The Rake Magazine

Say you were offered the option to go forward or backward in a time machine. Which would you choose?

If science fiction is any indication, most people would leap ahead to find out what the world will be like at some future time. Me? I'd go back: to the Last Supper, to Ludwig Beethoven's Vienna, to the birth of my firstborn. I'm fascinated by what has happened and by the changes wrought. Whereas others blow horns and throw confetti, kissing strangers and drinking too much to welcome the new year, I tend quietly to look to the past.

This is why I love those recap shows — even the really sappy montages set to music — that show the events of the previous year. It never fails to awe me how much transpires in so short a time and how long the events echo.

In 2007, for instance, we as a world suffered the loss of Kurt Vonnegut, Ingmar Bergman, and Luciano Pavarotti. There were other deaths, of course, which for whatever reason don't rank as high on my personal list. I'll admit I'm irrational. That Norman Mailer finally shuffled off this mortal coil, leaving some 17 wives and 98 children, seems fitting somehow; but the silencing of Vonnegut's wit and preternatural understanding struck me as abrupt and left me cold.

There were the iPhone and the Kindle; the collapse of the 35W bridge; the massacre at Virginia Tech; and the real estate crisis that precipitated a slow-moving but monstrous economic slump. As a result, people are reading The Da Vinci Code on handheld screens. Commuters of sound mind are taking long detours to avoid crossing rivers. College professors who teach writing are on alert (I know, because I am one) to pick out troubled students. Once secure and successful homeowners who thought they'd made a failsafe investment are going broke. And all this took place in the space of a year.

In my smaller corner of the world, 2007 was the year I celebrated my one-year wedding anniversary to a man I never expected to meet — and whom I did not yet know on New Year's Eve 2005. I was 39, the longtime single mother of three teenagers, and happily resigned to a life of independence (though far less happily to a life of celibacy) when we brushed against one another for the first time in the Heartland Wine Bar. That we are now a family simply amazes me.

I also watched the resurrection of my older son — the one whose birth haunts me because of its profound normalcy — from a trancelike condition called autistic catatonia. In 2007, I allowed the doctors at Mayo to hook my child up to machines and jolt him with electricity in hopes it would bring him back to life. And in the sort of weird coincidence that appears in books like The Sirens of Titan, I took comfort from the fact that Vonnegut once made the same decision regarding his son, Mark.

I spent an afternoon with Leonid Hurwicz, the 90-year-old winner of the Nobel prize who fled the Nazis as a young man and came to Minnesota where he developed economic theories touched with the humanity of one who knows both honor and sin. I met Max Fink, one of psychiatry's most well-known and controversial figures. I finished my second novel. I joined the staff at the Rake.

Truth? I also culled a lot of people out of my life this year. It happened around the time of my son's illness as the community I knew divided neatly into those who remained admirably steadfast and those who became distant, accusing, or mean. It saddens me to say that several friends and my own younger sister were among the latter. And while I try not to live with the grudge in my throat, I find it's a relief to know where in the world you stand.

All this happened, and yet it feels like no time at all has passed since the night of December 31, 2006. I was in a hotel room in Madison, WI, drinking a glass of something red and watching my then-brand-new husband sleep as the bells and whistles and gongs of some faraway New Year party announced midnight's turn.

I began contemplating all this last night, while sipping on a strange wine called The Other. I will rarely admit this, but I bought the bottle mostly because the label rather appealed to me. It's simple and incredibly off-topic but the line drawing somehow speaks to what it is to be a woman in flux. It's inexpensive: about $12 in most stores. A blend that, confusingly, changes each season depending upon both crops and the winemaker's whim, this Peirano Estate Heritage Collection variety doesn't list a year. But the one I tried was 60 percent Cabernet, 30 percent Merlot, and 10 percent Syrah. Heavy, fruity, and almost leathery, today's Other belies the naked yoga pose on the label. Like hearing the voice of Queen Latifah come out of the mouth of Heidi Klum. This is a thick, thoughtful, serviceable wine. It exists in no time, apparently, and contains an oddly specific 13.8 percent alcohol.

