Savoring the smallest details
Standing in the bathroom in the predawn, I smelled smoke and remembered that the North Bay was on fire. I thought about what I was smelling, imagining the particulate matter floating in through the narrow window above the sink. The vaporized remnants of wood and plastic and rubber and textiles, trees and vines and brush, houses and apartments.
Outside of my house in Glen Park, a fine layer of ash had settled on the cars parked on the street. Filtered through the haze, the sunlight painted everything in a dreamlike
palette, fainter and redder than usual. Yellow walls appeared peach. Blond hair carrot orange. It felt anxious and prophetic. In the afternoon, I had the distinct feeling that it was Christmas, or deep into winter, when the earth leans away from the sun as if to say, “Give me a minute. I need a break.”
I’ve spent the two weeks since the North Bay fires began worrying about my inlaws’ house in Santa Rosa, friends in Sebastopol, friends’ parents in Petaluma, and the many people up there who grow and cook things in the industry that I love.
I wanted to write something this week about a restaurant in Santa Rosa as a kind of gesture of solidarity, however insufficient it may be. I thought I would write about Willi’s Wine Bar. I remember lingering on the patio there with my wife one night in our mid-20s, drinking three-glass flights and trying to seem like we knew what we were talking about.
The last time I was at Willi’s was less than a year ago, when my daughter was a couple of months old, squirmy and fussy. The waitstaff was generous and accommodating and didn’t mind that we were getting up from the table every 30 seconds. Our waiter told me something I haven’t forgotten: He regretted not taking more videos of his daughter when she was a baby — just four or five minutes at a time of her playing. They had recorded all the big moments, but the unremarkable, quotidian details are the ones we tend to neglect and wish we could revisit later.
I always ordered dishes at Willi’s that I wouldn’t mess with anywhere else: pancetta mac and cheese, Moroccan lamb chops, warm spinach salad, shot glasses of soup. Being in a roadside restaurant full of enthusiastic travelers giddy from a day spent tasting wine disarmed me of any misgivings I had about the menu being too eclectic or the dishes too basic. Whenever someone asked me where to eat near Sonoma, I’d send them to Willi’s. It’s the kind of place I wish were more common in Wine Country.
I figured I was due for another visit, so I looked to see if they were open or when they might reopen, assuming the fires weren’t forcing them to close for too long. I searched online and found that Willi’s had burned down.
A week before the fires started, my mind dwelled on Vieques, the small island to the east of the main island of Puerto Rico, where I had a memorable Thanksgiving dinner at a concrete dive in the jungle called Chez Shack and spent a phantasmagorical night swimming in a bioluminescent bay. For half of the 20th century, the Navy used Vieques as a bomb-testing site. In the wake of the destruction wrought by Hurricane Irma, we’ve mostly left it to fend for itself.
Before Irma came Harvey, which tried to drown Houston, a city that mesmerized me when I visited for the first time this year. I recall with fondness every dish I ate at Underbelly and Oxheart, and the best egg tarts I’ve had in America at Eck Bakery. I tell people about the joyful service and smart cooking at Hugo’s, and the massive feeling of disappointment I experienced when I had to leave Texas before I could eat at every restaurant on Bellaire Boulevard.
I can recall images of the people I’ve met and things I’ve eaten in Mexico City and Las Vegas in the same high resolution. I’m not claiming that I have any kind of exceptional connection to these places, or a greater grasp of the pain and turmoil that their residents have experienced in recent weeks. Like a lot of people, I am overwhelmed by the increasing frequency of tragedy. There’s no breathing room between gut punches, and there are few of us remaining who can watch these natural and man-made disasters without thinking of someone or some place we know being affected. I cop to the privilege and good fortune I have to be safe and sound. In fact, I’ve spent my life shielded from the true cost of things I care about. Violence, climate change, health care, gun control, poverty and social inequality have always been matters that moved me without impacting me.
Putting a face to tragedy makes it all the more difficult to stomach. But it can also be a strategy for healing.
An acquaintance of mine in the coffee industry comes from a coffee-growing country that endured one of the 20th century’s deadliest genocides. He tells me that he chose his line of work for a very specific reason: to alleviate poverty in places like the one he comes from. Not only economic poverty, but what he calls “impoverishment of the human spirit and human soul.” The root cause of the genocide, he says, was not ethnic or religious conflict. It was a pervasive lack of identity, of self-worth.
He says that coffee farmers who are accustomed to throwing their fruit into a big pile to be shipped off to a commodity roaster get very little money and no satisfaction from the transaction. But when value is placed on how and where a product is grown — and when measures are established to ensure that those facts are not misrepresented — the farmer gets more out of it, both in terms of money and self-regard. I’m not sure whether he’s right. I don’t know if coffee drinker obsessiveness is quite so easily transferred to a sense of self. But I have to believe that caring about where something was grown is better than not caring.
This was on my mind the other night at Ordinaire, the wine bar in the Grand Lake neighborhood of Oakland. Wine is the quintessential product of place. It is almost always described in terms of where and how it grew: “These vines are planted on an east-facing hillside that sees lots of sunlight in the morning and catches the breeze from the ocean at night.” I’ve never been able to latch onto these specifics. Who can remember which way the grapes faced, or how warm it was in a given year, or the weather in Jura relative to Burgundy? I’ve always waited for the adjectives: juicy, bright, full-bodied, sticky, tart, flinty, like a cat box. (The last description was one I heard from a waiter at Gary Danko, maybe 15 years ago. I was sure that he was onto the fact that I had lied about being old enough to drink and that he was messing with me.)
But natural wine, which Ordinaire specializes in, feels especially connected to terroir. Whereas conventional wine is made by adding specific yeasts to convert the sugars in grape juice into alcohol and predictable flavor compounds, natural wine is fermented by microbes that live on the fruit, the equipment, and the people making the wine. Thus, how the wine turns out depends not only on terroir that we can see and feel, but microbial terroir as well. Natural winemakers also tend to be fond of uncommon approaches — varying degrees of skin-on fermentation, unusual varietals, intentional oxidation — leading to white wines that can be ripe and savory, reds that are almost effervescent. It’s all pretty thrilling to me.
I’d never been to Ordinaire before, but felt compelled by what Chronicle wine critic Esther Mobley has written about it. I ended up going twice in a week. It reminds me of my favorite places to drink in places where natural wine has more of a foothold: Ved Stranden in Copenhagen, La Buvette in Paris, Belle’s and Bar Liberty in Melbourne, Winestand Waltz in Tokyo. The first night, I BARTed to the East Bay with a colleague who has been bugging me recently to help her know more about wine. I understand the compulsion even if I disagree with the notion that I have anything to teach about wine. We can all feel out of our depth trying to correlate the names on a list or the art on a label to what the contents of the bottle will taste like. But we found the young, earnest staff at Ordinaire game to help us wade into natural wine without judgment. They told us about where the grapes were grown and by whom, what the landscape and climate are like and why it matters.
As we talked through a bottle of 2016 Caleb Leisure Sparkling Viognier — grapes from the Sierra Foothills, bottled in Glen Ellen, fermented with the skins on for a few hours, made fizzy the oldfashioned way without added sugar or yeast (pétillant naturel) — I thought about the valleys and hillsides on fire in the North Bay and how many of them had been mentioned by people pouring wine to indifferent drinkers. I tried to focus. The details we neglect now are the ones we wish we could revisit later.