Boo Walker's Blog, page 6

Or bought the next person in line at the barbershop or salon their cut?

Or paid for a few people behind you in the toll line?

Or just told someone you love them?

What if you went out of your way for a stranger?

Offered a compliment on someone’s appearance?

Told a telemarketer how much you appreciate their call?

Rubbed your spouse’s neck?

Actually sat on the floor to talk to a child?

What if you called your mom just to say hi?

My friend and fellow St. Pete author, Kris Radish, let me share with her book club last night. Picture Boo Walker talking with forty smart and engaging women who have all read my novel, Red Mountain. Imagine my smile as we talked about the characters who live in my head WHILE drinking Red Mountain wines. Kris didn’t have to do that for me; she’s just that kind of person. And I woke today determined to pay it forward.

Has anyone done anything amazing for you lately? Or have you done something for someone else that’s worth sharing. Please comment below. I’m looking for creative inspiration!

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Please, for Heaven’s sakes, just get this slightly overweight late-thirties monkey-minded male to Shavasana.

I love final Shavasana. My teacher is done beating me up for the day—in a good way—and there’s a chance I’m going to get a cold towel on my forehead and maybe even a foot rub. But more importantly, my final Shavasana is when I’m connected to what’s important. It’s when I’ve shed all the non-sense running around in my monkey mind, and I’m left with the stuff that matters. If I’m lucky, my wife is next to me in class, and during Shavasana, she reaches out and holds my hand, literally connecting me to what matters most. I’m not sure there is anything more wonderful in my world than those moments.

My monkey mind is a fireworks display, not like a 4th of July backyard show with kids running around, sparklers in hand, and dad shooting a five dollar rocket for the finale. My monkey mind is the fireworks show on New Year’s Eve at the turn of the century at Disney World, firework after firework bursting every millisecond, barely a moment of silence, a rainbow of color and sound, a massive eruption of thought that is nearly uncontrollable. And yet… yoga can control it. Eckart Tolle talks about the silent watcher in his book The Power of Now.  It’s generally about ten minutes into class when I’m trying to balance my somewhat not svelte figure on one leg that I start to disconnect my actual self from my thinking mind. Like a silent watcher, I start to see how incredibly active my monkey mind, a.k.a. left brain, is. And as I watch these thoughts, I see how absurd they are.

I just missed being a millennial by a year, but I can multi-task with the best of them. I can be thinking about an email I forgot to send while worrying about my job security and when I’m going to get a raise while also texting three people and checking Facebook and Instagram while also thinking about whether we fed the sheep or pruned the vines or why my son keeps yelling at me, “You make me mad!” while also regretting the veggie burger and fries and beer I had the night before. I can do all that while coming up with a character for my next book while worrying about my beat up truck and whether she’ll make it another winter; all this while analyzing the new Chili Peppers’ album and also worrying about a friend who is in a relationship I don’t agree with and ALSO wondering if I’m really doing what I should be doing with my life while ALSO running through my to-do list, which I have had to break up into different theme and priority sections because I’ve taken so much on. I have one for work, one for writing, one for general life, and one for our farm, and then they are broken up into high, medium, and low priority. (I can’t believe I’m telling you this; it sounds like I have severe OCD.) I can do all of the above while running through my high priority lists, thinking about what states are not buying enough wine (I sell wine for a living) while also thinking about when we need to move the sheep to another patch of grass while also worrying about changing my A/C filters AND working on refinancing our house and… okay, you get it. ALL AT THE EXACT SAME TIME! Take that you millennials!

Welcome to my monkey mind. It’s exhausting. Trust me, I’m in it. And most of it just doesn’t matter. It’s mind chatter that I don’t need, getting in the way of what’s really important. Getting in the way of the present moment. Sure, I need to get these things done, but I don’t need it all clogging up my precious and limited brain capacity at all waking moments. Yoga is just about the only thing—the only healthy thing (did I mention I’m in the wine business?)—that can control my monkey mind. And by the time I hit Shavasana, I pretty much have the monkey on a leash obeying my commands.

So what matters? As I’m lying on my mat holding my wife’s hand at the end of class, I feel like someone has cleaned the dirt off the lens through which I see life, and I see in sharp focus what matters. Here’s a hint: nothing on all those to-do lists matter. What I find important after a yoga session can pretty much can be summed up by one word: love. I feel love for myself, and with this love, I am reminded and encouraged to make sure I’m living every moment as if it was my last. And then I feel love extended to my wife and son and friends and family and fellow practicers and even the people I don’t know. And this feeling makes me want to be a better person and love harder and do my best to make the world a better place.

