The Rake Magazine

Were someone to tell me the world were ending tomorrow, I would pick up the phone immediately and make a reservation at Restaurant Alma. No doubt. Given a scenario where there wasn't enough time to jet off to New York City or Paris, Alma would be my choice for a last meal. Actually, maybe even in a scenario where there were. . . .

It's a near perfect place: never snooty but stylish, with high ceilings, plain tables, and smart servers clad in denim and black. And the food is always exactly (if I may be so bold) what God intended food to be. Alex Roberts, the 36-year-old chef behind Alma and the more casual Brasa, believes in taking whole ingredients and just touching them -- with heat, with spice, with sauce -- so the natural flavor is dominant and the other elements only enhancements that make sense.

Such was the case with the duck I ate the other night, roasted rare and set on a bed of the best baby Brussels sprouts that have ever passed my lips. What's important here, though, is how well those leafy little heads went with my wine: Domaine de la Tour Penedesses Carignan 2004, a Languedoc Roussillion that Roberts sells for a mere $8 a glass.

A hearty pour in a tulip glass, the nose is of wet wood, plum, and leather. This is a dry wine that tastes wise somehow, but also a little wild -- of dark red and purple fruits, oak, and pepper -- like a French cowboy, great in the saddle but also well read.

Yes, given what I know of food and wine, this -- the duck and sprouts, the sagacious wine, and the salad wearing a savory dressing spiked with caraway -- would have been a lovely last meal, had the world imploded today at dawn. It didn't, however. Lucky you. Pick up the phone.

Restaurant Alma, 528 University Avenue SE, 612-379-4909.

I have a wicked wanderlust. This is one of the reasons I ride a motorcycle: because on any given Saturday I'm willing to take off and hit a small town in South Dakota -- as long as it's one I've never seen before. I'll also seize whatever random opportunity comes my way to get on a plane and BE somewhere else for a while. This week, I went out to New York City in order to give a 20-minutes speech at the New York Academy of Medicine. At least, that was the plan.

On the panel were one of the world's top research psychiatrists, a doc from Johns Hopkins, a graduate of Harvard Medical School and, uh. . . .me. No pressure there.

I was last on the agenda, going immediately after the woman from Hopkins who'd single-handedly set up a peds unit for critically ill children while raising two kids of her own and no doubt darning her husband's silk socks. But after hours worth of PowerPoint presentations, each of which had multiple technical difficulties, the moderator looked at me and said in a genuinely gloomy tone, "I'm so sorry, our program has gone over time, you'll have to keep your comments to five minutes. Seven at most."

There was wine at my left hand: a glass of Beaulieu Vineyards Chardonnay, which is the Skippy peanut butter of white wines. It's cheap and if not high-brow, perfectly fine -- even marginally satisfying -- once you get a few swallows in. Well, ordinarily, I don't drink before speaking (which is why the full glass was sitting there, untouched). But in this case, I made an exception and downed about a third in what I hope was a ladylike motion, rose and said, "Well, I'm a writer, I'm used to being edited," then gave my 20-minute talk in 6 minutes flat.

It was a lovely trip, really. The Academy people couldn't have been nicer. No, that's not true. They could have been the guy with dreads and a grease-stained jacket at Grand Central who swiped his very own Metro card for me and whispered, "Go," when I was ineptly trying to rush the turnstile and catch the Lexington Avenue train.

I had lunch with my agent at the Blue Water Grill, a terrific, casual publishing hang-out on Union Square. (And yes, for those of you -- thank you -- who are reading closely: the agent responded, the book is being tweaked and readied for editors' eyes. My neurosis about it grinds endlessly on.) We ate some great spicy tuna rolls and assorted other sushi, but we didn't have wine over lunch, which is a shame, really, because it probably would have been the only decent glass of my week.

As it was, things went downhill from the Skippy-level Chardonnay.

I went to the airport yesterday afternoon, dashed in feeling late, in fact, for what was to have been a 6:30 flight. After I stood in line and got my e-ticket, however, I noticed the time had been changed to 6 o'clock. "How odd," I thought. "They rarely move the flight times back." That, of course, is when I realized that not only had the time been changed, the date had as well. This morning, six a.m., and I had no place to spend the night.

