I haven’t written since July, but I have a good excuse: on July 19 my mother — who, although she was not a connoisseur, loved wine and helped trigger my development as a student of wine — was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer. As a result I’ve spent the last five plus months fighting, caretaking, squeezing out every drop of meaning from every moment, grieving (she died on November 11), and not writing. Or at least not writing about wine.
 
Though we did, of course, drink some in her twilight hours. My mother loved chardonnay: the bigger, the butterier, the better. Normally she’d have something merely quaffable, at least to her, for lunch. (I have no idea what to do with the 1.5 liter bottles of Glen Ellen “Reserve” I cleaned out of her pantry. And I hate to think what the non-reserve tastes like, or if it even exists.) But considering the circumstances I convinced her to help empty my cellar of all my Kistler chardonnays.
 
I know some wine snobs are horrified by Kistler’s full-throttle versions of this varietal, but I have a lot of respect for their commitment to single-vineyard bottlings, that is, to wines that try – even in the midst of all the ripe fruit flavors that can come from this grape plus California’s warm climate – to express the individuality of place. Kistler’s chardonnays are not subtle. But they are always different from one vineyard to the next. And especially to Mom they were always memorable, always a “wow” wine.
 
Click here for some more of the comfort wines we drank during Mom’s last days:
 
In November I also broke out a a bottle of 1996 Chateau St. Jean “Cinq Cepages,” which won Wine of the Year from Wine Spectator magazine in 1999. When Mom found out that I was disguising myself in a different outfit every day and driving out to the winery for my one-bottle-per-person-per-lifetime allocation, she was amazed (and maybe a little alarmed) at my obsessiveness. But when she found herself in the vicinity of the winery at a retreat for her church women’s group, she rounded up 12 ladies, gave them $28 each (oh, those were the days; this year’s vintage costs $80 a bottle), had them buy Cinq Cepages, and gave me a case of the precious stuff for my birthday.
 
In general, though, my mom’s taste in wine ran toward the big, the clumsy, and the cheap. That’s okay, because that didn’t prevent her from enjoying and appreciating a truly great wine. In fact, I was with her on the fatal night I was bitten by the fine wine bug. Newly engaged, my wife and I took Mom out for dinner to a fancy steak house Mother’s Day in 1998. I was still at the stage where navigating a wine list was like playing pin the tail on the donkey. Mom told us we were not to spend a hundred dollars on bottle of wine. But I asked for the Groth Reserve 1994 – a great year in Napa and I think the last vintage of this wine made for Groth by their brilliant cellarmaster Nils Venge.
 
We told her it was not $100, and because it was $115 technically we were not committing the unforgivable sin of lying to one’s mother. It blew us all away: I don’t think any of us had realized how many different smells and flavors could come forth from a beverage. We all had an “aha” moment over how delicious wine is with food. My life changed that night in part because of the role that bottle of wine played in bringing these three women together: me, my original love, and the love of my life.
 
And even though Mom didn’t drink good wine – or even palatable in my mind – very often, she opened my eyes to its possibilities. Just the fact that she drank a glass of wine every day with lunch helped instill in me the assumption (very un-American at that time) that wine was a part of everyday life, part of sitting down at a meal with others, part of stimulating conversation. Even though my father had a problem with his drinking, because of mom I never thought of wine as a sinful, shameful, or dangerous. When I was approaching drinking age and started to ask if I too could shed the childish ways of soda pop, she (carefully, I’m sure, because of my father) gave me wine. And even though her favorite was the Glen Ellen, so she didn’t have much ground to stand on, she looked at me in horror when I said I wanted her to buy me white Riunite, a sweet, slightly effervescent, low-octane white from Italy that was being marketed on TV at the time with the jingle, “Riunite on ice. That’s nice.” I didn’t care; I loved it. And although it took me years to graduate in to something less silly, the seed was sown.
 
Mom was the sower.