AMERICAN SOMM

            The world is being torn apart, as far as you can tell from twitter. In Cairo, the streets are drenched in gallons of blood, spent shell casings, and the dead. Far away from the horror in Egypt, you swerve to avoid killing a bicycle courier in the rain, and you spill painfully hot coffee on your inner thigh. You can tell it was brewed too hot, a pity considering this is Esmeralda Gesha that the roaster would be furious to know was being mistreated. You’re on your way to a big wine tasting. Perhaps it’s the coffee that’s making your heart race, but you know better.

The notion of interacting with hundreds of other wine professionals is making you feel nauseous.

            It fills you with dull panic, with a gentle hum of anxiety. You come to a stoplight and look at the beautiful flowers the city planted in the median. You note the attention to detail, right down to the crushed oyster shells that surround the flowerbed. You would never know that the landscaping company gets much of their products from overseas. The crushed oyster shells came from Sudan, but they aren’t actually oyster shells. They’re human teeth. You will never learn this truth, because you’re counting the syllables in your boilerplate answer to “Hey man how’s it going?”

            In the hotel ballroom, salespeople will grab you and enthusiastically drag you to a table full of their wine, the way a coyote might drag a mortally wounded, struggling calf. You HAVE to try this Manzanilla Pasada. This petillant Naturel Pineau D’Aunis. This Carbonic Macerated Nerello Mascalese. You will try them, and you will let them talk to you about the slope of the vineyards. They will tell you the story of the soil, the majesty of great tangled roots stretching infinitely into the earth for a drop of water, for a sense of place. They make this wine sustainably, responsibly. They let the earth guide their hand, and coo into their ear softly. When our earth mother has made physiological ripeness known to us, the vineyard workers gently pluck the grapes under cover of darkness, and gently wipe the dew away. They set only the finest clusters in ancient hand-woven baskets, gently.

            The national sales manager for a company that sells wine with cute animal names like “Wild Weasel” and “Sidewinder” will pause, choking on tears, on the beauty, the enormity of it all. You too will choke on your true feelings, and out of respect, you will not express them. The truth is you don’t care.

            The truth is that you only care about what produces results. If dumping boiling hot liquid mercury into the soil made the wine taste better you would do it. If you had to stick a dagger in a baby goat’s heart and pull it out to worship Satan at the stroke of midnight to save the grapes of champagne from the bitter frost of January, you’d do it. Bull’s blood was once used to filter particle matter out of red wine. Why stop there? We use the blood of our vineyard management team. Every year we bleed them out, and bury them, dying but still alive in the vineyard. Their weak death throes till the soil and allow for better aeration and drainage. The cycle of life is complete, and all that is left after centuries, is their teeth.

            You have terrible visions.  You have impulses that rise up inside of you, which you haven’t acted on, thanks to what is left of your self-control.

            You friend asks, Hey man, how’s it going? Great! I just came back from Barolo; a distributor paid for the entire trip and set my itinerary, because I sold three pallets of their second label, the one with the parrot on it. Anyway get this, I hired some manual laborers to help me salt the vineyards of the top five Barolo producers. Nothing will grow in those soils for a millennia! I got em good! Your friend will be speechless in horror, because they aren’t exactly sure what the top five vineyards in Barolo are. Not knowing the answer to a question is very shameful in your world.

            Are you going to take your next big test? What level are you? You answer something like Oh I’m a class C. You’re staring at something in the distance, and your friend is visibly flustered, is that a new system? Is that the new beer test? Mixology perhaps? I mean previous spirit exams were more focused on base ingredients, but is this more uh, mixing-centric? You remember a time when it all mattered to you this much. But now you are jaded and losing it, and this is where you wish you could just rip your dick off, limp and bloody, and hand it to them without an ounce of formality. And you would just cryptically mutter, mixology. Here are my mutilated genitals, mixology.

            You slither over to a table of California reds, the winemaker is telling you that this wine spent 18 months in new French oak, in house cooperage of course. You decide to act out, and you widen your eyes and almost shout THAT SOUNDS EXPENSIVE I’M PRETTY SURE I CAN’T AFFORD IT. You back away slowly, in mock horror. The winemaker is pleading with you; it gets down to 40 dollars a bottle by the glass.

            In your head, you’re burning down the biggest distributor warehouses, full of pallets of wine they’re either aggressively incentivized to sell, or small parcels of actual good wine that they didn’t know they had in stock anyway. It's not anyone's fault, this is just how it has to work you say, as you would place huge cans of gasoline strategically. You breathe deep in the ballroom and smile, imagining the smell of a burning warehouse full of wine. Picture a great spire of black smoke rising up from the warehouse. You imagine a swarm of police cruisers surrounding you in the parking lot and you greet the police with terrible news. Some of our stock has been heat damaged, check your orders carefully!

            You’re fantasizing about storming a dining room with a machete, snatching away iPad wine lists, and smashing them on the corner of tables. Hey asshole! I was reading that! I was looking at a map of Vosne-Romanee motherfucker, what gives you the right? You powerwalk towards the angry guest, and you’re gibbering apologies. What where you thinking with all this violence? Here you say, try this instead. You grab their hands and clasp them around a flashbang grenade, after suavely removing the spoon. This is a token of my appreciation. Please enjoy.

            You’re never going to get your moment of angry indulgence; you’ll never receive catharsis. Are you sure that your industry is broken? You seem to be the only one here that hasn’t moved in 30 minutes, you’re the only one flushed and sweating, with heart palpitations. What are you missing? Maybe you should become a brand ambassador for a liquor company. Maybe you should become a mercenary for KBR. Maybe you should stick your finger down your throat and vomit on the guy who is making sure everyone who comes to his table knows that this particular rose dessert wine is known as an “LPR”. Before he can say “liquid panty remover” you would grab him by his thin, fashionable tie, and vomit blood on him.

            A little girl holding an AK-47 is rummaging through the ruins of Muammar Gaddafi’s palace in Libya. She finds a bottle of 2001 chateau Pavie. Does she understand what it is? You are not there to explain to her that 2001 is drinking REALLY well right now. If you were there, you could help decant the wine (which is mostly Merlot, with a healthy dose of Cab Franc) into a decanter or a filthy broken coffee cup. You could tell her how the wine was recently upgrade from Premier Grand Cru Classe B to preimer grand cru classe A, a huge honor. Maybe she would be crying because at the age of five, she had been robbed of any semblance of childhood, the only reminder of happier days is a cookie monster flashlight duct-taped to her AK-47. You would lean in and comfort her, telling her that everyone knew Pavie was pretty much a class A, and she should feel better knowing that it is now formally recognized as such.

            None of this can happen though, because you are being slowly crippled by anxiety at this wine tasting in a large air conditioned hotel in North America.