I have to go to a wedding this weekend. I hate weddings. Well, I hate bad weddings. Sometimes, someone manages to throw a good one, but that is pretty rare. A couple of years ago I went to a wedding and reception that was held at the home of a once-famous 1980’s rocker, and that was a pretty good one. All the guys still had “the hair.” You know, 1980’s rock band hair. All the wives were 1980’s groupies, all grown up and married but still a Size One and obviously, they also still had “the hair.” There was a band (of course) and they played Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger.” At a wedding! I’ll never forget that.

Sadly, weddings like this are few and far between. Brides, and mothers, put way too much confidence in hotel catering managers and DJ’s. Why is the DJ dictating the events of the wedding? I HATE that. “And Nowwwa, the whole wedding party will dance.” To some gawdawful Whitney ballad. I don’t believe the DJ should be in charge of the party – we, the guests should be in charge of the party. Well, really, the bride should be, but usually the bride is too nervous, too uptight, or too drunk to be in charge.

Of course, there is always that random wedding where people get up and dance to Kool and the Gang early on, like before their 9th cocktail. Usually though, there are about two hours of everyone sitting around, eating their dry prime rib, soggy caeser salad, and Stouffers lasagna and looking at each other. This is way too long.

I hate the dollar dance, the garter thing, and especially, the bouquet throwing. I’ve been scolded to never use the word “hate” in my writing, but I hate those things! Hate them! How come people are always trying to get me to go up to catch that stupid bouquet? I’ve already been married, twice and I don’t want to get married anytime soon again. (One marriage was annulled and doesn’t count, but still I don’t want to do that bouquet thing.)

So. When I got married – it’s been eleven years now – I threw a party that people still talk about. I planned the whole thing myself, with not much help from my party-loving, gorgeous ex-husband (not that I would have accepted any help.) I heard a cool jazz band at the Fillmore Street Festival in San Francisco, and looked them up and hired them. I talked to this crazy fashion photographer, that the band turned me on to. He said stuff like “do you want pictures with people with boogers in their noses? I think not.” Of course I hired him. He set up a sort of backdrop where everyone had their picture taken “prom style” – the line for this was always long. I have pictures of people airborne at my wedding, pictures of people in all sorts of crazy airborne twists, three feet off the ground. We had the whole thing at a killer place where they have jazz concerts, right on the Pacific. The sunset was fantastic, I had a thousand cases of wine and two kegs, all kinds of food that I never ate, and everyone had a good time but me.

I hated it! I was so stressed out. I think me, and weddings, just don’t mix. Perhaps I’ll go into wedding planning, a la J Lo in that movie “The Wedding Planner” – a control freak type job cut out well for me, except that I hate to wear nylons and beige business suit dress thingys. I’d do it just for the gazillion suffering wedding guests out there. I’d do it for you, people.

I’m in the process of writing my trip report. It seems to be taking forever. But it hasn’t really been forever – I’ve been back less than a month. I’m still in Sevilla. I sit and write and check my notes and think about the events and where they fell into place, in my mind vs. in my journal.

You have got to write this stuff down. At least I do. There are blind spots in my brain. Whole days could go by that would be unremembered if I didn’t make a note here or there about what was going on. For example:

On September 30, 1998, in Florence, I wrote in my journal that the Arno was very brown, that I could have had a bartender named Lorenzo but chose not to, and that I was smoking cigarettes and it felt really good.

What I remember: my friend Lisa was hanging with some guy named Carmello. He took us to a bar, full of guys, who looked at us with suspicion. Lorenzo, the bartender, was aloof, until he asked me what I thought of Carmello, and I said, “stronzo.”

I didn’t know much Italian, but I knew that word. I didn’t really think Carmello was a stronzo. I think I was just trying to impress Lorenzo with my usage of Italian swear words. “Why don’t you stay?” he asked, when we were leaving.

I’m not sure I would even have this memory at all, had I not written a short paragraph about it in one of my scraggly notebooks. It’s not even that great of a memory. But it is A MEMORY.

If I didn’t have these journals, I could never write a trip report. I’m about to post a trip report from a journey I took four years ago, and I can because I wrote down everything on that trip.

Sometimes the writing is really lame:

“Everyone has an umbrella here. It rains alot.” (Man, that is FANTASTIC. George W. could do better.)

Sometimes it is better:

“The boy from the glass shop comes into the cafe and he and the barman have a quick drink and hum to each other.” (Did this really happen, or is this my perception of what happened? Hmmm.)

Sometimes it takes a while before you can read your journal and think, hey, that is pretty good.

It’s important to me that it be good – but it is more important to me that I’ve recorded it.

