Issue 6 · July 1, 2026

The Long Way Around

A Viator tour to Châteauneuf-du-Pape, four strangers in a courtyard, and the discovery that the world is smaller than it pretends to be.

September 2025. The estate sits up off the road, gravel courtyard, vines visible in every direction. Working winery, not a destination polished for the camera. We arrived first and waited for the other two couples to show up. Fifteen minutes maybe. The dog was somewhere out of sight. The sun was already heavy on the stone. We'd booked the van just days before, figuring Châteauneuf-du-Pape was the one day we didn't want to do alone.

The other couples pulled in within a few minutes of each other. Polite distance at first. The slight self-consciousness of strangers who know they're about to spend three hours together.

Lori started it. She usually does. Something about the heat, the drive in, whether the air conditioning in the van had been working for them. The woman closest to us laughed and said she was from California. Lori asked where. The Bay Area. Lori asked where in the Bay Area.

Belmont.

There's a look Lori gets when something unexpected lands. She grew up in Belmont. She went to Carlmont High School. She named the year.

The woman across from us—call her Diane—named the year right behind her.

They started naming people. Teachers. The kid who lived on whichever street. The family that owned the place near the corner. Inside of two minutes they were comparing notes on a high school neither had walked through in thirty years. A private language between two people who'd both come a long way to find it.

The host came out then. Tradition rouge to start, the white to follow. We moved inside to the tasting room. Stone walls. Cool the way only a building from 1850 stays cool in September. The Tradition opened slow in the glass. Grenache forward, Syrah underneath, Mourvèdre holding everything in place. The host walked us through it without making a production of it. He'd done this before. He let the wine do the work.

The conversation kept going around the table. The other couple—call them Karen and her husband—had been quieter at the start. At some point Karen mentioned where she was from originally. Maine.

I asked where in Maine.

Sanford.

I told her West Gardiner. She said she'd gone to University of Maine.

My ears perked up. I asked which campus.

Farmington. Different from Orono, where I went, but the same system. Same accents. Same understanding of what mud season means.

Sanford had already come up earlier. I had a friend from Sanford. One of my closest friends for almost forty years—my college roommate at Orono. I asked Karen if she knew him.

She said his name back to me before I finished asking.

He'd been her best friend from elementary school through high school. They'd grown up next door. She said it exactly: I knew he was gay before he knew he was gay. She said it with the affection of someone who'd loved him longer than I had.

I sat with that for a moment. There's no protocol for what happens when the woman pouring Châteauneuf-du-Pape across from you in southern France has known one of your closest friends since they were eight years old.

It kept going. Both husbands had gone to Maine Maritime Academy in Castine. I started naming high school classmates of mine who'd gone there—the way a certain kind of Maine kid did in those years. Diane's husband had been in the same class as two of them. Karen's husband had been a year behind. He named another. I knew him too. He was my ex-wife's cousin.

We started running through the roster. Names landing one after another. The husbands looked at each other. Lori looked at me. Diane refilled her glass.

Then somebody said it. Call him.

Ten in the morning in Provence. Four in the morning back east. My roommate was asleep.

We called him anyway.

He picked up with the voice you have before coffee. I told him where I was. I told him who I was standing next to. I handed the phone to Karen.

A pause on the line. Somebody assembling a picture out of three pieces that weren't supposed to fit together. Then he laughed. Karen laughed. Diane refilled her glass for the second time. Lori watched all of it with the expression she gets when something improbable is happening and she's decided to enjoy it rather than try to explain it.

The call lasted maybe four minutes. Long enough for him to tell Karen she hadn't changed since she was eight. Long enough for Karen to tell him she'd been right about him. Long enough for him to tell me I'd have to explain later how I'd ended up in southern France with the woman who used to walk him to school. We hung up. Everyone was quieter for a moment. Some calls do that.

The host watched all of it. He'd seen a lot of things happen at his tasting table. Probably not quite this. He poured the white when it was time. He didn't try to redirect us back to the wine. He understood—the way good hospitality people understand—that the wine had done its job by getting us into the room. The room was doing its job now.

We finished the Fortia tasting together. The van took all six of us to the next winery. Then the one after that. By the third stop nobody was sitting with their own spouse. The conversations had crossed all the wires they were going to cross. By the end of the day we'd traded contact information the way you do when you know most of these exchanges don't survive the trip home and a few of them will.

What stayed with me wasn't the coincidence. Coincidences happen. People who grew up in adjacent zip codes find each other in unlikely places. Belmont is small. Sanford is smaller. The Bay Area and Maine both produce wanderers in disproportionate numbers. The math is less astonishing than it feels in the moment.

What stayed was something quieter. Three couples who would never have spoken in an airport, in a hotel lobby, at the next table at any restaurant on earth, sat down together at Château Fortia because someone in Avignon had put them on the same van. The wine was the excuse. The setting was the permission. The Tradition rouge gave the conversation somewhere to go.

That's what a good place does. It makes the conversation possible. It doesn't engineer the meeting. But it gives the meeting a room to become something. Stone walls that hold the cool. A host who knows when to step back. Glasses that don't get rushed.

We drove out of Châteauneuf-du-Pape late in the afternoon. The light was going gold. Lori said something on the way back to the hotel about the world being smaller than it pretends to be. About how the long way around—the unplanned route, the strangers on the van, the wine that takes its time—was usually the route that gave you something worth taking home.

The Tradition was the wine that gave the conversation its room. It was also the wine I'd still be telling people about six months later—not because of how it tasted, though it tasted like itself, which is what a good Châteauneuf is supposed to do. Because of what it was poured alongside.

Some bottles you remember for the wine. Some you remember for the room. Some you remember for the people who happened to be there when the cork came out.

This one was all three.

The Story Behind the Pour

The afternoon ran on two wines from Château Fortia and the company of strangers. The Tradition rouge opened the tasting—Grenache-dominant in the southern Rhône style, Syrah and Mourvèdre filling out the structure, fermented long enough on the skins to extract without overreaching. Dark fruit, not jammy. Garrigue on the nose—that Provençal mix of wild thyme, lavender, and sun-baked stone you only get when the grapes have actually sat in the Châteauneuf gravel. Tannins that knew what they were doing. The kind of wine that earns its appellation rather than wearing it.

The Tradition blanc followed—Clairette and Grenache Blanc, old vines, textured the way old vines make wine textured when nobody rushes them. Stone fruit, white flowers, a long mineral finish. Built for the heat of the courtyard as much as for the food.

We didn't take notes at the second or third wineries that afternoon. The wines had become supporting characters by then. The room had shifted to the people in it. That's how the best afternoons work. The wine does its job. Then it gets out of the way.

Château Fortia, Tradition rouge and blanc—Châteauneuf-du-Pape. The wines that gave us the room, poured by a host who knew exactly when to get out of the way.