It's a wine with a wallop, a rough finish that lasts for full minutes, and a dissonant drawing on the front. But after such a year, I'm thinking Kurt definitely would approve.

It is a firmly established fact about human beings that we want what we cannot have. Once stores run out of Furbees or fetal Cabbage Patch babies or giggling Elmos, suddenly every mother's child must have one. When exorbitantly-priced iPhones hit the market already in limited supply, people line up at 2 a.m. I've heard this is even a paradigm used by sex therapists: by telling even a couple they are not allowed to have sex for a week, experts say they can get even the most disinterested spouse to churn with desire.

And so it is with absinthe, the drink preferred by Ernest Hemingway, Vincent Van Gogh, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, which supposedly drove each of them crazy and was outlawed in the United States in 1912.

It is supposedly the wormwood in Absinthe that makes it so deliciously dangerous. An herb that's poisonous in even moderate amounts, pure wormwood contains trace amounts of thujone, a ketone with hallucinogenic properties -- and it's possible, I suppose, that absinthe provokes delusions in very rare cases. Though the same can be said of sugar, sleep deprivation, over-the-counter cold medicines, and love.

Laws restricting the sale of absinthe have been loosening for years, since 1972 when the Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act lifted the ban on the liquor itself and focused instead on concentrated thujone, which occurs naturally in sage, thyme, and rosemary. Once distillers realized that the absinthe they'd been drinking in Spain and Portugal (and believing had mystical properties) actually contained such a negligible amount of the hallucinogen it qualified for sale in the U.S., they were faced with a conundrum. The very thing that made this substance legal might lessen its appeal.

In other words, without the naughty element of absinthe, what is it but a bright green syrup with a nearly lethal level of alcohol?

I am a confirmed wine drinker AND I do not care for the taste of anise. Keep these two facts in mind. But my experience tasting absinthe for the first time left me truly puzzled as to what all the fuss is about.

It smells herbal with a touch of sweetness, like bakery in the middle of a stand of fir trees. This I truly liked. . . .But the first sip was like dragon effluvium: livid, scorching, and green. It burns for a long time (a looonnnggg time) on the tongue and in the throat and later in the gut. The predominant taste is licorice and leaf and something vaguely scotch-like — if your scotch were subject to a nuclear flash.

Most disturbing, for me at least, the flavor lingers for hours. Neither breath mints nor vigorous tooth (and tongue) brushing can expunge it. With an alcohol content of 62 percent — that's 124 proof — it's as if the imprint is soldered onto the inside of your mouth.

I tried drinking it straight and as an absinthe drip, a process that reminded me of every heroin-cooking scene I've ever seen on TV. There is dramatic ceremony to this drink — no doubt one of the things that made it popular among the writers, artists, and actors of yore. Traditional preparation requires a slotted spoon and a sugar cube. You trickle ice water directly over the sugar, allowing it to melt into the liquor through the spoon's vents. This creates a "louche," or pale white cloud, topped with a ring of iridescent chartreuse.

It's pretty. But the fact is, I liked the absinthe even less this way, preferring the pain and boldness of a flavor I found confounding to the watered-down and sugary slurry edged in green. The only way I could imagine liking this liquor, frankly, is in coffee with a heavy dollop of whipped cream — which would not only soften the flavor with mocha but might thankfully heat off some of the alcohol as well.

Tomorrow morning at 8 a.m., Surdyk's will begin selling Lucid Absinthe Supérieure, one of only two varieties currently available in the United States, for $70 a bottle. And Jim Surdyk, who has an exclusive on the introduction of absinthe to the Twin Cities, says he expects a line around the block by 7:45. "It's interesting to people, the whole mystique of it," he said. I agree. I also think this is a rather dangerous drink, not only for the pocketbook but for public health. It is a fascination: a century-long withheld novelty that will make you very, very, very drunk very, very, very fast.

And this, in addition to depression, schizophrenia, and syphilis (respectively), likely is what caused the madness of Hemingway, Van Gogh, and Toulouse-Lautrec.

