The Tobacco in the Cabernet

Issue #12 · Wednesday, August 12, 2026

We ate at Chickie's and Pete's on Thursday before the show. The wine list there is average at best, which is roughly what a casino sports bar list is built to be, and the practical effect is that nobody at the table chooses anything. Lori took the house Chardonnay because the house Chardonnay was the option. I knew what that glass was going to be and I knew I would leave two thirds of it sitting there, so I ordered a Blue Moon and carried it out to the amphitheater instead. The room did not lose that sale over money.

We were supposed to see the real thing in Sacramento in April. A freak storm closed the pass and we never got over the hill, and Journey played its last show on July 2 in Laredo, so that was the chance and it is gone. What was left was Voyager, a Journey cover band, on a stage behind the Grand Sierra in a hundred and three degrees.

The house was dead. Most of that crowd had been standing around cars since noon and had nothing left to give anybody. Eight or nine of us were on our feet knowing every word, and the reason we were up there had little to do with the band being good, which they were. Those songs put us somewhere.

Lori was hearing San Francisco, which is hers by right. I was hearing a college dance floor in Maine, which is about as far from San Francisco as a person can get and still be in the country. Journey was one of the first bands I ever danced to. Same songs, same hundred and three degrees, two completely different rooms.

Lori was up early the next morning, leaving for Tahoe with her Alpha Chi sisters, and packing the wine had fallen to me.

Six bottles out of the cellar for six women I was not going to watch drink them. A 2017 Saini Old Vine Zinfandel off the Apple Block in Dry Creek Valley. A 2020 Wilson Nolan Zinfandel, Dry Creek as well. Two Smith Story wines, the 2022 Olivet Lane Chardonnay from Russian River and the 2025 Filigreen Farm Pinot Gris out of Anderson Valley. A 2017 Keller Estate Pinot Noir off La Cruz Vineyard down in Petaluma. A 2023 Bacigalupi Chardonnay, Russian River, from people I have known a long time.

Three whites and three reds, picked against what I know each of these women actually drinks, which is not always the same as what they say they drink. Into a box, into the back of the car, and that ended my involvement.

Which left me an empty house on a Friday, so I went down to Mo's.

There is no kitchen there. I ordered a Noble Pie and set it open on the table, which is the arrangement. Food at Mo's belongs to whoever is sitting near it, and so does wine, somewhere around the second glass. I opened a Broadbent rosé, which is an afternoon on a porch and does not pretend to be anything else, and the patio on Jones Street started cooling once the sun dropped behind the houses.

Mike, who is there most weeks, had carried something in with him. A 1999 Merryvale Beckstoffer Vineyards Clone Six, Rutherford. Twenty-seven years old, Napa Cabernet off Andy Beckstoffer's fruit. He poured some into my glass without being asked, and then he poured a courtesy taste for Mo and asked her to name it.

She got the vintage. She got the varietal. Blind, off a splash, in her own bar on a Friday night with a pizza box open on the table and the patio filling up around her. Mo has no somm pin and never sat for one. She spends part of each winter in France and Italy tasting and choosing what she will carry, which is where that palate came from and where it keeps getting sharpened.

What she named, correctly, was a wine that had already taken me out of Reno.

It came in smooth with tobacco underneath it, and I was fifty-some years back on a small family farm in West Gardiner, Maine, at Sunday dinner. Gramps smoked a pipe. Uncle Cliff had a cigar going. I have always suspected Gram took a pipe herself when nobody was looking, though nobody in that family would have confirmed it. The whole room came up out of one swallow, unasked for and complete, and I sat on a patio in Nevada for a few seconds inside a house that has not existed in that form for half a century.

Nobody had to tell me what to look for.

Later Burning Man Jim came over with a light Spanish red and poured that too. I never saw the bottle and could not name it today. It took me to Sevilla on a November night that had no business being that warm, walking the city looking for exactly that, a red I could drink in heat. Whatever was on that label would not have added anything to the trip.

Two glasses inside an hour, and neither of them had much to do with the patio I was sitting on. One dropped me at a table where my feet did not reach the floor. The other put me on a street in Andalusia as a grown man with a wallet and a plan. Nobody at that table was working from a tasting note.

Three wines on that patio and two of them handed to me. The pizza went the other direction and came back mostly gone.

Toward the end of it I asked Mo for a porch pounder to take home, something other than the Broadbent. She could have moved me up the shelf. She handed me a Picpoul de Pinet, which is about as far from a margin play as a wine gets. She answered the question I actually asked, and she could do that because she knew who was asking.