I can’t believe it is May already. It is hot in San Diego, summer is here, there are girls in bikinis and drunk guys with tattoos all over the place. There are keggers and guys with signs that say “I have weed for sale.” I am not sure that my little hamlet is part of the real world. But it is good to come home from a long and tiring work trip and get back into non-reality.

So. The company I work for gives out an award every year, for excellence in wine literature. That is, the writing of many books about wine. In order to get the award you have to have written about American wine a bit. All the most famous wine writers have received this award, except for Oz Clarke. I’m sure he doesn’t really give a fig about this, but I am just as sure he would be pretty happy to come and accept it if he did. This year, the recipient was the 90 something year old Robert Lawrence Balzer. At first I was like, why are we giving the award to that guy? I didn’t realize, that he is totally loved by all these old winemaker and wine industry guys. Plus, he hung out with Gloria Swanson (which he went on and on about in his speech.) OK. Homie REALLY won my respect when I spotted him, during the Press (I mean part Press and part Professional Drunk/Gate Crasher) tasting, smoking a cigarette on the steps of the California Culinary Academy with a couple of young, hot, future grill cooks. I tried to be accomodating (which of these 790 wines would you like on your dinner table, Mr. Balzer? He gives me the look that is given to all women who are not Gloria Swanson.)

It was a good event – out of 14 of them (in almost 20 years) I have done 13 and it’s getting pretty smooth now. I can’t even begin to describe the set up of 800 or more different wines, on long tables, by varietal, at 6 A.M. Well I could describe but it would be really boring. Just imagine setting 150 Chardonnays on long tables in alphabetical order and then discovering you forgot one. You then have to move 300 bottles four inches to make room. Let me just say that there is a bit of Champagne flowing amongst the staff by 10 AM, when the Press/Professional Drunk Gate Crasher Tasting starts.

The Press/PDGC tasting goes for six hours, and then we clean everything up for a big banquet and all the boys at my work (all hot 30 somethings) are in tuxes and I am in a cocktail dress from Ross Dress for Less. I sometimes have a hard time getting rid of the PDGCs at 4:00. At 3:30 I go around and say WE ARE DONE IN HALF AN HOUR. PLEASE MOVE ALONG. Some of these dudes are still on Gewurztraminers; there are about 500 reds to get through, and they want to try them all (or at least all the expensive ones.) Last year, there was a bit of a problem as some of these guys did not listen to me but instead, at 4:00, proceeded to pour 3/4 full glasses of Stags Leap Cabernet straight down their throats. So this year, I wasn’t taking any of that nonsense and instead told them, borrowing from the film Pulp Fiction, that if they did not finish by 4:00 I was “going to get medieval on their ass.” Well, what do you know! It worked! They all left by 4:15. I need to expand this whole S & M thing with the wine writers in my life.

So we (us and 150 other paying folks, like Mr. Robert Mondavi) eat and drink and then we have several hundred bottles of wine, half or 3/4 full, left over. Everyone asks, what do you do with all that leftover wine?

Well, email me and I will tell you.

I know the instant I fell in love with the Spanish wine known as Fino, a super-dry Sherry. We were in a gourmet shop in Cordoba, at about eleven in the morning. They gave out little samples of wine and olive paste and other tasty treats. I’d been served Fino at a few cafes, but it didn’t exactly rock my world. Even though I’d been told to drink it, I wasn’t really seeking it out.

Then, that morning in the wine shop in Cordoba, the salesperson/taster giver handed me a little plastic cup with a shot of cold Fino. I drank it, and the earth moved. That shot, 15.5% alcohol, clean and clear and from the soil of Spain, hit my bloodstream in a violent burst and left me incredibly happy and at peace with the world. The taste of that little sample, and the feeling I had after I downed it, will remain with me forever.

Fino is an acquired taste, and I have acquired it with a vengeance. I bought a bottle of Lustau Fino on Friday (thank you, thank you, San Diego Wine Co.) Saturday, I dipped into it. One sip, and you are transported to a cafe in Sevilla. You are in a place of Spanish dreams. This is a wine that takes you to where it was made. And that is what wine is all about, isn’t it? That is what wine should be about.

It’s Sunday night, and the bottle is gone. I shared a little, but not much. Thankfully, there is more where that came from. I think this will be an addiction, I’ll go to restaurants, and ask if they have Fino, and when they don’t I will storm out in a huff. I want to be the reason restaurants start serving Fino.

The other taste of Spain – Jamon Jamon Ruffles. Two bags came home with me. You only need to eat one, and the ham flavor kicks you in the face. It’s like a crunchy piece of heaven.

Wine and Potato Chips. Like I’ve always said, it doesn’t take much to make me happy.