That’s what yoga is to me. My mat is my church; my teachers are my preachers. It doesn’t matter if I’m in a Gold’s Gym in eastern Washington or Michael Franti’s studio in Bali. When I hit the mat, I reconnect with the universe.

So like I said, please get me to Shavasana.

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I’ve been in the wine business since 2008, since the crash of the stock market that happened to coincide with my own quarter-life crisis. In other words, Boo Walker was crashing at nearly the same speed as the Dow Jones Industrial Average. And so I made a run for it, leaving the day trading job I’d had since graduating college, packing it all up and moving out west, chasing a dream of driving a tractor.

Up to that point, my wine education came from the days I’d take my thicker-than-now wallet to see a bottle shop owner in Charleston, South Carolina. She would send me home with wines from around the world, encouraging me to discover all that was out there. On one of those visits, she handed me a bottle of Red Mountain wine from Hedges Family Estate, and perhaps more importantly, the ticket to my destiny.

It wasn’t only the juice that captured me. Washington State had become a part of me since I’d first heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit” by Nirvana when I was a teenager. I may have played that song on my early-nineties boom box more times than any other kid that year, and it’s from that tune that I began to explore all that was the Seattle music scene at the time. Washington State became this evergreen fantasyland in my dreams, a place far, far away from everything I knew. So when I drank my first glass of Hedges, a bell rang deep within. It was only a matter of time before my mug defaced a Washington State driver’s license.

The multi-talented fermenter-of-all-things daughter and now winemaker, Sarah, got me a job working in the vineyards, and from time to time, the family would invite me inside to sit at their table in the Chateau and taste through the wines. Oh, how quickly I discovered the limits of my wine knowledge. I could have spat off a list of cult Napa Cabernets, probably told you what grapes were grown in Bordeaux, and maybe the difference between Syrah and Shiraz (nothing but the spelling, btw), but I didn’t understand the larger picture.

The Hedges family not only taught me how to drive tractors but also the philosophies of the old world. Anne-Marie Hedges, a Champenoise whose parents and grandparents fought for the resistance against Hitler, had impressed upon her American family the wine beliefs of her European roots.

It was something Anne-Marie and Tom’s visionary Francophile son said one day that tore me away from all my previous notions of wine and still lingers with me every time I raise a glass to my lips. Christophe said, “I’d rather drink a bad wine that has a sense of place than a great wine that lacks terroir.” In other words, context matters. Wine is so much more than the nose and mouth. Kermit Lynch, another person who sculpted my beliefs says in a similar vein, “Blind tasting is to wine what strip poker is to love.” Yes, blind tasting is fun and also educational. Discovering the nuances of lychees, peaches, and other stone fruits in white wines; or the differences between Oregonian and Burgundian Pinot Noir; or the true meanings of “minerality” and “finesse” and “subtlety;” or the profiles of various viscosities, alcohol levels, and acidity, is paramount to one’s journey in wine.

But in my eyes (perhaps brainwashed by my old world teachers), context matters infinitely more. What led to that bottle of wine sitting on your table? What led to the juice that now dazzles your olfactory system and dances on your tongue? Is there a family behind the wine? How many generations? When and how did it all begin? What are the details of that specific day that a couple decided to start a business in wine? What obstacles presented themselves along the way? What were the happiest moments?

What are the personalities of each of the family members and the other employees? What are their convictions? What is the typical music, food, and sport of the region? How does the winery farm? Do they care about sustainability, organics, and Biodynamics? Is the wine estate-grown and bottled? Are there other elements of a farm that might contribute to a more rounded sense of place? Do they use animals? What are the names of their dogs, chickens, sheep, and horses? Like the mom and pop producers in Sicily, do they make olive oil from their estate trees? Do they use concrete, barrel, or amphorae? Do they use indigenous yeast for fermentation? Do they have honeybees? Like my new favorite, Domaine Gerard Raphet in Morey-Saint-Denis, do they use horses to till the land?

Those questions don’t yet touch the more traditional and yet equally important meaning of the word terroir. Where are the grapes grown? Do they come from a single vineyard? What is the soil? What is the climate? What is the slope? Where does the water come from? Does wind or fire affect the vines? And on and on.

No, you can’t learn the answers to these questions by putting your nose to the glass or taking in that first and second sip. If all you care about is those hedonistic qualities, you might as well be playing strip poker. Though it sounds like a good time and I’m considering peeling off my shirt right now, wine is more than fun to me. Wine is life. To know the context of wine is not only helpful, but it is crucial to enjoying the bottle that stands before you, waiting to whisk you away.

The Hedges family’s answers to these questions keep me thirsty for more even after slinging ten vintages of their juice around the world. As Kurt Cobain sings in the song that started it all for me, “And for this gift I feel blessed.”

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