind in the trees and the flutter of blue jay wings as we got lost in the wine. To me, the wine is a wine old man, his heavyset frame resting soundly in a worn leather armchair. He keeps a collection of cigars in a mahogany humidifier and regularly indulges, caressing the tobacco gently as he thoughtlessly swirls a 25-year single malt scotch in his right hand. Though his appearance implies he is no one to trifle with, his eyes are kind and his hands are warm. He is a man of letters, a generation of yore, and he doesn’t plan on going anywhere anytime soon.
Our silence is eventually broken when halfway through the bottle, as the birds quiet and first stars begin to peak through what’s left of the crimson sky, Tom looks at me and says, quite seriously, “This wine is amazing. It’s…it’s God’s breast milk.” I crawl onto his lap and together we savor the end of a bottle for the books.
Cheers.
Allison was raised on the vine in Sonoma, California, and believes that life is too short to drink bad wine, count calories, or second-guess your destiny. She now lives in Los Angeles where she practices many things, the two most important being contentment and tricks for opening a wine bottle without a wine key.