‘Acidic,’ I smile. ‘Some certainly are; in fact many I come across.’ The guy doesn’t know whether to grin – am I talking about him? He hovers his phone near the credit card machine. ‘But this one’, I say as I pour a glass, ‘is a perfect blend. Look at its body, its bigness. Its depth. It’s…’ I gaze high, move my lips, as if searching for the correct characterisation. ‘It’s the sort you want to drink immediately yet keep forever, you don’t want a glass, you want a Balthazar.’
Balthazar – he has no idea what I’m talking about, pretends he didn’t hear me over the thumping music, just presses his phone against the machine, which dings, but he doesn’t look at the small screen, doesn’t see the price of $40 appear. For one glass. Instead he takes a sip and nods. ‘You’re right,’ he says. It’s bloody beautiful.’ He peers at the label on the bottle in my hand. ‘Barolo, eh? I’ll remember that.’ He sniffs at the wine. ‘Nice, er, Bouquet. Like you. And you know your stuff…perhaps you’d like a drink with me later, teach me more about wine bottles…and the art of screwing?’ He winks. ‘Corks, I mean.’
I sigh, sneak the heavy book from beneath the bar. Flick through the alphabeticised pages until a page interests me. ‘Don’t get so clos to me, you cunt,’ I whisper.
Clos is a lovely word, though I’m not sure how to pronounce it. ‘Historically a vineyard whose boundaries were delineated by a walled enclosure,’ I read. That’s what I need in this bar – a walled enclosure. Too many attack dogs in here at this time of year.
‘You should be working not fucking reading,’ is breathed into my ear. I jump. It’s the Boss. I think quickly. ‘A customer was asking the meaning of –’ I peek at the open page, ‘– demi-sec.’
Demi-sec,’ he snarls. ‘If you don’t know the meaning of that,’ he snarls. ‘I shouldn’t have hired you.’
‘I know, of course I know,’ I say. ‘But the dumb fuck didn’t know how to pronounce it and I was just checking.’ I smile charmingly – never, ever admit you’re lying. Never, ever admit you’re no expert. Not when your job depends on it. I elbow him in the ribs. ‘Dumb fuck, geddit?’ He stares at me. ‘Dumb as in wine that has nothing to say. That’s unsatisfying.’ His eyes narrow; he nods suspiciously. ‘Just get back to work,’ he says. ‘I don’t want any customer waiting too long. Push the wines, not the fucking cocktails, or we’ll never get em all served. And you’ll be out on your ear.’
‘Earthy,’ I yell to the next patron – the queue’s growing longer, impatient. ‘You mean this wine tastes like dirt?’ she slurs. I nod. As she slurps at her glass the wine splashes her white dress, her red felt santa hat jiggling sideways. ‘Dirty wine!’ she shouts at a group in the far corner (no doubt yet another work Christmas party). They cheer. ‘That’s what we call our boss,’ she garbles and winks at me drunkenly. I have no idea what she means but wink back.
‘That’s the way I like em,’ gawps another guy with a big bony nose. ‘Full-bodied.’
‘Full-bodied,’ his mate says. ‘Weighty on the tongue?’
‘If only, mate.’ They stick out their tongues, jiggle their hips lewdly, chortle.
‘Gimme Heineken, love,’ says Big Nose. ‘Hey. You’re not too full-bodied. But you’re foxy.’
I’d read the wine guide’s F page the night before, so I pull an offended face.
‘What?’ he says. ‘That’s a compliment.’
‘If you live in the seventies,’ says his mate.
‘Next you’ll be calling me Fat or Fleshy.’
‘Hey!’ his mate says. ‘She knows her wines. Next she’ll be accusing you of being – what’s the word for unripe? Green.’
