Chapter 9: Saki Is Wine
Stan the winemaker told Jeremy more about Ms. PR’s marketing study. She had her two market researchers question purchasers at the Cuisine store about a wine that landed in their basket after being lauded in the most recent wine column by a well-known wine writer. The column’s author, her research told her, was the former Leonard Bernbaum, who had legally had changed his name to Saki some years before. He wrote a syndicated column titled, “Saki Is Wine.”
His overbearing manner came through brilliantly in his column. The public – especially large segments of the wine-drinking public – enjoyed being browbeaten by his aloof prose and haughty phrasing. The editors of the newspapers carrying Saki’s column were astounded by his success, but they likened him to Howard Cosell or that obnoxious San Francisco weatherman – the one with the dildo-shaped pointer. Few could stand them or their demeanor and that was why the ratings were so high.
Saki was known by everyone in the wine biz for being on the take. The amount of kind words he wrote about a wine was directly proportional to the number of free bottles of that wine in his cellar. Saki referred to himself and his kind in his column as wine journalists. Yet Saki had no formal training in the Fourth Estate. Back in his days as Leonard, or Lenny, he had attended medical school. And it was there that he had fallen in love with wine. Literally. No one else would have him.
Early on in med school, Lenny realized he would be a horrible failure as a doctor, even as a dermatologist. And after his first year, he was positive that he would never have the chance to prove it. Three months into his first semester, Lenny concluded that he would have to stay afloat on his own; his father, an alum, had known several members of the admissions board, but none of Lenny’s professors.
Lenny insured his demise as a med student by turning to the bottle. He hit it as hard as his classmates hit their books. Lenny had good intentions. He was receiving an education in the social graces that would be required when he no longer was a person, but a professional corporation – or so he rationalized. At first he had begun studying anatomy in the evening with a glass of wine. Then two. Then a half-bottle with dinner. Then a bottle before dinner. Soon he was loitering in the wine shops. He read Lichine and Johnson and Parker voraciously. He could name the eight villages of Beaujolais, but not the glands of the endocrine system.
An inordinate amount of the monthly stipend received from his father was spent on wine. He was buying and drinking Dom and Vollards and RC and Lafite. He was developing a specialist’s taste for wine without having served his required term as an intern. He was in debt and he was flunking, but in those few moments each night when he first put his nose in the glass and smelled her perfume, in that instant of feeling her warmth as she caressed his tongue, and afterward, in that stupor-like ecstasy he felt after having drained her of every drop of her sensuous juices – for those few moments Lenny completely escaped any thought of his being a spoiled and failing asshole.
In the final days of his plummeting medical career, Lenny had used wine, as he would for the remainder of his life, as a prop for his sagging, beaten ego. He formed a wine club at the med school, appointing himself Le President de Societe des Medecins Genophiles. Several of his fellow students and his professors attended the mini-seminars he conducted once a month. Lenny was shocked at how easily he could intimidate them all by undercutting, with a nonchalant comment couched in the tone of an expert, any utterance that came from their mouths resembling a personal opinion.
Upon receiving his grade report at the end of his first year, Lenny began the westward trek that would eventually take him to California – he wasn’t welcome back at the medical school that fall. Lenny first moved to Kansas City. He stayed with an aunt and uncle while he looked for employment in wine sales – and while his father scoured the area for a condominium for him. It was his father’s idea for Lenny to leave the East Coast; the obvious but unspoken reason being that his father did not want to be constantly reminded of his own failure – the sight of his son.
Lenny moved into a lavishly furnished high-rise and was hired by a gargantuan desert wine producer as a sales rep for Missouri. At his two-week training session in California, Curtis was flabbergasted at how little his fellow students – even his instructors – knew or cared about wine. From what he learned during the sessions, he could just as well have been putting potato chips on the shelf. He found several of his peers were former salesmen for large manufacturers in the aerospace and defense industries, with one a former peddler of napalm before the contracts fizzled out at the tail end of the Vietnam War.
