Books, Covers, Judges

This week I'll take a turn away from the malt and toward the grape.

I once ran a little place in the Santa Cruz, California, area community of Soquel called Django's. We had some snacks, some beer, some wine and some jazz. Newly opened and off the beaten track, sometimes we'd not have a single customer during the day.

Such was the situation one Wednesday afternoon as I worked the bar and a very large, unkempt man entered. His clothes were tattered and matted, with leaves and twigs stuck here and there in his long hair and thick unkempt beard. He had a slightly unhinged look in his eye and could probably have made two of me.

Santa Cruz is a place where lots of wackos literally live in the woods, completely 'off the grid', and rumors of strange goings-on were common. Django's was at the base of the Santa Cruz Mountains and its thick forests. Many of the people that lived in the forests also used the hillsides and creek beds to travel around the county. I was alone with this guy, and thinking that I might be trapped by a crazed maniac.

Squinting up at my wine board, he growled, "Gimme some of that there 'Merlaht'. I always wanted to try that." I glanced up at the board and realized he wanted the Merlot, but mispronounced it. I was getting more hints that he was a nut and just hoped to placate him long enough to get rid of him before he became violent and murdered me.

It was 1983, and Django's offered some high quality, and for the time, expensive wines. It was my conceit then that I would open any bottle of wine on my list and serve a single glass. This Merlot was one of my most expensive bottles, and I thought I had a way to get rid of him quickly. "That's a $5.00 glass of wine sir, just wanted to be sure you knew", I informed him.

Breathing noisily from his mouth, he grunted and reached into his overalls, pulling out a giant handful of coins and flopping them noisily on the bar. With no paper money in the mix he began to carefully count the pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters, muttering the amount as he added it in his head.

Oh, yes, indeedy, completely nuts for sure, but I hoped he wouldn't make it to $5.00 and he'd go back to his tent in the hills. Sadly for me, he had $5.16 in loose change and I knew I was stuck.

Slightly nervous, I opened the wine and poured him a glass.

He set it on the bar, just looking at it for a moment. Holding his beard back with one hand, he bent over, stuck his nose deep in the glass and took a giant sniff.

He stood up straight, contemplating the experience, and growled again. "Late pickin', I'd say."

Oh, yeah, sure, dude. You ARE cuckoo.

He took another giant sniff, saying, "Alcohol about 13%".

Whoa, Nellie! Was he crazy, or was it me? He was starting to make sense. I took a surreptitious glance at the bottle. "This Merlot is from a special late-picking," the label read. He was right! Alcohol content 13.3%: almost exactly his estimate.

He finished one more sniff and said, "Residual sugar about 0.8" and quickly seeing on the label 'residual sugar 0.8', I knew then I had somehow misjudged this beast from the wild.

Not only did he have an incredible knowledge of wine, but he had an amazing sense of smell. I relaxed a bit and we talked as he began to actually drink form the glass. He was a winemaker from the Bonny Doon winery (one of America's premier wineries) straight up the mountain behind me, he said, and one way he unwound after work was to walk through the forest.

So here's the long-awaited moral of this story—you can't judge a book by its cover, but some of us can judge a wine by its nose.

And don't get trapped alone with a homicidal maniac.