Wine, Language, Home

Or alternately: the Tasty, the Impossible, and the Elusive: Thoughts Invoked by The Best Parade Ever.

It started when I spent last weekend drinking wine with my friend Martin, who comes from Lösnich on the Mosel.

Funny how I wasn't a wine-drinker at all in the States. But maybe that's just it: everyone knows that wine culture in Europe is "different" from wine culture in the States; however, that difference is not simply a matter of quantity. Leaving aside all discussion of American attitudes toward alcohol, buying wine in Arizona was not only expensive, but impenetrable -- bottles crowding each other on the shelf, competing for attention with their cutesy names and dizzying array of various origins. Australia? California? South America? Europe? Africa? Where do you even begin? There seemed to be something more than slightly elitist about all the prerequisite foreknowledge I imagined you had to have to identify whatever was supposed to be "good" (I personally couldn't even taste the difference) and so I just stuck with beer.

I knew lots of Americans liked wine. But suffice to say that, at least in non-wine-growing Arizona, there seemed to be such thick barriers of entry for the newcomer that I just never got into it.

Here, however, wine isn't nearly so inapproachable. It's life. It's a culture, an economy, a heritage, and a series of festivals that crown the "Wine Queen" every year. And yet it's also, paradoxically, not that big a deal. It's loved, but knowable. In the Pfalz, in fact, wine is almost preferred over beer, because wine is local and much beer is not (although living with someone who grew up within walking distance of the Czech border means our household still maintains a goodly supply of beer). Plus it's very unusual to find the giant wine producers here the way you might in California or Australia, because vintners aren't interested in bottling enormous quantities to mass-market abroad. Not to say there isn't competition, of course there is -- with each other, with France. So it is nevertheless some damn fine stuff, and I've had the inestimable luck to find myself standing in a river of it.

Now, I learned to love it in the Pfalz, where they drink it dry, dark, powerful, and by the 1/4-liter glass. (You ever want to stain your teeth blue, sip on a Dornfelder.)

But I knew nothing about the Mosel. I'd driven by the valley a time or two, and been intrigued by that glassy river, winding sleepily like a jigsaw puzzle through the glowing, vineyard-covered hills. It's also the wine-growing area of Germany that happens to be slightly known outside of Germany; so when your Mosellaner friend extends an invitation to show it to you, you take it.

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank my excellent host for an marvelous and enlightening time, and all his excellent friends for their warm welcome. It was beautiful. And different. The vineyards are different -- so... steep! -- the dialect is different, the wine is different, even the way of drinking it is different. Instead of buying a half-liter Schoppen and passing it around the group, the way they do in the Pfalz, on the Mosel, you buy a whole bottle and then distribute it into everyone's individual, tiny (0.1-liter, or 3.4-ounce) glass. The bottle is finished, the next person buys the new one. In this way, you can annihilate quite a few bottles and still be standing when the last bus goes at 4:00am.

I also made the barbaric mistake of allowing my fingers to touch the bowl of my glass, and was immediately corrected: "Hier," I was assured, with a demonstration, "trinken wir mit Stiel." (A nice little pun on Stiel, the glass-stem, and Stil: class, style.)

In addition, the wine is very sweet. Not syrupy and cloying -- in fact it was delicious -- but certainly not the dry reds that I'm used to at home.

Not to mention that it seems like all of Martin's friends are vintners. Or at least in a family of vintners. One moment, we'd be standing around sharing a bottle, and another, one of our group would appear behind the counter of the stand we'd been patronizing, wrapping an apron around his waist and opening another bottle for other customers.

All of this culminated in the completely normal sight of a bunch of young men standing around, being manly and talking man-things, while holding their tiny glasses of sweet white wine carefully by the stem and interrupting each other once in a while to swirl it, sniff, and ask, "Say, do you think this one's too acidic?"

It was awesome.

But this brings me to another, somewhat less awesome (I'll explain in a minute) feature of the wine festival, which was the quantity of American soldiers who suddenly appeared: quickly recognizable by their military haircuts, baggy American clothes, and loud honking voices.

Again, let me explain. I grew up a military brat in Germany, to parents who loved the country in which they found themselves and took every opportunity to explore and learn and discover. So when Martin told me to expect to see a lot of people from the bases, I rather looked forward to meeting and talking to some countrymen and expected I'd be able to relate. Besides, I've been here long enough to discover that plenty of American servicemen are not like my parents were, and so am proud of anyone who decides to brave what could be a scarily foreign country to get out to mingle with the folks and experience some local culture.

But once I saw -- or rather, first heard -- them, I was startled to discover I didn't want to approach them at all. Why not? There they were, being American and talking American; and instead of walking up to them, I wanted to run and hide. What was wrong with me??

Well, one factor was probably just shock, in that we'd been floating in a sea of soft, rolling German, and suddenly these noisy haircuts come swaggering in, projecting their nasal vowels across the crowd as if they were on a college campus, and it was... okay, it was embarrassing.

Another factor was probably just age: their average couldn't have topped 20 or 21, and they were simply acting like it. Poor guys, they were just being the kids that they were. But they were still a far cry from the Air Force officers I'd been picturing. They were... well, have soldiers always looked so sketchy? And the girlfriends so, well, trashy? What was with the g-strings sticking out the backs of their jeans?

Although I'm always very slightly aware of my outsidership here, most of the time, it's easy to ignore as I get settled into my adopted home. After all, it's the one I've got, now (I hardly even know anyone in Arizona anymore!), and it's been a constant process of effort and development to get used to the Immigrant Experience.

And yet now it was like, Martin had shown me where he was from, his culture and people and place; and then supposedly representing my side, a group of MTV caricatures bursts in to demonstrate where I'm supposed to be from.

Maybe that's why I relate so much to my friend Linda. She's Canadian, and has lived in Neustadt since 2005. For a long time, she was ambivalent about staying; but now she's marrying Clemens, her adorable Pfälzer, and has really landed firmly on the side of remaining an immigrant. Even Chrissie from Chicago, who knows she'll be leaving at the end of her third year (next summer, boo hoo!) tries as much as she can to engage with the culture and learn the language. So maybe the reason I can't make friends with the Americans I occasionally run into from the military bases are that they aren't of this little dual-natured world. While many (my parents included) seized the opportunity to live abroad and wore it out, for far too many others, there is this very clear separation of Us and Them that I don't -- can't -- identify with.

Wow, I didn't realize how long this post was going to get! It's time to go to bed, I'll try to get to the rest of it tomorrow... nighty night!