You Had Me at Pet-Nat by Rachel Signer

Author:Rachel Signer [Signer, Rachel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-10-19T00:00:00+00:00

The Land Rover cruised along country roads—no street lighting, no commercialism in sight. The path swerved this way and that, and little Alfie tumbled from the console onto my lap. Dappled sunlight streamed through the tall, spindly eucalyptus trees. Wildman grew quiet, allowing me to take in the unkempt, powerful wilderness alongside the road. We passed a bubbling creek, and the air cooled even more. I saw big gray cows ambling around on a hillside and a grove of massive pine trees the other way, and then we turned onto a gravel road, wide enough for just one vehicle.

Large white birds with fabulous yellow mohawks swooped overhead. “Cockatoos,” Wildman told me. A few red-blue-and-green parrots dove toward the car and then careened away. On one side of the gravel road, a ridge careened down into a lush, fern-covered valley. The road had some potholes, which Wildman expertly evaded. I had the feeling he could drive this route with his eyes closed.

Then we saw Wildman’s vineyard, the one I’d watched him pruning from afar, in videos. He had planted it with Pinot Noir fifteen years ago, likely inspired by the multiple vintages he spent working in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. It had never been watered or sprayed—the only other vineyard I’d heard of or seen like this was Ramaz Nikoladze’s vineyard in Georgia.

“There’s the veggie patch,” said Wildman, gesturing to a large plot where rows of leafy greens were interspersed with rich brown soil. Farther up a hill, a large blue shed came into sight—it was the same color as the bright, open sky above us. Just up the hill from that shed, set amongst towering evergreens and bushy dry grasses, was a humble sandstone house with a tin roof—my home for the next three weeks.

Within my bones, all the toxic energy that had accumulated over the past years while living in New York, and the stress of hopping from one couch to another in Paris, started to dislodge. I wanted it expunged from my body, out of my spirit, and this place, with its majestic trees and impeccable air, felt like the setting I’d been looking for, even if I hadn’t fully known it.

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