New York - 2 October 2002

This is a very solemn occasion - well, maybe not too solemn. The Scholastics of the Middle Ages would likely have commended us to memento mori, and I am, of course counseling that we memento torqui. In my somewhat tenuous Latin, this would translate as "remember to screw" the caps off the bottles, of course, or alternatively, "remember to get twisted." I suspect that we will make excellent progress in both of these activities this afternoon.

Today's event was inspired by the very strange novel, A Rebours, sometimes translated as "Against Nature" by Joris-Karl Huysmans, published in 1884 and which deals with the perils of an extremely jaded sensibility, of connoisseurship taken to its ultimate extreme. The book is amazingly funny and creepy at the same time and I find that for me, it is almost like the I Ching. I can open it at random and find language that always seems to relate to the matter at hand. About the publication of the book itself, Huysmans wrote, "It will be the biggest fiasco of the year- but I donÕt care a damn! It will be something that nobody has ever done before, and I shall have said what I had to say." J. K, wherever you are, you the man.

The infamous passage in the book relating to the "Black Dinner" takes place when the somewhat eccentric, definitely neurotic, if not neuraesthenic anti-hero of the book, Des Esseintes, becomes temporarily impotent and sends out funeral invitations to his closest friends to commemorate this very personal calamity. All the courses served at the dinner were black or at least very somber. In the book the meal was served by naked Nubians, wearing shoes and stockings of silver cloth besprinkled with tears, a touch, IÕm afraid I am unable to replicate this evening.

There is another wonderfully appropriate passage in the book where he talks about Des EsseintesÕ collection of liquor casks which he called his "mouth-organ": "A small rod was so arranged as to connect all the spigots together and enable them all to be turned by one and the same movement, the result being that, once the apparatus was installed, it was only needful to touch a knob concealed in the paneling to open all the little conduits simultaneously and so fill with liquor the tiny cups hanging below each tap. Each liquor corresponded, so he held, in taste with the sound of a particular instrument. Dry curaçao, for instance, was like the clarinet with its shrill, velvety note; kümmel like the oboe, whose timbre is sonorous and nasal; crème de menthe and anisette like the flute, at one and the same time sweet and poignant, whining and soft. Then, to complete the orchestra, comes kirsch, blowing a wild trumpet blast; gin and whiskey, deafening the palate with their harsh outbursts of cornets and trombones; liqueur brandy, blaring with the overwhelming crash of the tuba."

You will have the opportunity this afternoon for a rare historical tasting of a range of Bonny Doon wines that are, alas, no more. (These are the ones that have black ribbons tied around them.) In some cases, these are the very last bottles of their lot, the last of the Mohicans, as it were. Some of them are still unspeakably wonderful, others just unspeakably strange. But they are all indisputably defunct, finito, hasta la bye-bye. For me it is a very poignant moment to think of the grand ambitions I have had for the various wines, imagining the dapper Le Sophiste, a bit of a dandy not unlike Des Esseintes himself, as ubiquitously present on the most refined cartes des vins worldwide, bien sur. Memento mori and memento torqui. This is a wonderful moment for us to reflect upon how brief our time is - all the more reason to be ready to take a chance, to leap to meet the unknown and mysterious, whether it be a stranger on a train or a very odd and unpronounceable pink fortified, say, Bulgarian concoction.

There is another extraordinary episode in the book, where Des Esseintes, who is a relentless experimenter with his own nervous system and its response to various sensory stimuli, decides that his living room requires a certain decorative element that will throw off light and reflection in an ever-changing manner. He buys a large tortoise and commissions a jeweler to inlay its shell with precious stones. When the work is finally completed, the exquisitely strange and beautiful creature soon perishes. It occurs to me how appropriate this image is to the current state of the modern business of wine. Modern wines especially those from the New World, are so utterly tarted up, fussed with, ameliorated, enriched and potentiated. And while these wines can be very impressive, I really wonder if we are not gradually losing our taste for "natural" wines. Even as we speak, back at the Doon, we are adding various enzymes and tannins to our wines, correcting the acidity, WeÕve found some great wood chips and weÕre spinning the alcohol out of our high test zinfandels so the wines will taste more balanced and "natural." I should mention that in the spirit of Des Esseintes, we are doing some interesting experiments in "creating terroir" (a patent impossibility and logical contradiction, by the way) by putting different sorts of stones in the bottoms of our tanks. I tell myself that in following this very perilous route, the way up is the way Doon. I tell myself that experimentation with all of these unnatural methods is somehow in the service of finding something beautiful that is true and immutable. But I suspect that I am deluding myself. In any event, read the book, if you get a chance. It is a wonderful cautionary tale. Alas not an available elective at the yeshiva.