Poetry of the Wine Label

Far too many wine labels are full of purple prose. You know the stuff, rolling hillsides kissed with abundant sunshine, grapes crushed by the calloused hands of a conscientious winemaker. Or the back label telling you what kind of toasted bread you should taste on the finish or what kind of sauce you should drizzle on your seared scallop pairing. 

But as an avid reader, writer and wine-drinker, I appreciate when producers take a thoughtful approach to placing words on the bottle. I admit calling wine label language poetry might be a stretch. Writing on a wine bottle is, after all, a pitch for a product. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be good. Wine is emotive, and sipping a glass of wine encourages us to analyze it, and enjoy it, through language. In this era of instant communication through so many different media, the wine bottle itself is often the most intimate line of contact between producer and consumer. And some producers make the most of that opportunity.

Back in September, I enjoyed a 2010 Dundee Hills Pinot Noir from Willamette Valley’s Sokol Blosser. These folks combined a description of the vineyards with a declaration of their wine philosophy and a restrained tasting note. And they organized the label language in a manner that could be called poetic:

A nice mix of rain and sun. Warm breezes. Fog.
The fruits of sustainable farming. 16 months in
French oak. Flavors of black cherry, licorice, and
Blackberry. Smooth tannins. Deep affection.

When it comes to creative wine label language, sometimes less is more. I’m often wary of back labels with an essay’s worth of words. There seems to be a correlation between the shittiness of a wine and the length to which the label waxes about its deliciousness. One of my favorite examples of wine label writing is also one of the shortest. 

Last year I enjoyed a 2000 Bien Nacido Vineyard Pinot Noir from Lane Tanner. This 13-year-old Pinot was full of spice and pickle notes on a tangy, medium-bodied frame. Mature for sure, but still lively. After a sip or two, pleased with my selection, I checked the back label. It read, simply: “This wine is a very smart choice.” Indeed it was. 

Cinquain Cellars of Paso Robles embraces the wine label as a medium for creative writing. The winery is named for a short poetic form which consists of five lines of two, four, six, eight and two syllables apiece. The husband-wife team behind this outfit, David and Beth Nagengast, chose the following cinquain to sum up their wine vision:

Planted,
pruned, picked, and pressed,
all by hand, on our land,
we share our art form and passion,
with you.

Alliterative, concise, it’s not profound, but I like it. David and Beth also solicit poems from their customers every year, and they use the best on Cinquain’s wine labels. Here’s one from their 2011 Hames Vineyard Petite Sirah from Monterey County.

The grapes
Pour their story
Speaking in lusty notes
With a voice of velvet pleasure
Savor

Winemaker Bill Frick, of Frick Winery in Sonoma’s Dry Creek Valley, has been writing poems on his wine labels since 1977. “I prefer an abstract way of describing wine,” Frick told RW&W. “Every one of my wines and vintages has its own unique poem. The inspiration for the words comes from the character of the wine, the scenes, ideas and what is happening here around the vineyard and winery.” Here are some of my favorites…

1985 Pinot Noir
Red velvet, blue beard, old leather satchel full
of wild mushrooms and straw.
The rain starts but the cave is near. 

1985 Napa Grenache  
Grin when you say Grenache.
A serious jester juggles red jelly beans. 

1993 Syrah
the mountain is so close
you can’t see it

“Many people don’t notice the poem,” Frick says. “Those who do are enthusiastic and want to read more bottles. Some are not sure and ask, ‘What does this mean?’ Sometimes customers remember a specific wine only by the poem.”

Frick’s Facebook posts are also poetic in nature, while providing basic information about the producer.

I spied the Frick tasting house through leafless brush.
A bright winter day. No one was there because it’s Tuesday.
Frick Tasting House open weekends 12-4:30.

Here’s another one, a clever Rhone-themed poem:

Winegrapes as verbs…
To syrah downtown is my wish.
Rainy days make me counoise.
The best place to viognier is in a box seat.
I carignane when I see a sad movie.
She will cinsaut when the sun sets.
Every time I mourvèdre I think of the you.
I grenache when the news comes on.

Environmental science writer William L. Fox has a passion for soil and terroir, which led him to write wine labels for some Oregon winemakers. As author of many nonfiction books, 15 collections of poetry and the former editor of the West Coast Poetry Review, the guy knows how to turn a phrase. But when he looks at a wine label, Fox doesn’t want to see flowery tasting notes. He wants to get a sense of the place. “I’m not interested in someone telling me what they think the wine tastes like, but rather the elements out of which it comes,” he told RW&W.

