Vintage Attraction

by Charles Blackstone

  “What do you think about all of this?” she asked.

  “I really like it here,” I said, “on this side of paradise.”

  She chuckled. “Listen to you. You’ve become F. Santorini Fitzgerald.”

  I patted my belly, which seemed poised to overhang my belt. “I’d say more like Santorini Claus.”

  “I told you not to eat so much last night.”

  “I didn’t want to be rude. And everything was so delicious.”

  “Nobody held an octopus to your head.”

  “I kind of wish somebody had.”

  After breakfast, we moved through the mall of souvenir shops. Collarless brown-and-white shaggy dogs sauntered alongside us. In front of several neighboring agencies that offered hourly, daily, and weekly rental rates on everything ambulatory from donkeys and bicycles to watercraft and SUVs, two taxis awaited. Down and down the volcano we went. We traversed the plain of Oia for two kilometers.

  In an area called Baxedes, we reached the Sigalas property. Unassuming winemaker Paris Sigalas met us at the gates and took us around. The Assyrtiko vineyards (like most of the other Greeks, Sigalas pronounced them “veen-e-guards”) were in character markedly unlike the others we’d seen. Instead of walking aisles between wire-caged vertical canopies trellised to heights nearly our own, here there lay on the ground rows upon rows of tangled vine nests. The vines had defensively wound around themselves in order to capture the moisture they needed to thrive. There were hundreds and hundreds of these baskets. They extended all the way from the edge of the road to the green side of the volcano in the distance. The vulcanized rocks in the deeply sulfuric soil crunched under shoes as we tried to find a vine coil that had the beginnings of some grapes. A leafy basket revealed a bunch of green fruit smaller than my thumbnail. I imagined its trajectory, starting out here, maturing, going through its vinification. And that resulting Assyrtiko bottle could end up anywhere in the world: on a grocery store shelf in London or an Abu Dhabi hotel room service tray; on a Union Square wine studio by-the-glass list in New York; at a Corked4Less in a Peoria, Arizona strip mall; in the refrigerator of a rural Midwestern shared apartment in which resided a young waitress with big-city sommelier dreams, working to learn as much as she could at her chain restaurant’s staff trainings and beyond.

  In an understated room of long wooden tables with plenty of light streaming in through the windows, we tasted the Sigalas ’07 Assyrtiko-Athiri first. It was a good balance of the two grape varieties. Their association yielded a crisp green-apple flavor, with very light minerality. The ’06 vintage that followed was a little sweeter, and somewhat more aromatic. Next they poured us a vertical of Sigalas Santorini, which was one-hundred percent Assyrtiko. This was the same wine we had with the octopus risotto last night. The 2006, Izzy said, would go well with a lobster roll.

  The ’03, when it came, was too cold. The colder the wine, the less of its components and aromatics could be detected by tasting. Temperature was a common problem with white wine served in the United States, not just with reds. As the 2000, an appreciably darker gold from the additional years of oxidation, warmed, the nose began to resemble a gas station. Dick grimaced and pushed aside his glass, but I found the note intriguing.

  “Petrol,” Izzy told the balkers on the evaluating panel. “I know it’s a little weird, if you’re not used to it.”

  “And people buy that?” Barry asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” she replied. “Wine geeks love it. The scent actually gets stronger as the wine ages.” She swirled and sniffed her pour again. “This varietal reminds me so much of Riesling.”

  “It must be an acquired taste,” Dick said. “But I’ll trust the sommelier.”

  Izzy smiled for the room and pressed her hand against my leg.

  At the end of the line came the Sigalas Apiliotis. It was made completely using Mandilaria, a grape variety we hadn’t yet encountered. The 2004 vintage tasted like maraschino cherries, acidic but sweet. “Welch’s grape juice,” Dick said. He seemed, more and more, to find his tasting voice in the final bottle or two we were shown at each winery.

  “Cherry Heering,” Izzy said. “The Danish liqueur.”

  “‘The lady doth protest too much, me thinks,’” Dick said. “I’m kidding. You got it.” She laughed, and they pantomimed high-fiving each other across the room.

