Garrison Keillor has recently read the work of poet and father Jerry Roscoe on Writer’s Almanac. Read and listen to November 28, 2009’s rendition of Bouquet. From September 2, 2007, you can hear a reading of Adequate Love.

Of course, if you like what you hear, you can pick up a copy of The Unexamined Life by Jerry Roscoe on Amazon.

A good friend since the fewest of years has written a terrific short piece that’s up at Staccato. I hope you take a look; you’ll be happy you did.

Serena Sutcliffe, on Penfolds Grange (a famous Australian wine):

The 1960 showed the great drive of peppery Shiraz, with orange, coffee and peppermint, all of which are Grange signatures. We had the usual discussion as to whether the 1962 or 1963 was ‘better’, but it is a pointless exercise as they are both show-stoppers. I found the melting aniseed of the 1965 seductive, the liquorice-filled 1966 a mite drier, the plumy 1967 redolent of candied tomatoes, the stellar 1971 all black truffles, the 1975 reminiscent of peaty tobacco, the 1976 full of mint and bitter chocolate and the 1978 evocative of Cuban tobacco and log fire.

Although ordinarily I don’t pay much attention to wine writing—it’s easy to find less, shall we say, “readable” examples—I think what Ms. Sutcliffe writes here is kind of wonderful (even though, to readers who don’t encounter much “wine writing,” it may appear stuffy in quite the ordinary way).

Rather than simply describing what a wine tastes like—a practice I think is kind of inherently ridiculous—she talks about what the wine evokes. And she manages to avoid some of the most hackneyed terms and phrases. Wine writing at its worst is really something that deserves to be place in quotations, as I did above. Most of what you find when you search for a wine looks like this. The descriptions hardly vary, like a checklist of regulated qualities: “cigar,” “earth,” “leather,” etc. Slightly more literate, but not an ounce more alluring or useful, are examples like this: again, “spices,” “earth,” “stones.”

These descriptions utterly fail to say anything about the wine; there is nothing about what makes one wine different from another, save for vague flavor profiles. If wine A, at $20, contains “cigar-y earthiness,” and wine B, at $400, also contains those qualities, why would anyone buy the second? Really, why would it cost more at all? But wine isn’t just about what the stuff tastes like—not only, that is. Good wine possesses a remarkable power to create emotion. Same as a good book, or movie. There’s no specific quality, or set of qualities, that makes it good, just as there are no specific qualities that make a film good. The only measure of quality is that capacity to elicit feeling. And if you think wine can be expensive, think about art.

Ms. Sutcliffe’s paragraph creates a more richly varied texture to the language of wine, and I am impressed by that. She acknowledges that the wines are “redolent of,” or “reminiscent of.” This is a far cry from claiming to actually detect those flavors, and the difference is very important. Rather than haphazardly grouping wines together based on their supposedly shared qualities of “earth,” she describes the experience that she herself is having. That interaction between the drinker’s mind and the wine is what creates meaning. The same with literature, the same with film.

Some take it much further, and to a more enlightening extent. Alder Yarrow, of Vinography.com, practices a style of journalism that sometimes allows me to take away the quotation marks around ‘wine writing.’ Even if his writing isn’t always the most erudite (and why should it be?), it’s almost always genuine and approachable, two qualities that are far too rare in this business. In his article “Wine Will Never Smell the Same Again: Luca Turin and the Science of Scent,” he explores the human physiology of smell. While that aspect of wine writing interests me quite a lot less (since those with a physiological bent often just seem to be seeking empirical support for their personal experiences), I understand what he’s doing. In directing attention away from simply describing tastes and smells, he presents a new perspective on wine, and the brain, and experience, without forcing us to come to any firm conclusions about any of it. We think about wine more, and that new, enriched context makes each sip mean more.

I remember tasting a sweet wine from 1959 and thinking, JFK was alive when these grapes were on the vine. Obama hadn’t been born yet. We’d never been to space. And in all that time, between those days and today, this bottle was sitting, uncorrupted, aging. And all of that, for this moment, for this taste in my mouth as I stand in a hazy, sweaty kitchen late at night in New York City, in 2009. Holy fuck! 2009?! [looking around frantically] Where am I?! In wine, like poetry and art, what ultimately matters is the power of the subjective experience. To deny that would be to erase what is special about it, what makes it sought after.