In a 2011 interview with Edible Geography, Fox described what he aimed for when writing up a wine label: “You could combine a Weather Channel report with a USGS geologist’s field report with a geomorphologist’s soil analysis, and you still wouldn’t quite have it.” Sure the wine label presents a challenging medium, but when it’s done right, Fox says wine label writing can have a powerful impact on the reader. “I do still go to the store and read the back labels. I chortle sometimes, and other times I’m in awe,” he told Edible Geography. “I’m the same way with books, as an author. That’s what a wine label is — a small book.”

Of course, the language on the label matters little if the juice doesn’t back it up. If the wine sucks, I don’t care if you put an unpublished Bukowski poem on the label, I’m not going to be happy. But if the wine tastes good and expresses a sense of place, well-chosen words can make the experience even more rewarding.

Cheers!

The Blurry Lines Between Fact and Fiction

A review of  "Lenz" Georg Büchner, translated by Richard Sieburth

Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz (1751-1792) was a complicated man. Perhaps the best way to capture the life and work of this poet, playwright, schizophrenic and visionary is through an equally complicated literary work. Richard Sieburth has put together such a masterpiece, in his new translation of Georg Büchner's biographical novella “Lenz.” 

This was my first time reading anything about Lenz, and my first experience with Büchner’s work. And I’m glad I read this edition, because the different parts of this book combine to form a unique whole. The book is composed of “Lenz” the novella, the journals of an Alsatian priest who looked after Lenz, and Goethe’s impressions of Lenz. These individual pieces offer, as the translator says in his afterword, “something like a cubist portrait painted from several perspectives at once.”

Büchner’s novella is simply impeccable. The piece is decades ahead of its time, providing perhaps the first widely-read work of fiction seeped in the perspective of someone with mental illness. The book is a third-person view into the mind of insanity. It's startling, moving and wonderfully poetic. Presented in the original German on one side of the page and English in the other, "Lenz" really is a literary experience to remember.

After “Lenz” the novella, the book moves on to the real-life journals of Johann Oberlin, a priest in Alsace who takes Lenz in while he is facing serious mental problems. It essentially acts as a factual recounting of Büchner’s fictional work, adding an entirely new perspective to the novella. In his collection of journal entries, titled “Mr. L.,” Oberlin analyzes the weeks he spent looking over Lenz. Oberlin describes Lenz’s “fits of melancholy,” which Büchner so eloquently writes of in his novella. After a suicide attempt in which Lenz jumps out of a window, Oberlin becomes overwhelmed with Lenz's mental and emotional state. He tells Lenz that, “things have gone on long enough now, now you must be watched.”

The end of the book contains a lot of Büchner’s own thoughts on Lenz, as well as his thoughts on poetry, politics and psychology. Büchner, like Lenz, believed in the raw power of poetry and prose to address the complexities of the human situation. “The dramatic poet is, to my eyes, nothing but a writer of history, but he is superior to the latter in that he recreates history for a second time for us and transports us immediately into the life of an era instead of giving a dry account of it…” Büchner uses his fiction not as an end in itself, but as a means toward understanding history, and subsequently, understanding human consciousness.

In the translator’s afterword, it’s very interesting to read how Georg Büchner’s mental state mirrored Lenz’s. Buchner was studying at the University of Giessen, and wrote about how much he hated the city: “everywhere a hollow mediocrity; I can’t get used to this landscape, and the city is abominable…” He later writes: “Every night I pray to the hangman’s rope.” A short-lived left-wing agitator who died at 24, Büchner's life was as chaotic, if not more so, than Lenz's.

As the translator explains in the afterword, “Lenz” the novella isn’t only inspired by events, it actually is a sort of nonfiction. About one-eighth of the text is lifted directly from Oberlin’s journals. This blending of fiction and nonfiction is masterfully done, and it also fits with the subject matter. As the translator says, “Far from merely constituting a covert act of plagiarism, Buchner’s strategy of quotation is in fact a brilliant (post-)modernist experiment in intertextuality, for it allows him to incorporate bits and pieces of documentary ‘fact’ as design elements in the larger collage structure of his fiction.” And isn’t that, in essence, what all great fiction writers do to some degree or another?

If you’re interested at all in German literature, mental health and the blending of different literary traditions and genres, this new translation of “Lenz” is for you. If you’re going to read it at all, read this edition. It’s a complex work of art, one that I devoured with glee.

And, hey, it appears to be free for Kindles on http://www.amazon.com/.

Tattoos - A Poem

“Tattoos” — Poem published in BloodLotus: An Online Literary Journal, August, 2011.

http://www.bloodlotusjournal.com/2011/08/bl-21.html

Blood Lotus is a great lit journal, and I'm thrilled they published this poem. I've pasted it below, but be sure to check out the journal because these people are doing great things with poetry and prose. Cheers!

