Bukkhead Creative Writing

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====== The Mister ======

Hello madam, and welcome to the Griffin Farms Winery and Leather Recovery Visitors Center. Today we are offering guests a rare treat: a sample of our 2006 Pinot Gregarious, a playful overture of spicy anise and cultured Ethiopian yeast, with a hint of cherry bark and just a whiff of campho-phenique. We call it Misty Mister. //Wine Fanatic// gave it their prestigious Coque-del-Vino award, and Gary Albright, of the //Reluctant Wino// blog, gave the Mister 98 stars out of 103, noting that he always saves the last 5 stars for his late wife's Rutabaga Reserve. It was what killed her, you see. She wasn't very good at viticulture.

You'll note we're serving the Mister in old jelly jars, as is the custom with wines from 2006, a nod to the financial crisis that nearly bankrupted Griffin Farms. Gently swirl the wine in your jar, see if you can catch the liquid on microscopic, calcified remains of the old jam. Yours would be the apricot, madam. Rest assured, it will have no effect on the taste whatsoever! It will, on the other hand, portray a subtle fractalization of the light, if you...ah, but I see you are a connoisseur, holding up your glass to catch the sun, as it beams through our dusty windows, from the east. Myles Griffin always said wines taste best before 10:00 a.m.

The Mister is usually served at a jovial 32 degrees centigrade, which, owing to proprietary information rights, we're not allowed to convert to fahrenheit-- well, we could, but then we'd have to shoot you! Only joking, of course, about the shooting, I mean. We do have lawyers, afterall, we're not thugs. At any rate, by a nice coincidence, these recycled jelly-jars are tempered perfectly to keep one's hands from over-warming the Mister as one consumes. Rumor has it that when Her Royal Highness The Arch Princess of New South Old Tasmania was offered this 2006 in one of her custom-blown micrometer crystal quaffing goblets, she stood up, pointed roughly in the direction of Tabersville, and demanded the steward fetch her a proper used jelly jar! Cultured, her highness is. We like to think the jar that was procured, emptied, steam-cleaned, and eventually used to serve her a "spit of the Mister," as they say, was a Welch's Strawberry-Pomegranate.

Quite right, madam, that is indeed how we have it depicted on t-shirts and novelty aprons available in the gift shop. Just so.

Now, if I may quote Mamma Griffin, our founder's mother and his most accurate critic, "Lay your beak in the bowl and get a snootful of that fine stink into your lungs, Jimmy." Of course our founder's name is, as I said, Morpance "Myles" Griffin, but she called everyone Jimmy, it seems. She was not only his mother, his bookie, his horse doctor, and fervent collector of recovered leather, she was also the one who taught him the arts of wine appreciation. And his, it must be said, was a most arduous education. She raised him on all manner of vintages, not the least of which were beet-root wines, candied-yam wines, even turpentine wines. Until her tragic death in 2005, the small town where she was from annually celebrated a Turp-n-Burp festival. They did stop, however, after she won the Power Gurgle for the eighth year in a row and then passed out next to the fireworks display just before it was set off. 

Never fear, madam, every palette is different, and although I don't know the name for the palette of the nose, I am quite certain it's also true for one's olfactory senses. We've had guests who insist they noted ash, laundry detergent, the armpit of steverfore from Mozambique, grape koolaid, warm diet caffeine-free chocolate Shasta, doctor's office, twine used by geriatrics to wrap paper packages of clean socks sent as a gift to grandchildren to have that same twine cut-off by unimaginative postal workers and then dropped behind an old trashcan spoiled by years of discarded Twinkies wrappers, green paint, aggressive butterflies, and one guest who would not be persuaded that we had not, in fact, made The Mister using a pair of her cousin Linda-bear's underpants that the cousin claimed she'd lost while away at horse-riding camp only to turn up three years later in the trunk of the poor lady's ex-boyfriend's Toyota Tercel. She was very convincing! 

If you're ready, go ahead and take a sip. The mister should frolic down your tongue like an old man experiencing virtual-reality for the first time and pretending to be the seven-year old girl he always felt he was. Which is to say, with only so much abandon, as he still surely has bad knees. Let your taste buds wake up with eyes blinking as if from a subtly erotic, somewhat unsettling, and yet altogether cogent dream. That's the tannins. As the mister splashes against the back corners of your tongue, your glossopharyngeal nerve should begin a quiet but insistent argument with the submandibular gland, which will become turgid. The argument, like all good arguments, will decay into a fervid love-making, as they are baptized in the mister and are born again drunk with love, shame, and just the right amount of queasiness. This is the point where you'll taste chocolate, burnt Queen-Anne's lace, and scented candles. 

Really? Very good indeed madam! Our waters come from a hidden aquifer that they say was where Richard Adams got the idea for Watership Down. Most impressive. There's a blind monk in Salina, Kansas, who also said he could sense dead rabbit in the aftertaste, but then he's never actually tasted any of our wines, and so we chalked that up to the stroke he experienced after a three day peyote-and-Lord-of-the-Rings-film binge. Fan of Tolkien, are you? No, neither am I.

Finish the jar if you like, madam, and I'd be happy to pour you another one. Madam, if I may, the manner in which you toss back the remains, dregs and all, is most fetching. Flirting with you? Only if it sells a few more bottles. No, just kidding of course. I was voluntarily castrated before coming to work here at Griffin Farms. But I am nevertheless flattered.
Bukkhead Creative Writing

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