  “Nice work,” I said. I patted her knee. “I bought a bottle of that stuff on a dare in grad school. I think I might still have it. There was a war over whether or not it was pronounced ‘hearing’ or ‘herring,’ which went on for two semesters.”

  “This is a crazy wine,” she said.

  Izzy’s cheeks were rosy with alcohol, her eyes big. She never failed to get a charge out of having a crowd like this, with their rapt gazes and unselfconscious murmurs of approbation. They really, truly, cared about everything she had to say, and wanted to listen, to learn from her. Just as I always had. And I liked seeing her happy.

  A Bob Dylan song started playing on a shelf stereo behind the wine bar while we gathered our things. “You say you’re looking for someone / Never weak but always strong / To protect you an’ defend you / Whether you are right or wrong.” The marketer said Mr. Sigalas was a big fan.

  We reconvened, after lunch and a nap at the hotel, for a short trip to Gaia, a boutique winery also on Santorini. The sparse facility was housed in a converted tomato-canning factory that resembled a parking garage or remote book warehouse. There was a small tasting room in the center of it that was lit by dim fluorescents overhead. Candles were on the easeled old barn door that served as a table. Their small but elegant portfolio didn’t take long to get through. At the end, Leon, the enologist and co-winemaker, drove us into town for dinner. The empty restaurant had plates displayed on the wall above the window to the open kitchen and shelves of local gourmet products decorating the dining room of green tables and chairs. Eleven familiar and unfamiliar dishes Leon had ordered ahead arrived in rapid succession. I filled up before many of them made it to our end.

  Izzy, too, it appeared, had begun to feel the deleterious effects of our furious consumption. I poured her a glass of Thalassitis, which she didn’t drink. She sipped bottled water and ate some of the fava puree on a slice of baguette but little else. I ended up finishing the ladder of octopus and island of taramosolata and dismantling the “meet pastie” statue that remained on her plate.

  “Are you stuffed?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” she replied absently. She was looking at something in her lap that was shining a digital light on her expropriated eyes. Damn it, I thought, Pacer Rosengrant got to her again. Had he informed her of, or had she deduced independently, the text “she” sent? It had been days since she’d even picked up her BlackBerry. I’d been hoping she’d left it in her suitcase and stopped caring about it.

  “What are you reading?” I asked.

  “Just e-mail.”

  “Anything good?”

  “Junk.”

  “That’s one thing I haven’t missed too much since we’ve been away.”

  She smiled at me tightly. She pressed her free hand against my knee and patted it several times.

  Over dessert and espressos, I offered her a spoon of my panna cotta. She shook her head. She twirled her fork aimlessly through an untouched bowl of fettuccine with shrimp and octopus I didn’t recall having been passed. She still looked preoccupied, disengaged. I stared at the circumference of the ceramic and its flecks of dark, wilted parsley.

  “What’s bothering you?” I finally asked, when we were back at the hotel.

  She let out a long sigh. “This e-mail I got.”

  I didn’t want to hear the name I was almost certain she was going to enounce. I gritted my teeth, squinted my eyes, and stepped across the living room and into the bathroom to read the sign about towel service.

  Izzy’s next words were there unintellig
ible to me. I returned to her and asked her to repeat what she’d said.

  She was now logged onto WiFi from my MacBook. On the desk, her BlackBerry lay on its face. “It’s from Chef Dominique’s lawyer.”

  “What does he want?”

  “For me to call him. I can’t believe it. I think I’m getting sued.”

  “Izzy,” I said. I sat down on the dusty rattan-encased couch. “He can’t sue you. He fired you. It’s not like you quit.”

  “Maybe he’s pressing charges about the voided wine.”

  “Do you really think somebody as cheap as he is would want to spend thousands of dollars to reclaim that little?”

  Her eyes were glassy, her face suddenly pale. She let the computer screen hypnotize her, as though she were alone in the room.

  “Izzy,” I said. “Izzy,” I repeated. “Izzy!”

  “What?” she snapped.

  “Talk to me. Don’t talk to the fucking computer.”

  She shook her head. “Okay, okay. Look, I’m fucking worried. Is it too late to call?” It was ten thirty. “Twenty-two minus eight is what?”

