Revenge of the Wine Weekend, Part One

When Billy invited me as his guest last April to go on the Robert Balzer wine tasting field trip, I had a blast. The only disappointment was that Billy couldn't go as he'd landed in the hospital with an arm injury. In order to share it with him, I took notes, started Zhadi's Den and wrote about the weekend, which was a once in a lifetime experience.

Okay...maybe a twice in a lifetime experience, 'cause when the Autumn field trip rolled around, Billy once again invited me as his guest, only this time, he was gonna go too. I was delighted; as I discovered in Balzer’s wine seminars, Billy is a walking encyclopedia of wine facts (a well-written and engaging encyclopedia, not a dry, boring one), and I was looking forward to a whole new layer of experience to the trip this time around.

As it was, thanks to a nasty cold that hit three days before we left, I also had a layer of mucus between me and my sense of taste and smell the night before the trip. The runny nose had started that Tuesday while I was in Los Angeles. I drove home Wednesday, morbidly aware that I could spend the entire weekend unable to taste Thursday I spent in bed. I crawled out only to make hot toddies infused with cayenne pepper, lemon, honey, and cheap whiskey (Rebel Yell, hooyah!), pop decongestant, Airborne, and mucus thinning pills, and to steam my face over a pot of boiling water infused with cinnamon and cloves. I was determined to push the cold through my sinuses as quickly as possible, even if I had to burn it out to do so. Thursday night, however, I could barely taste the last toddy of the evening, although I could feel the cayenne pepper burning my tongue and throat on its way down.

I crawled out of bed Friday morning at 5:30, downed more cold medicine, a couple of liver pills (de rigueur for a day of wine tasting), and took the hottest shower I could stand. By the time I got to the BART station, I could kind of sort of taste my honey lemon cough drop and I felt substantially less icky than I had the day before. Maybe I’d done the impossible and almost cured the common cold. Or at least partially regained my sense of smell and taste. I was hopeful that Billy wasn’t going to end up wasting money on me. Oh well, at the very least I could fulfill my self-made role as Geisha, which meant showing a certain amount of cleavage and making sure that Billy’s glass was never empty (difficult to do at certain wineries, as I found out).

Once again I met up with the rest of the group at the Oakland Airport, where our bus, driven by the incomparable Malcolm (he’s been the driver for Robert’s tours for many years now), picked us up. And once again, the trip started out with everyone being assigned a number by Robert (always Number One) to insure that no one was left behind at any of the wineries. Although... would that be such a terrible fate? Billy was Number Two, and as his guest, I got to be Number Three instead of 15, my number on the last trip. Three above Patrick “I am not a number” McGoohan, by crikey!

Another difference this time around: Carol, the woman who coordinated the last trip, was no longer working with Robert. Instead, we had Jennifer, a good-natured, funny gal with excellent taste in champagne. She’d laid in a supply of “J” sparkling wine for the first leg of the journey (hey, that hour’s drive from Oakland to Napa is rough!). Everyone had their plastic champagne flute filled at least twice before we pulled up to our first winery of the day; Darioush.

(to be continued)