Green is the colour of my elf hat and jangly Yuletide earrings. The name of the old REM album I was playing before the Boss made me switch to Mariah Carey’s dreary Christmas album. The feeling that was eating at me when I thought everybody in this city bar, so near the courts and barristers’ chambers, would be oenophiles. But drunk and horny doth not make for a cluey vintner. And everyone here seems like that – drunk and horny. Proof in a conversation near me: ‘I was training her to give head…’ I slam the book onto the shelf below the bar and it topples, opens on H, where I read a strange term:
Head-trained. I wish I was that – free-standing, solitary, living as Virginia Woolf demanded in a room of my own. But no – with cost of rent exorbitant even in the suburbs I’m forced to live with my boyfriend and his buddies. And a law degree is far from cheap – all that HECs interest growing each year makes me Hazy. I feel Hollow. And the study required is not so Hearty. It’s fiddly, difficult, intricate.
‘Intricate, is how the sommeliers describe it,’ I blab to a thin guy who’s pretending to be an expert about the shiraz I’m pouring for his girlfriend. But he blushes, his mouth forms an o, and I feel sorry for the fucker. ‘Its flavours of wood and…and…(I notice the packets of Nobby’s on the shelf)…peanuts are subtly interwoven, as you, sir, no doubt appreciate.’ He swirls the glass like a maestro, peruses its legs, dips into it his long skinny nose, and orders a bottle. It’s deliciously expensive that shiraz, even if it’s not a jeroboam.
Jeroboam sounds like a character in a Dickens novel. Jerry Bome. Jer Abom. I run the word over my tongue as I measure gin, splash the tonic, slice lemons. And it reminds me of a case in Criminal Law last week: R v Gerarbone. Or am I making it up? I shouldn’t keep sipping at the small plastic cup of vodka I’ve hidden under the bench – drinking while working is certainly not kosher.
Kosher wine I drank at a friend’s niece’s bat mitzvah two years ago. It wasn’t too bad. The dancing, the food, the spectacle and the wine went to my head: growing up in an atheist household denied me the headiness of religious pageantry. I drank too much kosher wine that day and found myself in a car with a bunch of yarmulke-garbed surfers hooning around Bondi. One of them took me to his flat and kindly held my head as I vomited over his toilet. I stayed that night, and the next; and ended up moving in with him and his two mates. I was quite struck by Lee at first; felt particularly Loamy; but am now feeling somewhat more Lightstruck – like wet cardboard – now that I’ve spent a year in Lee’s flat.
‘Leesy’, though, is not viewed by me as a positive description of my life – the book defines this term as: ‘Aromas and flavours resulting from a wine having spent some time on its lees, typically adding rich, creamy and yeasty components to its profile’ – all I can see is the mildewed sediment accumulating in the bathroom, the bedroom, at our relationship’s edges. But perhaps this is how all relationships develop – perhaps I just need to accept that not every day is perfect, that it’s not sludge, it’s Loam. Perhaps I just need to be more Mature.
Mature is definitely not the guy yelling at me. I dropped a bottle and it hit the bar, Malbec splattering his aqua silk shirt. I’m apologising, saying we’ll pay for the dry-cleaning, the Boss is hissing that it’ll come out of my wages, and I shakily wipe the bench while tending to the next customer, who swears at me for not hearing him correctly. The room booms with loud music and screeching voices, multitudes demanding drinks press at the bar, the air is thick and musty and I can’t hear myself think, can’t breathe. I thought there’d be a sort of edification## in a place such as this – I’m a simple waitress, yes, but I’m working in noble surrounds, a respected old world, ringed by lawyers and experts who’d assist in my career. But there’s nothing here but rot.
Noble rot, you might say. But I disagree. Nothing noble here.
Old world, my arse.
Plonkers, the lot of them, who dwell darkly in the social network world. Nothing enlightened about any of these patrons. But I don’t have time to feel Piqued. And I certainly don’t have time for the bloke insisting his Pinot grigio is piqued, pricked, whatever. I take the glass from him, pour from a fresh bottle, and put the pinot grigio below beside the Oxford Companion to Wine. The other bartender, Margot, yells ‘Skol!’ after I check the Boss is out back, squat behind the bar, and sip the wine.
Quaff it, actually.
