Make Wine, Not Whine

Here’s how this came to be:

Friday afternoon. Late Friday afternoon. Sudden, stark and chilling realization: No wine left to make kiddush.

Grab kid. (Always, whenever possible, grab a kid when you’re running out on a last-minute errand. It’s called panic bonding.) Buckle kid in back seat. Step on gas.

Sun precariously hovering a few degrees above the horizon, we arrive at liquor store. Dash for the kosher wine section. Guy standing behind table with wine and cups.

“Would you like to taste some wine?”

“Thank you very much, but no, we use only . . .”

Hey wait! This guy’s got a kipah on his head. He’s got kosher wine on the table. Wine from northern Israel.

“This wine,” he continues, oblivious to my wild-eyed mad rush, “grows at a higher altitude than any other wine.”

“That’s neat. Lemme just buy some real quick and . . .”

“So, you see, the roots have to work real hard . . .”—and the whole spiel, like you just heard in the ’toon.

“. . . so the harder the roots have to work to get to water”—yes, he said those words—“the more intense is the taste of their wine.”

“Wow.” Frozen and standing there. But, hey, the sun’s not waiting.

“Kewl. Gotta run.”

Running, holding bottle in one hand, kid’s hand in another.

“What’s ‘wow,’ Daddy?”

“Wow, I gotta KabbalaToon.”

“Can I do the voice this time?”

“Did you hear that?” I asked while buckling.

”What was I supposed to hear?”

“The harder you have to work to get to the water, the more intense is going to be your wine. He actually said that, didn’t he?”

I’m still “wow”ing while driving. Driving not just down a road any more. Re-driving the whole journey in my mind, from a far, dry and totally confusicated earth, breaking through rocks, breaking my heart and pounding my head against walls, until the water began to trickle in, then more water, and then finally those roots are desperately sucking in that water. Intensely.

I made kiddush that night. Intense kiddush.

We talked about wine and roots.