The Pinot Noir Cure
October 7th, 2004 | Posted by Shannon
Friday night I got home from Venice. Sunday, I went to breakfast with my brother, came home, and got slammed with one of those wonderful “I must have caught it on the plane” bugs. The rest of Sunday, and all day Monday, I totally out of it. Weird how that always seems to happen when you get back, not when you go – as if your body has a built-in travel immunity. (Though I did get really sick in Chicago, in June. Maybe travel immunity doesn’t work for work. Though, the Venice trip was sort of work. Hmmm….)
Tuesday I felt better but of course the past two days I have had that end of the cold mega-mucous and hacking cough thing. How does the body produce all that stuff? Not to be gross, but I am really wondering. Nothing I learned in High School taught me about the human body and mucous.
Anyway, yesterday I had to go up to Huntington Beach for a Pinot Noir tasting and seminar, followed by lunch. I was there to sell a new book on North American Pinot Noir to the attendees, and of course I was invited to the seminar and the lunch. After that I had to drive back to Encinitas and work at the wine bar I work at when the owners are not around. So it was to be a long, long day.
All the way up to Huntington Beach I was coughing. I figured there would be no way for me to do the seminar and lunch, because I would be making a spectacle of myself. It’s the kind of cough where you cough so hard you feel like you are going to puke, the kind where mucous comes out of various orifices and you cannot help it. I’d just have to sell the books and try not to cough all over people’s credit cards. No amount of Halls cough drops was helping.
Then, during the seminar, which was going on in a room with a closed door, thankfully, one of the staff members brought me a glass of Pinot Noir. It was something really good from a small producer in Oregon – the kind of Pinot I never get to taste. And I am telling you – that shit cured my cough!!! It was gone! All of a sudden I felt way better, and I was able to go to the lunch, and drink more Pinot Noir with the people from the seminar who clearly had not been spitting and were all fairly buzzed at 1:00 P.M. No cough, until I got back in the car to go South. Then I was coughing a little again.
Went to the wine bar and opened. Really the cough doesn’t get to the “I am going to puke” stage until I have to speak, which, at the wine bar, I do. I take an order, then run back into the storeroom and cough. Get the wine, then run outside and cough. That is, until I POUR MYSELF A GLASS OF PINOT NOIR. Then, the coughing stops!
I swear this is a true story. I couldn’t sleep last night, because of the coughing. I was wishing I had a Pinot Noir cough drop. I think this could be a revolutionary new medicine for coughs. I want to develop, and market a product like this. Besides coughs, the Pinot Noir drops would be good for Pinot Noir junkies, they could pop one after their morning coffee, on the subway home, whatever.
I was telling a customer about the Pinot Noir cure last night. She said, “do you think Zinfandel would work? Merlot?” I’m not so sure but I have to work at the wine bar again tonight so I will check it out. But it was Pinot Noir that saved me, all day and all night, yesterday.