I had dinner with Robert Bly last week. Now you may think the biggest perks of my job involve food and wine and freebies but it's not true. The best thing is meeting people like Bly and being able to ask anything I want.

And here's what I wanted to know: What's up with men?

I was sitting in a booth at Cue, drinking a glass of M. Chapoutier Côtes du Rhône, which you may know by now is one of my favorite affordable wines. I also like that Chapoutier is one of only two winemakers in the world who puts a braille label on all of his bottles because, he says, wine selection shouldn't be limited by people's ability to see.

Bly was sipping a Bombay Sapphire martini while eating roasted ringneck pheasant. And we were discussing Peer Gynt, the 1867 Norwegian play about a hapless, self-absorbed young man, which Bly had — just hours before — finished adapting so that it contains, for the first time in history, Ibsen's original rhyme scheme in English.

"This is a great play about a wild young man," Bly told me. "Gynt is loved by women but hardly knows his own father. And the play asks what happens to such a man?"

This, of course, is a perennial theme of Bly's as well. In addition to being an internationally-recognized poet and translator, he wrote Iron John: A Book About Men and helped found the Mythopoetic Men's Movement, a 1990's-era self-help method for men that involved storytelling, new age shamanism, forest gatherings and drums. Yes, it sounds like voodoo.

But ask Bly about the rites, as I did that night, and his explanation is clear: "We were just pleased to be with other men who weren't brutal or cruel," he told me. "The men who came weren't angry with women, they loved women. If anything, they were angry at their fathers." The one thing his followers shared was a hunger to be recognized by older men. "The question they were asking," Bly said, "was, Am I worthwhile as a man? That's all they needed to know."

It happens, coincidentally, that I have for several months been reading books by men: those muscular, intelligent but addled, sex-fueled American types ranging from Saul Bellow to Richard Ford. Currently, I'm in the middle of Richard Russo's Bridge of Sighs, a novel as uneven as a hastily-gathered deck of cards, but one that I nevertheless like.

It's about a man named Lucy. (You can imagine, I'm sure, why he needs assurance that he is worthwhile.) As a child, Lucy is accosted by a bunch of older boys and locked in a trunk down near the blood-red Cayoga River. Terrified, he passes out and awakens hours later to the sounds of a couple having sex on the ground at his side. (Why they didn't wonder about a trunk on a riverbank, I cannot say. . . .this is one of the ragged elements of the book.) The woman hears him shifting and throws open the lid of the trunk -- naked from the waist up, of course -- thus freeing the boy who gets out, walks home along the river, and finds his father waiting for him on the bridge by their house.

It cannot be coincidence that there is everything in this scene that Bly described: the brutality of boys and the joy at seeing a bare-chested woman and the desire only to be gathered up by his father and safely transported home. It is, I'm beginning to see, a ubiquitous and rather winsome theme in men's literature and lives -- this need to be comforted, to be carried, to be loved.

I'm a big fan of men: wife to one and ex-wife (still good friend) to another, as well as the mother of two nearly-grown sons. I can speak to the softness that exists in all of them, the hunger, as Bly put it.

So I found myself wondering one day about men and wine. There is a strange, swooning, wide-eyed fever that men bring to their drinking. The same one, it seems to me, they bring to most everything else, be it war or stamp collecting or golf. And maybe it is the reason that most of the world's winemakers and tasters and raters and vendors even today are men, though women have been proven, scientifically, to have a far more acute sense of smell. Biologically speaking, Robert Parker should be a woman in her 30's, not a 60-year-old guy with an outdated JD.

As a woman wine writer, I can hardly claim prejudice. After all, you're reading me. But I've been examining these men and their stories, thinking about what I can take from them -- Bly and his moonlit drum beating, Russo and his childhood fear and fantasy, Chapoutier and his gallant but quixotic mission to make wine buying easier for the blind. Then there's the man I met the other day.

