FICTION: TOJ, Chapter 2: Of Wealth and Taste

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.