tasting notes

I was forty-four last spring when I made an ass of myself at a gallery opening in Oakland, and I will state upfront that I knew I was doing it the whole time. I'm a winemaker, Napa, small label, mostly Petite Sirah, and I don't know anything about art. I went to the opening because a restaurant client dragged me, and I stood there with a warm glass of something cheap in my hand feeling exactly like I feel at those parties, like a fraud in a good jacket. Then I turned a corner and there was the Caravaggio, the one she had restored, and I swear I forgot how to breathe for a second.

There was a little placard, and the placard said the restoration had been done by Elle Fontaine of the Bellagio Atelier, and I stood in front of that painting for maybe forty minutes. People gave me room. I think they thought I was having a moment, and I was, honestly. The light in that room hits the saint's face at an angle, and the shadow on his throat does this thing, this slow fall off into dark, and it reminded me of the way the first light comes over the eastern ridge at my vineyard in October. I can't explain it better than that, even now, and I've tried.

I found out later that Elle is forty-two, that she's been restoring paintings since she was twenty-seven, that people in her world are a little scared of her because she says exactly what she thinks. I didn't know any of that that night. All I knew was that I'd been in a wine-tasting seminar once, back when I was twenty-three, and there was a woman in the second row who laughed loud at everything, and I have always suspected, without any proof, that it was her. I never spoke to her. I was the loud guy in the back row who argued about oak chips, and she was out of my league by any measure I understood.

So I wrote her a letter. An actual letter, on paper, because email felt wrong for what I had to say. I started it four times. I kept a bottle of my own '19 Sirah open on the desk and I drank most of it, which I don't recommend for letter writing, and by the second page I had stopped trying to sound educated and just told her the truth. I told her I'm a fraud at gallery openings. I told her I don't know the words, chiaroscuro or whatever, and I'm not going to fake them. And I told her about the light, how it hits her restoration, how the shadow falls off that throat like tannin falling off at the finish, long and slow, and how I stood there like an idiot until a guard asked me if I was okay.

I mailed it on a Tuesday and then felt sick about it for a week. You don't send a stranger a letter like that. But I did, and then a typed page came back, one single page, the kind of thing you can tell was typed on an actual typewriter because the ink is uneven and there's a letter overstruck somewhere in the second paragraph.

Mr. Mack, it said. Your letter is poetic bullshit, which I mean as a compliment, mostly. Tannin structure as brushwork is the kind of thing people say to me at parties when they want something. But you said the guard had to check on you, and frauds don't get caught standing still for forty minutes. So here's your dare. Tell me about the underpainting. What do you think is under the surface of that saint, and how would you know? Don't look anything up. If you quote a textbook I will know and I will stop answering.

I read it maybe nine times. Poetic bullshit. I laughed out loud in my office, alone, surrounded by fermentation logs and bottles I keep for no good reason, and I thought, well, she's got my number and she's also daring me, and nobody has dared me about anything in about fifteen years.

I didn't write back. I dictated. I stood in my cluttered office with the door shut and I recorded a voice memo on my phone, eight minutes of me just talking, rough and unpolished, no notes, the way I talk about wine at a barrel tasting when I stop caring who's listening. I talked about the shadows in that painting the way I'd talk about the shade side of a hillside block. I talked about how the dark isn't empty, it's holding something, the way a deep colored wine holds flavor you can't taste until the wine opens up. And somewhere around minute six I told her the truth again, because that's what she kept earning from me, that I stood in front of her work and got hard, standing right there in a public room, forty-four years old, and I'm telling you this because you asked what I feel and that's part of it.

Then I sat with my thumb over the send button for a long time. A long, dumb time. Then I sent it.

Her reply was a text, which surprised me, a photo of a canvas under raking light, cracks running through old paint like a dried creek bed, and one line under it. What does this need? Fix it with words.

I sat there looking at that crack and I knew it. I knew it in my hands, in my shoulders, because I have stood over split oak barrels and I have heard them go. I wrote her back two pages, the longest thing I've written since school, and here is the part I still like best.

A crack in paint and a split in a barrel stave start the same way, I told her. Something flexes too long in one direction. Wood has grain and paint has layers and both of them remember every dry season they ever survived, and one day the memory wins. You don't fix it by covering it. You find where the stress lives, you give it somewhere to go, you work with the grain or you lose. A cooper can sometimes close a stave and the barrel holds wine again for thirty years, and I would bet, and I told her I'd bet, that she does the same thing, that she coaxes the canvas to remember it was once whole instead of forcing it, and that's why her Caravaggio looked alive instead of patched.

Then I asked for the thing I'd been chewing on for two weeks. I asked if I could come watch her work. Not touch anything, not talk, just sit in that studio with the vaulted ceilings and the skylights and see how her hands move, because I watch hands for a living, basically, and I thought hers would be worth watching.

She wrote back the next day, and this is what it said. Fine. Thursdays are long days, come at two, wear socks without holes, and if you say the word tannin in my studio I will spray you with the varnish hose. I have a couch you can sit on and stay quiet on. Bring the wine you keep bragging about.

I wore the good socks. I brought two bottles. I drove over the hills to Oakland with my heart pounding the whole way, and I sat on a stool under a skylight and watched Elle lift a swab the size of an eyelash off a canvas older than both of us put together, and I didn't say tannin even once, which if you knew me would tell you everything about how hard I was trying.

She glanced over her shoulder at me after about twenty minutes and said, "You're quieter than your letters."

"I'm saving it up," I told her, and she snorted and went back to the swab, and I settled in like I could stay there for years.

She wrote back Tuesday, typed again, formal as a contract, and I read it three times before I believed any of it. She said yes. She said I could come back, not Thursdays but Saturdays, her long private sessions when nobody else is in the building. And then she laid down rules, numbered and everything, like she'd been drafting them in her head since I left.

Rule one, no talking. Rule two, no touching anything, and she meant anything, not the canvases, not the tools, not her. Rule three, I sat in the corner on a stool she would provide, like furniture, and furniture doesn't comment, doesn't clear its throat, doesn't sigh. She finished with a line that I copied onto a sticky note and stuck to my monitor for a month. If you can be quiet for four hours, she wrote, you might learn something. Your Host.

Your Host. I read that signature about forty times and grinned at my phone like an idiot both days before Saturday came.

* * *

The stool was cold, metal, and placed in the far corner near the varnish room door, and I want you to understand I sat on that thing from two until six with my hands folded like a man in church. Elle worked on a still life that afternoon, some Dutch thing with a bruised apple in it, and she had a lamp rigged up on a boom