Second Set

I'm Ida. I'm twenty-nine, and I make wine. Not the fancy corporate kind. The weird kind, the kind with sediment and attitude. Pet-nat mostly, some skin-contact stuff when the grapes cooperate.

I broke up with a guy named Oliver two years ago. He was a winemaker too. When I was twenty-seven he told me I "focused too much on the soil." I think about that a lot. Mostly on Tuesdays, which is when my brain decides to do inventory on everything wrong with me.

So Tuesday night, I'm wheeling a wooden case of rosé pet-nat through the back door of this converted warehouse out past the industrial side of Portland. Half of it is a recording studio. The other half is a tiny natural wine bar. The same landlord runs both, which explains a lot about the landlord.

The bottles clink in the case. That sound always gets me. Little glass bells.

The studio side was quiet but not empty. Through the glass door I could see a guy at the mixing board, headphones around his neck, chair turned sideways. That was Bret. I'd seen him around when dropping off cases. He was thirty-one, used to tour as a session bassist until he quit at twenty-seven, and now he did sound engineering and looked like he slept well.

He saw me and pulled the headphones off.

"Delivery for the bar," I said, through the door. "Same deal as before."

"You're late." He was grinning. "Actually no. You're early. You're the only one who shows up on time, which makes you feel late."

"Thanks. That's a compliment, right?"

"Sure."

The bar side was dim, like always on a Tuesday. Smelled like oak and fermenting grapes. The bar top is old planks and there are four stools and that's it. I wheeled the case behind the counter and cracked the lid.

One bottle had a low fill. Happens. So I poured it into a glass for myself. Quality control. Don't judge me.

Bret came through the glass door and leaned on the bar.

"Can I try that?" he asked.

"Only if you promise to say something useful. If you say 'it's crisp' I'm leaving."

He laughed. "What do you want me to say?"

"Tell me about the acid."

"Ok. The acid."

"Try harder."

I handed him the glass. Our fingers touched on the stem and he held my eyes a beat too long. Not creepy long. Just long enough that I noticed and then thought about how I noticed. Two years of nobody doing that, and it lands like a dropped tray.

He tasted. Swished. Did that thing where you suck in a little air.

"It's got a buzz to it," he said. "Like the bubbles are nervous. Is that intentional?"

"All bubbles are nervous. That is the entire method. You bottle it before it's done and it finishes in the bottle, scared."

"Scared bubbles." He looked at the glass. "I like that. It sounds like a track I mixed this morning, actually."

"Now you have my attention."

"It's a scratch track. Client session. Slow instrumental, kind of aching. I shouldn't play it, technically."

"Should implies rules. You're the one with the buttons."

He thought about that. Then he waved me through the door.

The studio had amber lights on low and this hum in the walls. Old building. He pulled up the file and hit play, then turned it down so it sat under a conversation instead of over it.

The track was a guitar and a bass, very slow. The bass note just hung there. It ached. I don't know how a frequency aches, but it did.

"Ok," I said. "That sounds like the feeling of drinking alone."

Bret turned his chair. "That's weirdly specific."

"It's a specific feeling. You drink alone and it's either sad or it's the best thing in the world and you can't tell which until later. That bass is the not knowing."

He stared at me. "You're the first delivery person to ever describe one of my mixes."

"Delivery people have interior lives, Bret. It's shocking, I know."

"I didn't mean it like that."

"I know. I'm being difficult. It's Tuesday."

He laughed and turned the track down further, almost gone. I caught him glancing at my hands. I was doing that thing where you rub your thumb across your fingers. Harvest hands. Pruning hands. They look rough and they are rough.

"You've got good hands," he said, quiet. "I can tell."

"You can tell what, exactly?"

"That they work. That they're not just, like, hands for holding a phone."

I looked at my own hands like I'd never seen them. "They smell like grapes about eight months of the year. My ex hated that."

"Your ex sounds like an idiot."

"He said I focused too much on the soil."

Bret made a face like he'd bitten a stem. "That's the dumbest criticism of a winemaker I've ever heard. What did he want you to focus on? Vibes?"

"Apparently."

"Well. The soil is the whole song, isn't it? Everything above it is just a mix of it."

I looked at him. He said it like it was obvious, which is exactly how true things get said.

"Can I put something on those monitors?" he asked. "Not a track. A question."

"Sure."

"Do you know what wine sounds like?"

"Through studio monitors?"

"Yeah. Through those." He nodded at the big speakers standing on either side of the board. "I do it at the end of long sessions. Pour a glass, hold the glass to the speaker, play a low sine wave. The whole liquid shakes. You can feel the frequencies moving in the wine. Then you drink it and the wine is, I don't know, woken up."

"That is the most pretentious thing anyone has ever said to me."

"You haven't met most people."

"I'm serious. It's extremely pretentious."

"Are you curious though?"

And that's the part where I should have said goodnight, loaded the car, gone home. Two years of Tuesdays alone taught me exactly how to leave a room at the polite moment. Instead I said:

"Yeah. Obviously."

* * *

He poured two glasses from my cracked bottle. Mine, his. He set both glasses on the board, right in front of the left monitor, and dialed in a low tone. Not loud. Like a fridge thinking.

Then he slid one glass toward me.

"Hold it near the speaker face, not on it. Two inches."

I held it. The wine in my glass started to shiver. Tiny rings on the surface. You could see the tone moving through it, this slow pulse in the liquid.

"Oh," I said. "Oh, that's"

"Yeah."

"It looks alive. It looks like it's deciding something."

"That's what I mean. It's never the same twice. Different wines dance different. This one's jumpy."

I looked at the rings in my glass. Rosé pet-nat, trembling, nervous bubbles doing exactly what I told him they do, finishing themselves in the dark.