I was at Costco, where I'd gone to buy a case of the Chapoutier Cotes du Rhone for a party. Why would I battle the traffic and noise and hotdog stink of that hellhole? Because here the Chapoutier sells for $8.59 a bottle rather than $12. This fact -- and a Xanax -- were enough to get me through the horror of a Christmas shopping throng. Only then, there was no wine! Luckily, I found a man in a red apron who lifted another case off a high shelf.

Selling wine was his hobby, the man told me. And he wasn't just a fan of the wine I was buying, he was avid, recommending it to everyone he knew. As I was checking out, he came running over to hand me a sheaf of background materials. I mentioned that I was a writer, told him my name, and said I might post the information. . . .then felt ill and called it an early night. He called the Rake first thing the next morning and demanded to know where my new column was, leaving his number so we could alert him the moment it went up.

I'm not complaining. In fact, I think if there's something we women can learn from men, it's to indulge in a little reckless enthusiasm and genuine need. Men in the woods, telling each other fairytales and beating drums. It kind of makes sense.

Maybe it's an Edina thing. You step inside the city limits and suddenly you rather like a restaurant server who eyes you suspiciously for several minutes, then approaches sniffily to ask what you want.

You don't mind paying 20 percent more for a loaf of bread with goat cheese and olive tapenade than you would, say, in Powderhorn Park. Or half again as much for a tiny appetizer-style hamburger as you would downtown. I don't know what it is. . . .All I do know is, I'm typically a bear about service and price, yet I keep going back to Beaujo's Wine Bar & Bistro because -- and I don't have any better explanation than this -- I just like it there.

In all fairness, a lot of it is quality. When you get that loaf of bread it comes with three really generous pots of the various spreads and a set of crackers, too, in case you're feeling less carb-consumptive than usual. When you order the Wasabi Ginger Salmon Salad you pay a hefty $14.50, but the greens are absolutely fresh and the julienned snow peas are crisp and the dressing has the most pleasing bite.

What's more, there's really not a bad table in the place (and I find this is very rare. . . .). There are a couple high four-tops in the front window that I particularly like. And all the others are against walls, so you're never sitting stranded in the middle of a room with servers brushing by you and carrying trays overhead.

Recently, Beaujo's made a couple changes. They've freshened up their wine list, adding some really excellent ones, like the Chateau du Trignon Cotes de Rhone, a Saint Pierre Sancerre, and the Alamos Torrentes from Argentina. Every wine they serve is offered by the glass, the half glass, or the bottle (which I LOVE because often, when I'm driving, 1-1/2 glasses is just right but two is excessive). They've added flexible wine flights to the menu: basically three half-pours for a set price. And they're now open on Sundays, starting at 3 p.m.

Personally, I'm very happy about this last bit of news. Because there's nothing I like more on a Sunday than a cheap matinee at the Edina Theater followed by a glass of wine. And no matter whom I've met at Beaujo's, they've been happy there: whether dining on salads or sandwiches or biscotti and tea.

The one thing, truthfully, that I still cannot figure out is the service. I have been ignored at this place for long stretches of time -- never in a hostile way, but I get the feeling that the women who man the bar (an odd phrase, I know. . . .but in this case, it's fitting) simply don't care if I stay and take off my coat or get tired of waiting and slip away. No matter how many times I visit, no matter how familiar I become, they approach in the same way: warily, as if I'm taking up their valuable time. Sometimes it makes me angry.

Then the wine arrives at a pitch-perfect temperature and the salad comes pretty and fresh and clean. And I forgive them. Again.

For a Jewish Gen X'er, I have a strangely regressive Protestant work ethic. For instance, I tend to feel guilty when I have fun while I'm on the job. And after last Thursday at Thomas Liquors -- let me tell you -- my conscience is simply awash.

These guys are crazy, in a very good way. Led by Mike Thomas — the third-generation owner of what used to be St. Paul's party central (they were, Mike says, the "keg pros" for nearby Macalester, St. Thomas, and St. Kate's, until the drinking age was raised to 21) — this is a group that knows how to throw a wine tasting. Just to give you an idea: I think, at one point, around the seventh bottle, Dionysus wandered through.