The woman behind the American Airlines counter was on the phone, speaking Italian. She hung up, turned to the couple at my side, and had a rapid conversation in Spanish. By the time she turned to me, I'd put her right up next to the doctor with the seven or eight Ivy League M.D.'s. (People who speak multiple languages always intimidate me in a biblical, highly evolved sort of way.) I showed her my ticket and she punched something into her computer. "Northwest at 10:45," she said in a gruffly lilting Puerto Rican accent. "The weather is bad. They might let you on, might not."

Which is how I ended up, elbow-to-elbow with a furniture salesman from Detroit, at the bar in the Delta terminal at La Guardia, asking for a wine list. To which the bartender scoffed. "We got red," he said, holding up a crusty bottle of Kendall-Jackson Merlot. This is one of those wines I'll drink at a pub, if I absolutely must. If it's that or, say, Schlitz. So I said, "Sure," and he tipped the bottle, but what came out was more the consistency of slurry than wine. The only taste I took was thick and scorched, like the stuff that dribs onto the bottom of the oven when you bake a blueberry pie. I switched to soda water, which the furniture salesman insisted on putting on his tab, and waited among thousands of hot, stranded bodies for my plane to land.

They let me on the plane. I nearly wept. My husband picked me up from the nearly deserted nighttime airport on the other side. We came home and despite the late hour, opened a bottle of wine. It was corked. So we opened another -- the only one we had. It happened to be an odd vintage with a demented Robert Crumb-ish label called Plungerhead Old Vine Zinfandel 2005, which someone had given me insisting it was good. It's made by The Other Guys, a whimsical little division of the mega-corporate Don Sebastiani & Sons.

This wine is called Plungerhead, apparently, because it's sealed with a "zork" -- a rubbery little mushroom top cap that's been wrapped with a spiral of plastic you have to unzip. It's supposed to keep the wine good. Well guess what? It isn't good to begin with. At least this bottle -- at 1:30 a.m. on a Friday morning, after a total of 12 hours spent sitting on airplanes and in airports over the space of only 24 -- didn't seem so to me. It has a nose of cranberry and cough syrup, and a flavor to match, only the taste fades quickly in a sour way. And I expect more from a basic $12-14 bottle of Zin.

The only good part: Plungerhead has a whopping 14.8% alcohol, which made it better than Nyquil for knocking me out.

I can't say I'm sorry for the way of the week. Typically, my days are full of sameness and routine, interrupted from time to time with a really fine glass of wine. This was a whirlwind of activity, new experience, and truly putrid drinking. Life is meant to be lived, after all, and an adventurer is bound to run into a few snags (seen Into the Wild, anyone?). As trade-offs go, this one -- compared to killing a moose, eating poison and dying a lonely death -- wasn't so bad. But I'm looking forward to something far better when I tilt my glass tonight.

I drink at dusk in autumn.

This is dangerous, as dusk comes a little earlier every day, cutting my afternoon off at 6:30, then 6, and then, suddenly, this past weekend, around half past 5.

I can almost feel the lonely, lavender air come down like a curtain, or a veil. The world dims in quick shutter stages, the leaves in the driveway swirl and scratch, and I love all this in the same way I enjoy sad movies. Throat aching, I sit looking out the window. I might as well drink; it's not as if I'm going to get anything done.

This time of year always reminds me of when I lived in Duluth, fall of 1990. Dusk was later up north, but it came down like a sheet of dark water. The wind in the maples made an eerie whistle and on murky evenings we could hear the foghorn blowing across the lake.

I was 24 and in love, but anxious too. About my husband's addiction, the future for my two young sons, the rent and oil bills and groceries we couldn't afford. Dusk came and I remember, I always felt a slice of fear.

I still do. I think there's a moment -- you can miss it if you're working or inside a bright kitchen or talking on the phone -- when the world goes from light to dark and crosses something empty. It's that moment when I always realize that we're actually, each of us, simply stranded in a little sphere of gravity, exhaling useless carbon dioxide, unnecessary, really. And completely alone.

