FICTION: Excerpt from Transit of Jupiter, Chapter 2: Of Wealth and Taste
Nik’s father, Thanassis Aleksakis, had a nose that
people couldn’t forget. It was a big,
blocky Fred Flintstone-Karl Malden job: squashlike with bumps all up and down
it. His brother Tony once joked that their
dad’s nose was so big that the blackheads on the end had private caterers. As
kids, Nik and Tony used to shrink in embarrassment whenever Thanassis would
lower it into a wine glass and inhale deeply, indulgently, as he called off the
names of the fruits he detected. Didn’t
he know that by doing that, he was drawing people’s attention to that awful
thing? What was it about grown men, Nik
wondered, that let them ignore their ugliest features – their drooping man
boobs, the hair that sprouted from ears, shoulders, nipples, from their
cavernous nostrils – and get on with life as if those things didn’t matter? And
even though he was being called Nicky the Nose by kids at school, he knew that
if it ever reached Thanassis’s proportions, he’d go see a surgeon. His father,
though, seemed to live in a realm beyond embarrassment. Nik supposed there must be something to
admire about being immune to others’ judgments, but as a kid he couldn’t have
said just what it was.
Thanassis Aleksakis thrust his beak into thousands of
wine glasses, but he was forever naming wood, cherry, raspberry and, god
forbid, green pepper as the dominant aroma.
For he drank a grim Greek varietal called Xinomavro;
similar, Nik would later discover, to Italian Nebbiolos. His dad bought it in four-liter basket-woven
jugs from an Astoria importer and drank it at every meal. But he would only showboat with the wine-sniff
thing when guests brought their own wines over for dinner.
When Thanassis’s friends called him The Nose, he would
smile modestly. It wasn’t until years
later – when Nik began to appreciate wine in his own way – that he understood
the adults hadn’t been making fun of the old man, but were really complimenting
him on a skill that a young boy couldn’t appreciate.
As a boy, Nik’s nose was newly budded, round and
smooth with youthful shine, though still with the essential
Flintstone-Aleksakis blockiness. As it
grew from that nascent version of his father’s late harvest gourd,
college-bound Nik Aleksakis, perhaps more than coincidentally, became
interested in wine.
He once put it this way: if wine appreciation were
analogous to womanizing, Thanassis Aleksakis was monogamous, loyal-to-the-grave
to his big jugs of Xinomavro; Nik, on the other hand, might have been more of a
serial womanizer: knocking off the rarest and most exotic of vintages, drinking
them once and thus satisfied, forever done with them. Nik
was constantly hopping from one classic vintage to the next, “bagging” them, as
he said.
In
his spare time Nik dug through cellars, attended estate sales, he even looked
through the obituaries for mentions of wine-connoisseurship. Any lead could send him on a new quest for
the classics. Once bagged, he would check each wine off in the encyclopedic
reference tome he kept on his living room coffee table. To date, Nik had already bagged a 1979
Romanée-Conti, a ‘75 Lafite-Rothschild, an ‘86 Mouton Rothschild, the fabled
‘61 vintage of Cheval Blanc, a ‘71 Margaux, an ‘82 Latour and a ‘75 Evangile.
Janet
never understood Nik’s obsession. When
people asked if she shared his enthusiasm, she would always say in her
vowel-punishing Long Island brogue, “Wine?
I can’t be bothered. It all tastes the same. It’s like grape juice that’s gone to vinegah.”
Comments
like this Nik would ignore as he stared waxfaced into the distance, lost in his
lush life dreamscape where he was getting the VIP treatment in private dining
rooms, enjoying the most elusive wines with top-earning friends and receiving
compliments for his impeccable taste.
* * *
Near the
end of their engagement party seven years earlier, Nik and Janet stood
arm-in-arm in the main banquet hall of Verdi’s at Whitestone. The older guests and family friends had
retired for the night so that only the core of their closest friends
remained. Janet, beneath the Mothership
vessel-wide chandelier, held a champagne flute as she ribbed Nik.
“I love
the guy,” she said, stretching out the vowels in her playful alto. “But as we
all know, he’s uncouth.” She tapped his
chest with the prodding finger of the flirtatious. “Nik thinks whatever he wants, he can
buy. But there are some things, honey, that
you can’t just buy.”
Nik
rolled his eyes. “What, Jan, are you gonna say, love? Cause let me tell you,
some of the boys here will swear that even that can be bought.”
Hoots
from the groomsmen.
Janet
stuck out her tongue and said, “You wouldn’t understand if I told you.”
Arms
wide, playing it vaudeville for the fellas. “Name me one thing you can’t buy
with money.”
“Class,”
she said. “You can’t buy class.”
His
buddies howled. Then, to remove the
sting of any venom, she took Nik in her arms. “But I love the guy,” she
announced, as prenuptial tears blurred her vision and she planted a big kiss on
his lips.
Even
now, Nik would sometimes think back to that comment. Not because it had hurt his feelings – Nik’s
Teflon pride couldn’t be scratched – but because it rang of wisdom he had never
quite cracked. It sounded good when
Janet said it, and the comment had gotten a hell of a laugh, but the thing was,
taste was practically the same thing
as class. And taste, you could
definitely buy! People who eat gourmet fare night after night – even children –
start to ease into the good life. Any
regular who eats those Alain Ducasse-Charlie Trotter seven-course meals soon
loses his stomach for the grease, salt, and spongy textures of fast food. Let
there be no doubt, taste definitely could be bought.
These
were the thoughts that accompanied Nik one night three years ago as he flipped
through his tombstone-massive wine encyclopedia and his browsing finger came to
rest on this breathless entry.
The tasting took place in a Pomerol
cellar so that we would not disturb the sediment from the bottle’s resting
place . . . Marcel waved a candle
beneath the bottle like a charm. A half shoulder, no more, proving that there
had been minimal evaporation over the past half-century. Once the cork was removed, we saw that mold
was present on the shaft, but the bottom proved clean. Our host poured the
contents into four long-stemmed tulip glasses.
“Wine
porn,” Nik marveled as he sipped a ‘94 Château Montrose. “This guy is the Don Juan of tasting.”
Janet
looked up from her mystery novel and shook her head. He saw it on her face: wine again; she
couldn’t be bothered.
Robe: decanted, the wine is dense,
thick as blood, with just the slightest glints of pomegranate scarlet in the
candlelight.
Nose: a hint of quince fills the air,
that familiar friend of many a fine, aged bottle. Caramels and honeys from the oak follow.
Texture: a viscosity approaching
molasses or maple syrup. The wine swirls in lazy waves.
Taste: a first impression of plum,
date; second: violet, truffle. An enduring vivacity as rarely I’ve
experienced. The length unfurls in one’s
mouth as long as one chooses to hold it, resisting the finish. Never before has
the expression ‘chewing the wine’ so aptly described the feel. For forty seconds or more I suckle that first
sip, touring the legendary soil of this fabled domain.
The finish: Cocoa, vanilla, pepper,
tobacco. The tannins are not yet exhausted! Incredible! Forty-three years in
the bottle and this wine still has years, decades to age!
There, in that cold, humid cave, we
sat in mystified awe, as one word filled our heads over and above the cellar,
like a voice of those long-lost viticulturists chanting an incantation from a
half-century back:
Petrus! Petrus!
The
nineteen-forty-seven Petrus. A wine that was the product of a summer so
scorching, so punishingly dry that most grapes had succumbed on the vine. But those that did
survive were nectar: dense and opulent with Merlot fructose. By the time he finished reading the entry, Nik
was already a slave to one of those callings that bedevil any collector.
From
that day forward he was on a grail search.
