In the twilight of every mindless drinking episode, the time comes for a reckoning. Drawing the bottom line, but not in glasses drunk, bottles of distillate devoured, hours and days spent in the same bar, at the same table, with the same people, in the same distracted thoughts – or without any.
The drunk always arrives at this one question – how much time was wasted before these sweet hours of timelessness. How much more is to be wasted before stepping out again into this other dimension of eyes tired-aglimmer, thin smiles and full proof against any future? The soft light of the next roadside tavern fades fast before this sinking feeling.
Escape is into merciless despair, like the yearning for a harvest that comes once every hundred years. In the bustling feeling of the dark soil, ruffled by the drizzles of June and eager to fill aromatic grapes. In the handyman’s meticulous care after the vine. In the fermentation of the mind obsessed with collecting every last grape at picking-time. In the strong spirit of the vine herself, which defends the clusters from the good intentions of the high-noon sun and the morning dew.
Long after the tillers and the growers and the pickers are gone yet another season, the vine remains – orphaned, withering, yearning to put its last sap into that harvest which comes but once every hundred years.
The old man will end this sorrow. He will come with his cart, he will gather every cluster and every grape in bags and buckets, he will swing axe and pickaxe. A few Sundays later, he will set up savage brandy in the stills. And the vines will make the stills sing in two voices: branches, roots, stems in one, and their sweet sap in another. From these two songs, the vines’ last brandy will be born – clear like the eyes of a child, but heavy with the sorrows of a long life.
In barrels and in bottles, the new brandy will rest until that time of the year when the young vines hide their first fruit beneath a thick blanket of leaves. Then we’ll sit together with the old man and drink, but we won’t sing. So we don’t remember that same despair brought on only by time long lost.