  I was too exhausted to compute. “Why don’t you e-mail now and ask him what’s going on?”

  “You’re right. That’s a good idea. I’ll just say I’m out of the country, and with the time difference—”

  “Yeah, yeah. There’s nothing he has to tell you that he can’t tell you in an e-mail.”

  “You’re right. You’re right. You’re right,” she said, fingers assailing keys in a touch-type fury.

  Friday, March 28

  Athens

  Izzy kept her head cemented to the taxi window and her eyes shut the following morning. She had slept poorly and eaten little of the cereal and yogurt she took from the buffet. It was silent in the car, save for the intermittent soggy drag of the windshield wipers. As the driver descended the mountain, I once again kept myself entertained by snapping digital pictures. My day’s study was the exposed rock and deep volcanic layers we passed. It was difficult to make art out of the blurry exposures.

  We got to the airport for our flight to Athens, which was to be a relatively brief forty-five-minute hop, checked our luggage, and passed through an amusingly lax security screening. The rumpled attendant seemed more concerned with impressing his pretty female counterpart than he was in preventing the carry-on baggage smuggling of weaponry and contraband. Still sitting in the terminal thirty minutes after our scheduled departure, amid a growing sense of travel futility, we watched rain swallow up the sun and envelop the island in gray, wet darkness. In contrast to the labyrinth of deceptive maneuvers that the American airlines went through to stave off any potential traveler uprising and refund demands by keeping passengers uninformed of the bad news for hours, the flight to Athens, a voice over the loudspeaker announced in Greek then, quite indifferently, was canceled.

  For the first time I could remember since being in Greece, we were without a plan. “It never rains in Santorini,” George said. He shook his head as though dumbstruck and looked about the terminal. The displaced Greeks surrounding us didn’t seem terrifically concerned they might not get to Athens today, just mildly annoyed that they’d gone through the hassle of checking their bags and arranging their boarding passes when they could have been smoking or off having coffee or a glass of wine someplace more convivial.

  There was talk of climbing back up the mountain, which we descended only hours ago, and returning to Oia. We could secure rooms once again at the Laokasti, have dinner, and put off trying to leave the island until tomorrow. Then George made a call and conferred in Greek. He got off the phone and shared the idea that had overtaken him: we could still get to Athens today, if we went by sea. He proclaimed, “There’s a three forty ferry departure. We’re going to the port!”

  But first we were directed into a large baggage terminal. Instead of moving along in an orderly fashion on the motorized conveyor belt, all the passengers’ checked items had been scattered around the room. “It looks like they just threw the fucking luggage down,” Izzy said. I unzipped the front pocket of my suitcase to feel for the miniature ouzo bottle Maddie had given me that I’d stashed. Not broken.

  Athens by sea was to take eight hours. Dick, reddened, visibly frazzled already by the day’s contingencies in course, lit a cigarette when we got outside. He smoked in full view of everyone, not even bothering to step away for a modicum of privacy or to preface his transgression with his usual jovial euphemistic “I need to walk the dog.” We piled into a Toyota van taxi George hailed. It took us from the airport, around the volcano, and down to the port. When we reached the dock, the taxi parked in between commercial vehicles loading cargo to be shipped off to other Greek cities and international destinations. Dick, Maddie, Barry, Izzy, and I stayed in the taxi while George ducked through the rain and into a tiny office to secure our transit. He bought us all tickets in the highest business class available, which would afford access to the VIP eating, drinking, and working sections of the ship. We also were assigned staterooms. I doubted I’d sleep, but appreciated the generous gesture George made on our behalf.

  We skittered into the ferry’s terminal and through big windows watched the Aegean for the ship to come in. The narrow room was already crowded. I recognized many passengers from the canceled flight. Most looked like refugees, as though they’d been traveling a long time, chalky faces, dirty hair, narrowed eyes. A couple of dogs roamed through and greeted the young mothers with babies and senior citizens with walkers. Local teenagers and backpacking college students wearing American university sweatshirts sat and chatted or stared at the walls or read or slept or sent text messages from the QWERTY panels of their Sidekicks.