Twelve hours earlier I had done the same thing six times standing in my own kitchen, and it had not occurred to me until that moment that it was the same act.

I opened it Saturday afternoon in Sparks with the last of the Noble Pie. It comes from a village above a saltwater lagoon on the Mediterranean where oysters are farmed in racks within sight of the vines, and in Pinet the wine has one job, which is to sit next to shellfish pulled from that water the same morning. Five thousand miles from the oysters, in triple digits, with cold pizza. Exactly right.

Sitting out there with the bottle going warm, what I kept turning over was how little of the whole week had actually been about what was in the glass.

A tasting note tells a guest what to detect. Tobacco, cassis, wet stone, a little vanilla off the oak. All of it can be accurate, and none of it does the thing the tobacco did to me on Friday night.

Detection is a task. What happened at that table was retrieval, and retrieval is not something a host can hand over. It is already sitting in the guest, and the wine goes and gets it.

That difference has been measured. Johan Willander and Maria Larsson, working at Stockholm University, gave older adults a word, a picture, or a smell and asked what came back. The memories triggered by smell landed in the first decade of life. The ones triggered by words and images landed in adolescence and early adulthood. Music behaves like the words do, which is why the research on songs keeps finding the same bump somewhere between fifteen and thirty.

Read that against the week.

Voyager put me on a dance floor in Maine at nineteen or twenty, which is precisely where a song is supposed to put a man my age. Jim's Spanish red, which came through the nose and the mouth but attached itself to a place I had walked as an adult, landed somewhere in the middle. And the tobacco in Mike's Cabernet dropped me at a table where my feet did not reach the floor. Nobody arranged any of it. The retrieval system did what it does, and three cues in thirty-six hours reached into three different decades because that is how the wiring runs.

The same work found something else that matters more on a tasting room floor. Memories that come back through smell are older, they carry more feeling, and they have been thought about less often than memories that arrive any other way.

Less often. That is the whole business.

A guest has replayed their favorite songs a thousand times, and the memories attached to them have been handled until the edges are smooth. What comes up through a glass has not been touched in forty years. It arrives intact and slightly shocking, and the person it happens to has no defenses ready for it, because nobody has ever charged them eighteen dollars to feel that.

Which is why the vocabulary is such an expensive habit. Forest floor. Wet stone. Mossy earth. Graphite. Nobody standing at that bar has eaten any of those things, and a guest who cannot find graphite in a glass does not conclude that graphite is a strange thing to go looking for. They conclude their own palate is broken. Then they go quiet for the rest of the flight, and everything after that is a monologue delivered to somebody who has already decided they do not belong there.

Palates differ enough to make the exercise unreliable anyway. Two people take the same pour, and one gets cherry all the way through while the other gets almost nothing, and neither of them is wrong about what happened in their own mouth. A host who treats the tech sheet as an answer key has built a test that most of the room will fail, in a room those people paid to stand in.

The question that works runs the other direction. What does this remind you of?

Nobody can get that one wrong. The answers come back as porches and kitchens and long drives and grandfathers, which is where the wine was going to take them regardless of whether anybody asked.

The floor cannot manufacture that and cannot predict it either. Two people stood in the same heat on Thursday hearing the same four minutes of music and went to two different decades on two different coasts. The same pour will do the same thing to a bar full of guests on a Saturday, which means there is no script that gets written in advance, and the tasting room that runs on a script is the tasting room least equipped to notice what is actually happening in front of it.

What the floor can do is see the moment arrive and then stop talking.

It looks like a guest going quiet for a beat, or saying something offhand about their grandmother's kitchen or a trip they took once. The trained response is to acknowledge it warmly and get back to the tech sheet, because there are three more pours and a club pitch waiting. The better move is to ask about the kitchen. Where was it. Who was cooking. That conversation costs ninety seconds and it fastens the wine to something the guest cannot buy anywhere else.

People cancel wine club memberships all the time. They do not cancel the ones tied to something they can still smell.

An allocation assembled off a tier name and a red-white ratio will underperform one assembled by somebody who knows the member, every time, and the gap shows up in the renewal numbers rather than in the shipping report. I did the second kind on Friday morning, with six bottles and a cardboard box, for women whose preferences I have been paying attention to for years.

Lori got home Sunday. Which bottle went first, and where any of those bottles took anybody, is something I will not find out, and that is the ordinary condition of the work.