Hi!

A little something different for you this week! If you’d like to skip this unusual musing and get right to the philanthropic bike ride I’m doing, you can go straight to the bottom, or here. Thanks for reading!

Juice

I have to by honest, dear reader – I’ve had a lot of messed-up wine in the last month. It has left me feeling puzzled (and pairing-less) but also grateful for the deeper investigations into winemaking and culture those sips catalyzed.

I’m mostly interested in finding beauty, meaning, and nuance and sharing it with you through wine and song. But today, let’s take a moment to ponder when good juice goes bad (so to speak.)

When is a ‘flaw’ something to celebrate? Tolerate? Revile? Finding the answer is essential to discovering one’s pleasure, and understanding winemaking all the more for it.

There’s many an opportunity for wine to be flawed – whether that makes a wine ‘bad’ or not is often just a matter of degree. Wine that’s been slightly oxidized might have a touch of nuttiness that makes it a richer dram, or a hint of the yeast brettomyces (brett for short) that gives a wine the ever-so-slight rusticity that speaks to a place.

Dialed up however, that oxidative quality can make a wine more nut than fruit, more flat than alive – and when bret goes wild, your wine will reek of the barnyard. When is too much too much? It’s all a matter of taste, and opinion (though I certainly have strong ones.)

These tasting misadventures reminded me that making something beautiful is never easy. Both the trend-chasing newcomer as well as those who stay fossilized by outworn tradition can equally fall prey to the same hazards.

The only guarantees of “flawlessness” come from synthetic wine products of larger industrial operations. They may guarantee a reliable outcome free of some mishaps and the risk that makes them possible, but that’s often at the expense of making wine that’s honest, rooted in the earth form which the grapes came, and free of spooky ingredients.

I’ll take my chances!

Jazz

Total ‘perfection’ is easily available these days in music – there are people guiding A.I. to make pristine recordings of things that sound remarkably human, every ‘quirk’ is by design. There's no risk of a sour note involved – however, the risk to our humanity is incalculable and the rewards are hollow (even if they sound credible enough.)

Imperfection in music, especially jazz, is a rich subject. The idea of perfection itself is almost a non-sequitur – in music that has never existed before, and is largely spontaneously composed, who’s to say what’s perfect, or if it can even be achieved?

Miles Davis emblemizes what it means to have the artistry to risk and integrate what some might see as a mistake, and make it thrillingly part of the living art. In a temporal art form, there is no still point of perfection, only an evolution of discovery. As he said:

“It’s not the note you play that’s the wrong note – it’s the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong.”

One of my favorite unplanned moments in recording history is the beginning of Davis’ “Stella by Starlight” Live at Philharmonic Hall (Columbia, 1972). The band is closing out its misty, portentous first chorus – then Miles thrillingly kicks the rhythm into gear while not-quite-squarely landing on a B natural. In the space after the note, this guy in the audience gives out a cry of “YEEEEAAAAHHH!” that’s unbridled in its enthusiasm (and volume!) At that moment I don’t know what I love more – the music, or the lovers of the music.

What’s better than perfect? Ah yes, sublime.

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Stella by Starlight - Live a... Miles Davis PREVIEW   ​

I’m riding in the Five Boro Bike Tour this coming Sunday, in a charity ride for ADTF – this kind of dementia is a life-ravager, and the proceeds of my ride will go towards research and remedy. I know the cause will keep me going (for 40 miles, fingers crossed!) I hope you’ll consider a donation should you be so moved.

​Donate here. And thank you.

Cheers,

Kristen