San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
A lesson in grief and food.
A memoir of loss hits home but also offers comfort with its shared language of food
When I first read “Crying in H Mart,” the debut nonfiction book by musician Michelle Zauner (also known as the front woman for Japanese Breakfast), the idea of death was fairly abstract to me. In the book, she recounts the many times she’s used food and eating to center herself amid uncertain circumstances: when she struggled to meet the high expectations of her family, and when she faced the challenge of taking care of her mother while she slowly died of a terminal illness. In her grief, Zauner finds solace in making pine nut porridge, watching families shop for snacks at H Mart and digging into fresh seafood from a fish market in Busan, South Korea. Zauner follows her cravings, hoping that the trail will lead her toward closure.
Her grief was abstract to me, and then, when my grandfather got sick, I suddenly understood what she meant.
I’m writing this from one of the quieter pockets of Illinois, the place where my family ended up when they came here in 1975. It’s the kind of spot that forces you to drive everywhere; where bigbox stores open and close and become other bigbox stores, their changes as imperceptible from a distance as the slow melting of glaciers. As I grew up, I would come back to this place for baptisms and weddings; at this stage in my life, I come back more and more to say goodbye to people I love, as I am doing now with my grandfather. Even though the reason why I swim back upstream, to my birthplace, is different, how my family members and I occupy ourselves here remains the same. We eat, or we talk about eating.
At my grandparents’ house, the kitchen counter is laden with snacks. When we go out to Costco, Target and one of the few Asian grocers in town, we just buy whatever attracts our eyes: dried cherries, novelty CheezIts, Srirachaflavored almonds, vegan puddings. Between and after meals, while talking to relatives about school and work and death, I gravitate toward the counter and mindlessly flick through the bags like I’m browsing in a record store.
When we’re not snacking, we eat Vietnamese home cooking. We drizzle Maggi seasoning sauce over silken steamed rice rolls filled with gingery shrimps. We slurp up bowls of fish and pineapple broth. We refresh spring rolls in the toaster oven and eat them over squishy rice noodles.
The Rust Belt city where my grandparents live has been depressed and declining for decades, and things that are commonplace on the coasts come late, if at all. I’ve been making a game out of seeking out trendy stuff, tastes that seem so anachronistic here: cold brew coffee, veggie burgers, tacos al pastor, salted duck egg chips. They make me feel like I’m somewhere else — somewhere outside of the fuguelike, liminal space between death and notdeath.
Zauner concludes her memoir with a trip to her mother’s native South Korea, where she feasts on fried chicken, abalone, soft tofu stew and bottle after bottle of soju. It’s the first time she’s been there without a relative to translate. Still, Zauner is able to embrace the people and places that her mother knew, takes in their particular aromas and timbres. She finds something there beyond death, and leaves the reader to contemplate where that place might be for them.
Like her, I’ve walked through the places where my grandfather once lived when I took trips to the motherland as an adolescent, though I always felt like a tourist, unable to fully absorb the meaning of that journey. I had previously thought that grief was a feeling that paralyzed you in a haze of sentimentality, that it fixed you in place until you were fully able to process your loss. But now, I wonder if one of its virtues is that it irrevocably changes the way you perceive touch, smell and taste. Contrary to what I thought before, grief brings you someplace totally new.
Welcome to Wine of the Week, a series in which Chronicle wine critic Esther Mobley recommends a delicious bottle that you should be drinking right now. Last week, she highlighted the 2019 Grenache rose from Mathis. Check for a new installment online every Wednesday.
The wines of Bedrock Wine Co. are not exorbitantly priced to begin with. The Sonoma winery’s entrylevel bottling, Old Vine Zinfandel, usually sells just shy of $25.
But its Shebang label, which sells for $10 to $15 depending on the store, represents a truly jawdropping value for a wellmade California wine.