Thomas Liquors is a little hard to find. It's on Grand Avenue, but only the solid brick exterior, painted with grapevines, shows streetside. We were in the back room around 4 p.m.: Mike, two wine vendors (Eddie and Corey), Dan — an employee — my good friend, Mary, and myself. There were shelves of liquor lining the walls, a round wooden table piled with bottles and books, and a space heater pumping out warm, red rays.

The topic of the tasting was French 2005's. Now, 2005 was an ideal year throughout Europe; all grape growing conditions were perfect: rain, sun, temperature, and ripening time. Compare this to — say — Italian films of the 1960s (when Sergio Leone was in his prime). Which is to say, even choosing at random, it's hard to find a bad one. Wine or western, as the case may be. . . .

In any case, the vintage was one thing. The company another. Thomas himself is a jovial former beer drinker who admits freely that some savvy vendor handed him a Wine Spectator 25 years ago and insisted THIS was the future of the liquor and spirits biz. Eddie is a recently married rep for Wine Adventures, and the proud purveyor of a Cotes du Rhone that's now near and dear to my heart (I'll get to this in a minute); his cell phone, which went off every couple minutes, played the theme from Batman -- the one that signals the boys are sliding skulkily into the bat cave. Corey, from Cat & Fiddle Beverage, was hawking a Chablis of all things and talking about the Catholic funeral (his first, apparently) he'd just attended: "Two hours long. But I liked that. When you're burying someone, you shouldn't be in a fucking rush."

It was a little like one of those afternoons in college when you know you should be studying but you amble down the hall to a friend's dorm room instead. Pretty soon, there are six or eight people sitting around and there's a guy playing a guitar, or Pink Floyd on the stereo, and you drink beer and order a pizza and someone reaches under a bed and pulls out a. . . .OK, never mind. We're not here to talk about the indiscretions of my youth, we're here to talk about wine.

So anyway, we sat around the table and passed our glasses back and forth and tasted more wines than anyone should in a single sitting. But the fact was, the mood was right and it was toasty and I love the theme from Batman. Also, there were crackers.

Of the '05's we sampled, here were my top picks (note: I'm not going to list the year for each -- they're all 2005 -- and prices are for Thomas):

Bourgogne Les Setilles -- all Chardonnay but there's no butter; instead, this is pure cream, smooth with just a hint of cardboard on the edges of the tongue; a nice body of apricots and peaches with a sexy, musky finish; 13% alcohol/$16.99

Billaud-Simon Chablis -- a very pleasant surprise for someone who associates the word "chablis" with the yellow liquid that was stored in my grandmother's refrigerator in a box; a light, flinty white with citrus and tropical fruit; 12% alcohol/$26.99

Louis Latour Pinot Noir -- the loamy bouquet of a French field; midweight with plenty of cherry and oak but NO anise; an incredibly versatile, drinkable wine; 13% alcohol/$13.99

Chateau Beauchene Grande Reserve Cotes du Rhone -- I saved this for last because it was my favorite by far; an absolutely exquisite wine made from vines that once were part of the Chateauneuf-de-Pape region; fig, blackberry and a diamond-clean finish with a wonderful whiff of something like vintage violin strings or library dust; 13% alcohol/$16.99

We tried a few others, too, truth be told. We laughed and talked about the movies we'd seen and where we went to college and had our first jobs. Corey gave Eddie marital advice, or the other way around. Nobody (thankfully) spat.

When we left the back room and went out into the store so I could pick up a couple bottles of the Cotes du Rhone, Mike introduced me to all of his employees and many of the regular customers in the store. We'd spent hours and if I didn't have hungry kids waiting at home I easily could have stayed on into the night. Thomas Liquors is a truly happy place. And more important, I suppose, they offer some excellent wines. Plus a really fine cracker. . . .

So I took notes and wrote the story and let all of you in on the secret of where you can get a downright beautiful French '05 for under $14. Can I stop feeling guilty now?