Lenny survived six months with the company. Constant badgering from his sales manager was one reason for his departure. But his sales quotas bothered him the most. He steadily increased sales after taking over his territory, but never by enough to please his bosses. One night he sat down and figured out how much wine he would be selling if he extrapolated the increasing sales quota placed on him during the past six months. After an hour of computations on his calculator, Lenny saw a number that astounded him. If the state’s population continued to rise at the current rate, within two decades (in about 1995) the average Missourian would be consuming 65 gallons per person, per year of his company’s wine, twice as much as all the wine consumed annually by the average Italian. Lenny rationalized that by quitting the company he simply was returning to reality.
By a fluke of luck, Lenny landed a job as the wine buyer and in-house wine expert for a dynamic wine distributor with Mafia ties. It was at this same time that Lenny Bernbaum became “Saki” and wrote his first wine column by-lined with his new name.
Several months into his column at a wine tasting Lenny learned of his plagiarism in his new name. An English professor at a local university, a fellow wine lover, approached Saki and told him of his amusement of the double innuendo of the pen name. Lenny smiled and nodded. At the public library the next day, Lenny learned of the author, H. H. Munro, and as Saki he had a new bit of trivia for future cocktail parties and wine seminars about a fellow author who shared his name.
And Saki was no fool. He quit berating California wine years before his fellow writers and wine educators east of the Continental Divide followed suit. He knew that it was the new frontier that held the key to his future, for they both had something in common: a disappointing past.
Before Saki left for The Coast, he took his long awaited trip to Europe to observe the grape harvest. The cost of the trip was paid for by his father, a present to Saki for not having come home for four years, especially for his absence after he had relinquished his name and his Jewish heritage. He heard his father had said more than once, “Oy, Lenny? The boy is crazy. He moves to the hinterland and thinks he’s an Oriental.”
Saki found his European wine trip exciting, but exhausting. His tour group visited twelve major grape-growing areas in fourteen days. Highlights included a fifteen-minute tour by a French-speaking cellar master of a dilapidated fifth-growth Bordeaux chateau, and passing by on the bus the front gates, so lovingly depicted on the labels, of Chateaux Leoville Las Cases, La Lagune and Canon. For years after the tour, Saki would pick up a bottle of a particular Chateau and say, “Ah, yes. I remember that gate well … .”
On the tenth day of the tour, suffering from exhaustion and a light case of the flu, Saki lay in his tiny hotel room in a feverish delirium. Rain had been his constant companion, leading the French to publicly call the vintage a nine on ten, and privately the worst since 1968. In the solitude of his dreary cubicle Saki dwelled on how boring his fellow travelers were: Even he couldn’t talk about wine for two solid weeks, yet it was obvious they could. That was the moment that he thought about the saying he had once heard, that only difference between an insane person and an eccentric was money. With that as his base, Saki developed his own theorem: That the only difference between an alcoholic bag lady and a wine connoisseur - was gender and money. Fortunately his fever broke a few hours later, and when he awoke in the morning, refreshed, he conveniently had forgotten his hallucination.
Upon his return, Saki convinced his father to fund his new West Coat venture: To open a wine store in a Bay Area city. His father agreed, but not without strings attached. Saki had to sign a contract to not enter his home state for five years except disguised as an unknown rabbi to attend unexpected funerals. Failure to live up to those terms meant the immediate calling due of the note on Saki’s loan.
The place Saki had chosen for his shop was a small community on the furthermost point of the inland bay. Nearby were the vineyards of several pioneering California wineries. Within a half-dozen years Saki would have a chain of wine and gourmet food shops in the state’s fastest growing city in population and per capita income, in the city with a burgeoning semi-conductor and kiddie-viddie game industry, in a sprawling metropolis that was chewing up those historic vineyards and spitting out tacky subdivisions in their stead. Saki’s shops grew because the town grew, and he became a local financial success. But Saki had grown tired of settling disputes with his deli help, of deciding what new video game to place next to the smut rack, really of being a merchant, so he sold his stores at a tidy profit and concentrated on his writing full time. Saki’s wine column had been carried by the town paper, which became the flagship of a growing nationwide newspaper chain. Saki’s column was soon in every one of the paper’s affiliates, including the favorite paper of his father back in New Jersey, and Saki basked in his new-found notoriety.