The wine is simple and straightforward, but also juicy and fresh — it smells like blueberries and cinnamon, with a zesty set of flavors that recall a summer cookout: cedar, grilled herbs, meat that’s been doused in black pepper. The current release is a kind of kitchensink blend of grapes including Zinfandel, Carignan, Alicante Bouschet, Mourvedre and Syrah.
It easily fulfills the goal that its winemaker, Morgan TwainPeterson, had when he set out to make it. “It’s just meant to be unvarnished, easy, Cote du Rhoney red wine,” he says, referring to the inexpensive wine category from southern France.
Shebang is an example of what’s often called a “second label”: a bottling where a winery can funnel portions of wine that didn’t quite make the cut for its main label. The practice is common in Bordeaux. For the producers, it’s a way to ensure that only the topquality liquid is going into their priciest bottling, and a way of doing something with the leftover wine other than selling it on the bulk market.
“As a small winery, one of the most confounding situations you can be in is having some extra barrels of wine that weren’t as good as you wanted them to be,” says TwainPeterson, who specializes in singlevineyard bottlings from historic vineyards, many of them with vines planted over 100 years ago.
That’s what initially drove TwainPeterson to make Shebang, 13 years ago — just having the odd barrel here and there that wasn’t up to snuff. He supplemented the small amount of leftover wine he had with leftovers from friends’ wineries, but eventually he was making enough wine at Bedrock that he could make Shebang with just his own castoffs. With somewhere between 8,000 and 10,000 cases produced, the wine now represents about a third of Bedrock’s annual production.
The process means that Shebang is made in the same way as the other, more expensive Bedrock wines, with almost entirely nativeyeast fermentations and aging in French oak barrels, which many California wineries consider to be the gold standard for refinedtasting wines. At this price, it’s tempting for a producer to use certain types of shortcuts, including throwing the wine into a big vat with oak chips (a cheaper way to get that oaky flavor) and adding concentrate like Mega Purple to intensify the wine’s color.
The big difference between Shebang and the other Bedrock wines is that it’s nonvintage, a combination of wines harvested in different years, which helps keep the production costs down and allows TwainPeterson to create a consistenttasting wine year after year. The current Shebang is identified as the Thirteenth Cuvee; it’s comprised of the Twelfth Cuvee with about 40% wine from 2019 blended in.
TwainPeterson is not the first to make an easydrinking, nonvintage, boldtasting California red. He admits he “poached” the idea off of Sonoma County’s Marietta Cellars, whose OldVine Red pioneered the category, and Marin winemaker Sean Thackrey with his Pleiades red. “I loved what they were doing, just making an unabashed, frank, nottoointellectual but wellmade red,” he says. He credits Marietta and Thackrey with paving the way for him, helping consumers get used to the idea of a nonvintage wine.
I love the idea, especially if it can result in better prices for good wines, a combination that can be hard to achieve in California. And I won’t be surprised if we see more nonvintage blends coming out this year, after many California wineries saw their wines from the 2020 vintage impacted by wildfire smoke. Some of them may be able to blend liquid from 2019 or even other vintages in order to get something, anything, out into the market.
Shebang’s one failure, TwainPeterson says, came a few years ago when he attempted to make a white blend. People just could not wrap their heads around it: When people buy inexpensive white wines bottled under screw cap, they want them to be ultrafresh, brandnew, barely aged. The concept of a nonvintage white, incorporating wines that were two or three years old, just couldn’t stick.
But the red will continue to be a big part of the business. “If we’re able to put out an honestly made, $14 wine, and it’s not made by Constellation or Treasury and it doesn’t have megapurple, oak chips or sweeteners,” TwainPeterson says, “well, I think that’s a win.”
The wines is available at the following Bay Area retailers: Whole Foods, K&L, Noe Valley Wine & Spirits, Wine on Piedmont, Bottle Barn, Vintage Berkeley, D&M Wine Co. and others. Please note that the price of the wine will vary from one store to another, and retailers may run out of inventory.