  George distributed Dramamine ahead of boarding. It took twenty minutes to kick in, he explained. I declined the tablets when the medicine bottle came around to me.

  “I don’t get seasick,” I told Izzy.

  “How do you know? When was the last time you were on a boat?”

  An image of a summer camp cruise I took as a teenager came to mind. “A while ago. But I remember.”

  “Okay,” she said, “but I reserve the right to make fun of you when you’re leaning over the railing, Admiral.”

  On and on the ship susurrated. The sound reminded me of the constant tremble of an excited heart. It was difficult to hear much amid the vibrations beyond a battery of siren signals and ceaseless chatter in a panoply of dense, throaty languages. It was equally difficult to move around in any direction other than zigzag, because of the waves rocking against the ship and unsettling the floor. I couldn’t get used to the fluctuating gravity, unable to master throwing my weight in the opposite direction of the heave. My instincts were off. I pushed when I needed to have been pulling. I had to concentrate intently on each step to avoid colliding into anyone or his cigarette or his beer or his baggage.

  We fell into chairs in the lounge. Cinereous rain sheeted down the window beside us and hid the opaque sky.

  “This is like Master and Commander,” Izzy said.

  I asked, “Was that a movie?”

  “Yes,” she said. “It only was nominated for, like, fifty Oscars.”

  “I seen it,” Barry said. I was somewhat surprised to find he’d joined us. The last time we saw him he was negotiating through gestures with a white-capped porter the stowage of his oversize suitcase. Barry’s forehead was sweaty and he looked pale. It awakened my sympathy such that I decided to overlook his rurally permissible, but nevertheless improper, verb tense conjugation.

  A taciturn server delivered a pile of plastic menus. I was grinning when Izzy handed one to me. “I could get used to this,” I said. “It’s like a floating hotel.” She giggled and searched the wine list for an acceptable varietal. The thundering sound of the waves made it impossible to relax my clench on our context for very long. I peered out the window and saw a ship employee on the deck in an
acid-green hooded slicker wrestling with a length of intractable hose. The unrelenting downpour was drenching him. Before long, two large bottles of Perrier and the wine Izzy chose (the very floral 2007 Tsantali Athiri) showed up. The waiter brought it all on one tray. He did it and spilled nothing, not even a wobble or a flyaway cocktail napkin, an amazing feat of nautical virtuosity. The wine had me almost forgetting we were moving, that the course we took was in a lot of ways rudderless.

  Barry couldn’t eat anything. The sea was hitting him hard. He left for his stateroom to lie down. Dick and Maddie finished their sandwiches. Then they had to go to their room. I had a half turkey baguette and a section of spinach pie. I had potato chips. I slugged Athiri without fear. Izzy cautioned me, “You’re going to puke if you keep drinking.” “Nonsense,” I said. My stomach was fine. I couldn’t handle a lot of turbulence in life, but for some reason, being on the water wasn’t something that unsettled me. George, too, was fine here, but nothing could unhorse him. Izzy paced herself. She sipped her Athiri slowly. She didn’t seem interested in pushing the limits of her Dramamine. At the moment, it was keeping her insides unruffled.

  Izzy and I had more wine and chips and watched the Greek version of Extreme Makeover (here it was delicately entitled The Swan) above English subtitles on the televisions banked into a wall. It started to seem as though this ferry to Athens had been the transportation plan all along. When our waiter returned to the table to refill our Perrier glasses, George put down the Greek paper he’d found to confer with him.

  “We may have to stop in Naxos,” George said. “Because of the weather. This rain is very unusual.”

  Izzy poured the rest of the Athiri. “In case of emergency, empty glass,” she said. I laughed.

  The lounge got smokier as the night moved on. Everybody’s patience was running out. Izzy was now in a bad mood. She was annoyed about how long we’d been sequestered. She’d also been unsuccessful in her attempt to check e-mail from one of the ship’s Internet kiosks. “They not work when it is so stormy,” a nearby tobacco and phone card stand operator had tried to explain. I suggested we go check out the cabin. We lay together on one of the four available Murphy bunks. We had to press tightly against each other and intermingle limbs in order to both fit on the narrow mattress.