It’s Willamette, Dammit

Photo by Jason Weaver, CC BY 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

I was lucky in my restaurant career. I expressed interest in wine right when interest was welcome, but I was reticent to ask certain questions. I’m usually not that way. I’ve never been a “There are no such things as stupid questions!” person so much as I believe that there are very stupid questions but I’m fine asking them on the principle that if I shy from asking I might miss out on something. So, I ask away, but be wary unto thee that treats me like an idiot for asking a question that initially seems idiotic. You better have the right answer because, and this has happened many times, if I find out a dismissive response is wrong, when next we meet you’ll hear about it at length.

I moved back to Birmingham from Savannah with a letter in my briefcase, which I was pretentious enough to carry at that point, from two guys I consider mentors. I’ve written about them here before and I can’t say enough about their graciousness. I handed that letter to my prospective new job interviewer, a woman that owned a wine distribution company who set up a meeting in a tavern run by a former co-worker of mine.

I was a little terrified. The former co-worker was a Mephistophelian presence that as a side job took over a stage in ways I’d never seen and haven’t seen since. The guy was a maelstrom. He fronted several bands and always played to packed houses. He’s older now and has a family of four. Every one of them, he and his wife and both kids, has a slightly odd but really great name, which is not germane but interesting to me. He’s off in Charleston now and apparently charming acoustic set-goers on the side. Computer storage sales is his thing these days. But I was terrified. If someone was going to embarrass me in front of my interviewer, it would be the guy that knew my late-night booze limit and why so and so wasn’t talking to me at a given moment.

Turns out he was the perfect host, and my knowing a restaurant manager, considering I’d be selling to restaurant managers, helped a great deal.

The woman that interviewed me is a pretty cool character too. She’s killing it in the Austin real estate market right now, but when I met her she was just off a year or so teaching skiing in Switzerland. Her uncle was a University of Alabama notable, and he and her father parlayed that bit of fame into a taco franchise. Last I saw there were still six locations. I remember her dad telling me that he used to pour draft beer and hand out baskets full of tacos. “The taco business has been very good to me,” he said. There were French wines he was fond of that he couldn’t get in America, so he took his some of his taco proceeds and got an importers license. His daughter saw that license as a business, and she made it sing.

She asked me what my favorite wines were. That’s a tough question. I remember having a taste of a mid-90s Colgin and being told that I just drank $200 in that sip alone. No matter what I thought before I drank that scant bit the dollar amount certainly clouded my opinion. Chateau de Mareuil-Sur-Ay may not be the greatest champagne, but it is to me. My wife and I toasted our engagement with the stuff. That’ll influence your opinion. When Jose Galante was with Catena Zapata I was amazed. But I inferred that she wasn’t asking me about a specific wine. She wanted a range.

I said I like Pinot Noir and Pinot Blanc. I nailed it insofar as what she was wanting to hear. She went on about how those are food pairing wines and since I had a fine dining background, I was hired. All that was left was for me to demonstrate that I like people and restaurants, but I was a shitty salesman. That last bit unfolded over the next year. I can be full of it, as a salesman needs to be, but I can’t be full of it in a targeted way, as a salesman really needs be.

I recently attended a wine tasting advertised as “Wines of Oregon.” It was pretty fantastic. As you might imagine, there were all manner of good to great pinot noirs, ditto pinot gris and pinot grigio if we’re still pretending there’s a difference, a really bad pinot blanc, and so many delicious roses. The sparklings kinda bored me. Still, I was able to try about forty of the hundred plus wines on display and it was wonderful.

I kept thinking about that meeting in that tavern with the interviewer. We hit it off talking about wines and regions and food pairings, but I screwed one thing up. I pronounced Willamette, the famous Oregon wine region, as “will-a-met” rather than as “will-ah-met” with the stress on the middle syllable. She told me “Nope.” “It’s Willamette, Dammit.” Emphasizing the rhyme.

She told me that in the tavern run by my Mephistophelian friend on that first day. I’ve worked years with wine since. It was life changing but at the time I’d have said it was pivotal.

My mother died on Halloween, 2008. Whatever members of the family are convenable attend mass at the downtown cathedral on the anniversary, and then we have a late lunch. A few years ago, I’m caught. There is a woman a few tables away that I recognize, but as to her name or why I’d know her I can’t recall. She’s a very pretty blond woman, which gets me nowhere as to placing her, but I know I know her. Two days later it hits me.

She used to date the Mephistophelian friend. She took a semester in Glasgow and when she got back we all met at a late night place – whisky, not wine – and she told us all manner of stories about her time abroad. She’d aged. Well, but enough to obscure my memory.

The daughter of my father’s law partner walked into the bar. I barely knew her but via my mother I knew that she had just spent a year in Edinburgh, Scotland, so why not. I asked her to join us, and the Glasgow and Edinburgh conversation went on. The next thing I know the bar is empty but for me and the Edinburgh student and it’s three or so in the morning. We’ll be married twenty years this October.

You weave together how you get where you are, and there may be nothing to it or there may be a recurrence. The Mephistophelian played in all manner of bands as I mentioned, but in one he had a damn near equal as far as stage presence. This really hot chick that had a last name as her first name and could belt it out into the wee hours and then still beat the clingers at pool as the bar shuts down and I started something up. At one show we joked around, and at the next we looked askance at the people that obviously wanted to hit on her, and then one nearly glorious night we were about to head off to my apartment. On the way out the Mephistophelian leaned into my ear as I was out the door and said, “herpes.” I came up with an excuse to call things off. I found out later he was right. She had herpes. Had he not told me what he knew my life would be wildly different. My wife would never have married me. My children wouldn’t exist.

I was at this Oregon tasting and it was all wrapped together. When I hear Willamette, I think of that tavern and that interview and that singer and his girlfriend that I couldn’t place in a local eatery and how I have a wonderful wife and children and not the itchy crotch bullet he helped me dodge. My family’s names are pretty straightforward. Nothing like the singer’s brood. My wife’s name has unexpected pronunciation, but we are pretty much biblical. The singer has a kid named Buck. How badass is that? How badass is it that one person can be attached to so many meaningful decisions and not even know it?