It’s unfortunate that in ‘The Science of Scent’ he ends up heaping praise on Luca Turin, a guy who clearly embodies everything I don’t like about wine writing. If you read his passages in Yarrow’s article, you’ll see a perfect example of how smug and precious it can be: ” ‘The ‘59, in a bottle for forty years, comes out the way James Bond emerges from a wet suit in a perfect tuxedo. It looks at you and murmurs, ‘What kept you?’ ” A perfect example of something I never want to hear or read again.

From Yarrow’s articles on trying to understand why exactly this particular type of rotten grape juice holds so much magic for him, to his review of Patz & Hall Winery (which pretty much only presents the story of the winery, and saves tasting notes for the very end), he largely embodies a new style of wine writing, in which the magic and mystery of experience are paramount; in which curiosity is valuable and open-ended; in which the strict ontological traits of a glass of wine are less important than, for lack of better words, what actually makes it important.

More on this later, and hopefully some great and illuminating stories about the history of wine that will make you thirsty.

One easy way to lose weight
is to fall in love with someone
who is already in love
with someone else. Then,
when you’re about to eat dinner,
think about that. It’s like magic
without the magic!
It’s like snorkeling without a snorkel
or flippers or any fish to see,
so you’re just holding your breath
and your eyes might as well be closed,
which is like being dead,
but not. But close.

They can be as fiery and epic and maddeningly beautiful as Erin Belieu’s “In the Red Dress I Wear to Your Funeral,” available at the wonderful online magazine At Length, or as goofy and touching and confused and sad as Bob Hicok’s “The History of Origami.” There are also any number of other things they can be like, which: thank goodness.

There are times when I look at this city from within itself and see nothing but a ghostly empire—luminescent, haunted, already fading. The views of grand palaces that dwarf Versailles; the limpid ponds and vigorous squirrels; the dancing sunlight; the autumn coolness in the air; the lethargic tourist families, collapsed on each other, eating hot dogs and ice cream, nestled under subway maps.

And something in me leaps a hundred years ahead, or back, and I become a traveller from a different time—some kind of cosmic voyeur. And to see leaves turn red from the tips as though dipped in blood, to hold chestnuts, smooth and fragrant, in the cool cup of my palm. And to watch an endless procession of persons marching past, all missing the view; I am alone here, hidden in the dappled shade, hidden in the notebook on my lap, hidden from the day and the night in this middle kingdom of evening.

Honey I love you but I’m turning inside out.
I want earthquakes that alter my topography,
fresh-ripped coastlines, volcanoes charging from the sea
like the football player throwing a Hail Mary pass
in one perfect arc in the film I would like to be real life.
I want to meet a dragon. I want change for a dollar.
I want to eat a habanero pepper
stuffed with habanero peppers. I want to drip spleens
and kidneys all over the kitchen floor right now
and say that I will clean it up tomorrow!
I want to play music so loud it thrums out the dark.
I want to build a bomb shelter for all the bombs without a home.
I want scars and leapyears. I want everybody in the phone book
to list fake numbers. I want to assume the man on the television
is talking to me personally when he salutes and says Good luck.
My life is a book I’ve been holding too close to see
and so I will be getting reading glasses but first
I want us to crack each other open like pomegranates
and witness the bounty I hope we’re made of.

The Animal Psychic Speaks

The hawk says, “I’m hungry! Where’s that mouse?”
The pig says, “Pardon me, I have the hiccups.”
The possum is thinking about intersections and her next of kin.
The anteater prefers gumdrops, but feels too shy to say so.
Those Japanese beetles see plenty of holes in the leaves’ argument.
When the stallion runs, he forgets where he comes from.
Today is your luckiest day: This rattlesnake’s on your side.

Landline

Phil padded into the living room to ask Evie what she wanted for dinner that night. She had been on hold with the cell phone company for a quarter of an hour, which was really eating into her minutes. “My heart,” she said, sliding from the couch to the floor. “On a slice of buttered brown bread.”

“We’re all out of bread,” Phil said. Evie remembered that she could not live without him.

Holding Their Tongues

“I’m worried the best thing about me
is what I don’t say,” Becky told her mom,
“and nobody will ever know it.
I feel like a root vegetable
with the greens snipped off
and what’s worse,
that’s my damn kimono
you’re wearing.” It was true
about the kimono, but
Ella was only trying to distract her child
from the harrows of introspection.
Last week she’d resorted to
harrassing Becky about gum care,
just to keep her from doubting her luminosity.
They were an old family. All their furniture had claws.
“Why not tell the help,” her mother said,
and waved her gimlet toward the back garden,
where a gathering of snapdragons
bobbed their faintly mutinous heads.