Tattoos

a bright blue celtic cross

tattooed on my forearm

the first one, a dare

proud, green vines and

grapes etched into my leg

i thought i was finished

i fell down again, ended up

with a deck of cards on my hip

a salute to the will of chance

i almost lost my life, wound

up with nothing but a body

my wrist now says: vive la liberte

and a broken bone runs

across my arm, that one

just looked really cool

© Isaac James Baker

A Poem for a Philadelphia Friend

A Philadelphia Night

I showed up on your doorstep
loaded down with freedom, wine
and half a pack of cigarettes.
You invited me into your home,
gave me a drink and a listen.
To this day I remember it all:
the kitten kneading the couch,
smoke rising from the ashtray,
the smoothe taste of good gin.
You told me about Portofino,
where truffles prefer to grow,
how to hotwire a car in seconds.
I told you about Social Distortion,
where to catch the big waves,
how to fight dirty when needed.
We stayed up until dawn
betting on when the moon
would disappear over the rooftops.
It was a good night, and the sun
rose early on Philadelphia.

 

(c) Isaac James Baker
August 2011
Washington, DC

For discussion on this poem, visit: http://www.fledglingarts.org/content/philadelphia-night#comment-3659

In Memory of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

I first read “Slaughterhouse Five” when I was at boarding school in Germany, and the book had a profound impact on me. It started me on a quest to read every novel, every short story and every essay he ever wrote. Vonnegut’s work gives me hope, it makes me laugh. It’s bold yet beautiful, simple yet complex, smart yet accessible to anyone with an open mind. It was while reading Kurt Vonnegut’s novels that I realized I wanted to write my own.

So it was quite a thing when I first met him at a Kinko’s in Midtown Manhattan.

This was 2005, and I was working twelve-hour shifts on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays to pay my way through college. It was almost midnight when he stumbled in. I thought I was seeing things but, at the same time, it was so clearly him. He was just so real. He stank of cigarettes and coffee. I walked up to him and offered to help. He told me he wanted 10 copies of some poems that he was working on. I made him 11 and asked him to sign the last one for me. He did, and scribbled a few pictures here and there.

I told him I was his clichéd “biggest fan.” He replied: “I hope you’re a Republican.” I laughed my ass off. We talked about politics and women and the generalized chaos that was the Bush II years. He spoke like he was writing a novel with his words.

This became a routine over the next several months. Each time Vonnegut came in, he walked right up to me. I never let any of my coworkers help him; they knew when Vonnegut came in that I had to drop whatever I was working on. I was a good copy boy and I dressed up his work in black leather backing, clear covers and black coils. He liked them that way, but he would ask for a velo bind every once in a while, just to mix it up. He always thanked me.

I left the Kinko’s shifts to take a job with a daily newspaper in Maryland. I moved away before I was able to say goodbye. Before I was able to work up the courage to ask him out for coffee. He was old and he seemed to like his personal space and privacy. But late at night or early in the morning or on rainy Sunday afternoons, he would come into the store, shake my hand and crack jokes. It was a life-changing experience for the artist in me.

I teared up when I read his obituary in the New York Times. Then I cracked a beer, grabbed my notebook and sat down on my front porch. I wrote this poem in his honor. I’ve been trying to get it published since 2007, but to no avail. Oh well. At least I still have all those poems and essays, some of which were published only after his death.

So, enjoy. (And, by the way, if anyone wants to publish this poem, post a comment!)


So it goes...

The scent of stale cigarettes
wafted through the store
when he waddled in.
Pall Malls, to be exact. Unfiltered.
“These things were supposed to have
killed me
by now,” Vonnegut said.
“I’m gonna sue.”
He threw some wrinkled pages,
those jagged, silky poems,
on the counter
and asked for 10 copies. He let me make
another one
for me, his biggest fan.
He penned a squiggly face on the page
and scribbled what I guessed was his name.
Looked like chaos to me.
“Thanks, kid.”
From then on, I didn’t mind
going to work on Saturdays.
He’d come in
from time to time.
I’d follow his every word,
waiting for some profundity to come
spilling out.
It was usually just Pall Mall breath
and jokes.
Good jokes.
But I left Manhattan. He didn’t.
He told jokes. I didn’t hear them.
He fell and cracked his noggin yesterday.
What a hilarious way
to die.
As his brain was swelling,
I’ll bet he was
chuckling.
As he’d say,
“So it goes …”

(c) Isaac James Baker
2007 - Westminster, Maryland

Poem: The Best Thing You Can Do

Here's a new poem I'm proud enough of to put somewhere else besides my desk.

the best thing you can do
in life is refuse
to live in fear
hit it hard
stop
to watch the cascade
serve the top shelf stuff
to friends and strangers alike
and hope
tomorrow
comes as planned
at least that's the best
i can do

-Isaac James Baker
May 2011
Washington, DC