Nothing matters in that moment: even for me, a mother who loves her three with a wild, irrational force, there is no real purpose in putting children forth. They're only walking out into a world with random car crashes and weak blood vessels, after all. And money -- what IS money, anyway? -- which will govern their lives but ultimately come to nothing. Paper, like leaves. . . .

And no news, whether of despots or ecologists, really matters either. Claim a country, for what? And sustainability? It's a pipe dream. Everything is temporary, just a flash of activity occurring in a particular time. There is nothing to sustain because in the end it's only earth and water and sky.

It is at this point, that crevice of early evening when I begin thinking pleasantly maudlin thoughts, that I pour a half glass of wine. I drink for a moment or two -- just a bit, that's all it takes; the habit as helpful, I think, as the alcohol itself -- and suddenly, I've bridged the empty place, reached the other side, reattached myself to things, to people, to the dollar bills in my wallet. It's an easy ritual, effective, benign, and warm.

For my former husband, however, the cure never did take. I understand now, in ways I didn't before, that he felt constantly, as many addicts do, that gap between light and dark. He once told me, after we'd been married for about ten years, that he was alone, always. And I became furious. Was I not a good wife? A constant presence? A comfort?

The answer is no -- to the last, at least. I live today with wry teenagers and a wonderful, new husband, happy in most things and tethered to ordinary events roughly 23 hours a day; yet I often feel that dusky, wise melancholy creep in. And make no mistake. Though I treat it, as do many people I know, with only moderate amounts of good wine, I share something with the man I knew back in Duluth, father to sweet babies and a genuinely lost soul, who kept trying to fill the empty space with tokes and lines, Jack Daniels and Miller Lite.

Saturday, probably the last good riding day of the year, my husband and I were on our motorcycle headed west into a sky like dark felt cracked with fiery gold. We cornered sharply, taking the ramp onto 394, and I thought, as I do so often, "We could die," then immediately, "But, of course, it would matter so little and to so few." And this was, in the molten light of the setting sun, somehow comforting.

We came home then, quiet, both of us, and opened a strange screwcap wine called Fin., a fruity, currant and cherry-filled Cabernet Sauvignon from 2005.

I sat at the table with my glass. It took only a few ounces, a quiet space in time filled with the smell of fresh, chopped garlic, and there was that sudden lifting of my disbelief. I stood to help my husband with dinner. Once again, I'd crossed the gap. Dusk was gone.

Today is the last day of Surdyk's Annual Fall Wine Sale, with 20-35% off bottles throughout the store. So if you're into the old-style guys-in-ties-and-striped-aprons ambiance of the place -- or in the mood for some extraordinary cave-aged Cheddar cheese, also on sale in The Cheese Shop next door -- you have until 10 p.m. to make it there.

Should you be out of town, however, touring the north country and looking at leaves on this exquisite autumn day, try Haskell's -- any one of their 8 Twin Cities stores -- where Mr. Farrell and the boys are running their own Fall Wine Sale, 'til Saturday the 27th, with discounts of 30-70%. One of the largest wine purveyors in the country, Haskell's carries bottles ranging from $6 to $160 right on the floor. You'll have to ask if you want a Chateau Lafite-Rothschild, however; they keep it in back.

Now this. My good friend and loyal reader, Schneider, sent the photo above in response to my October 11 Jug O' Wine entry about unexpected bottle shapes.

Hmmmmmmm.

Now, maybe I've just taken too many film theory classes (Am I, by the way, the only person in America who believes Die Hard was a romance between Bruce Willis and Reginald VelJohnson that climaxed -- so to speak -- when their hands met in front of a towering skyscraper that rose to pierce the clouds?), but it seems to me the Voga Italia bottle may have been designed to be. . . .um. . . .multi-purpose.

I haven't tried the Pinot Grigio. To tell the truth, I don't want to -- I prefer a more traditional, less organic shape in my wine containers. But you can read Schneider's far less Freudian analysis here.