Raw and ripe, not a bad pinot at all. normally I prefer Rouge, rustic, robust like a rioja, but it’s so hot in here (despite the air con) that I need cold alcohol. My head swims a little, I grin moronically as I take orders, don’t really listen, just keep glancing at the clock, at the messages on my phone from Lee, at the neverending queue. We close soon, at midnight – I’m already preparing for the whingeing about the nanny state’s strict drinking laws – but the last hour is always the longest.
Sticky is a way to describe these hours – risky, uncertain – but they’re sadly devoid of the sweetness of a good sauterne. I’d never tried a sticky till meeting Lee – strangely for a surfer his favourite drink is Noble One; he steals it from his dad’s cabinet. For a moment I savour sipping the botrytis Semillon later with him on our little balcony; then remember that I’m back living with my parents, and Lee is a memory. It hits me hard – Christmas without him; with the hornet’s nest of my extended family. God help me – I’m soused in boredom and terror.
Terroir – a vineyard’s geographical universe. My personal terroir was crazy in Bondi with Lee and his mates, so much exposure to wind and sun, storms and the soil of grubby men. Unreliability, changing weather patterns, atmospheric pressure, lies. One Saturday evening, stood up again, I tearily slammed the flat’s front door and ubered home. Told you so, said Dad. He’s just a surfer! muttered Mum. Tomorrow it’s my job to shop for Christmas lunch – salads, ham, puddings – then to prepare the house for the fifteen people coming in two days. Wrap presents, decorate the tree. Crucify myself. If I hadn’t stormed out on my capricious boyfriend I’d be on Bondi beach on said day, devouring prawns and lobster, singing and dancing and sculling beer and champagne (and perhaps, perhaps Noble One) and feeling free, free, free. Now I’ll be enslaved in a double-brick house with a ratpack of kids and oldies and chores. I’m feeling so sorry for myself I hardly hear the drink requests, robotically unscrew bottles and mix aperol spritzes and mango margueritas etc etc etc.
I’m jolted out of misery when a man with thick hair and blue eyes asks for a botrytis Semillon. ‘Will this do?’ I ask him and show him a bottle. ‘Tokay by me,’ he grins. (Wit! Wit! This isn’t the end of the earth!) ‘But do you have any De Bortoli?’ My heart flutters. I realise my ullage is possibly half-full – not half-empty.
(Ullage – the space between the wine and the top of a wine bottle.)
Velvety is the sensation between my legs as I hand him the semillon and four glasses and as his expensive suit brushes my wrist, he winks an indigo eye. I smile my most Vanilla smile, my lips plump, praying that his three companions are workmates only. He hesitates as if to say something, when my name is yelled.
‘Wanda!’ a Woody voice from the bar’s dark doorway cries. Blue Eyes shrugs, deftly balancing the glasses and bottle as he moves away. My heart sinks. (Maybe my ullage is half-empty.) Lee shoves through the jostling clientele and cries my name again. ‘Would you like a glass of wine, sir?’ I whine. He grabs the bar, breathing sporadically, his chin unshaved, his eyes streaked red. ‘Come back to me. Please! It’s no fun without you. I mean it. And Xmas on the beach just won’t be the same if you’re gone.’
Xmas. Not a mistake here – it’s spelt this way because the X is the Cross. The cross of lies and deceit Lee expects me to bear if I stay with him, even just for one day. I’m tempted to tell him to fuck off, to go back to his mates and his surfboard but instead I don’t. I stare at his mess of sun-blond hair, his tanned chest beneath his tee.
Yield is what I consider. Because I’m only twenty-one, I won’t be able to endure my annoying relatives for even one day, I’m tired of my parents, and it’s hard not to give Lee one more chance (and yes, regret it I probably will).
It’s time to call ‘last drinks’. If I tell him to go the room will be empty soon, I’ll have to clear away the glasses and bottles and detritus, count my tips, get my phone and my handbag – and then what?
Zero.
So I say yes, yes, yes! And look forward to a zing from the Zinfandel Lee is buying.
Photo by Yifeng Lu on Unsplash
