#5: Out of winter’s desert

Red Blooms & Australian Pinot Noir

Fruit unfurls in the glass like a Georgia O’Keeffe painting. A brilliant red flower in the cracked desert landscape, petals cool to touch and silvered by moonlight. This is the sensation I get when I sip on Quartier’s 2021 Pinot Noir while listening to Calexico’s Red Blooms – a little-known track from the Californian duo’s richly atmospheric “desert noir” album Carried To Dust. The song opens with the delicate high notes of a piano, minor key, calling to mind a drive through the night – shimmering light and shadows, soft illusions. The wine has a similar texture. It is a silky, cool terrain from which brilliant flashes of fruit emerge: bright strawberries and raspberry, alongside a subtle hint of crushed stones. 

As the song unfolds, so too does the wine, opening its petals. The piano chords jump in minor thirds, and beneath this surface, we hear the metallic strum of guitar strings, which (to me) have a distinctly tangy quality like unripe plum. Lead singer Joey Burns’ voice is smooth, pitch perfect, ripe and rounded. Both song and wine are characterised by a consonance, a sense of cohesion: pleasing to the ear, pleasing on the tongue. The tangy elements are balanced by the smoothness of the fruit, just like the sharp minor tonality is tempered by Burns’ fluid vocals. 

There is a coolness that suffuses the lyrics and the music, as well as the wine. The pleasure it gives is the sort you might get from pressing your cheek against a marble surface, or biting into a crisp red plum. The twinkling piano notes make me think of sunlight glinting on a cold sea, perhaps Bass Strait whose waters lap the shores of Mornington Peninsula – just south of Melbourne, across from Tasmania – where this wine comes from. Waves crashing against the cliffs on a mild winter’s day, the quiet wilderness of it. 

It’s early March as I’m writing this, and despite the promise of spring, the last few days have been bitter here in London. The cold gets into bed with us, and in the morning, condensation sits on the single-pane glass like dew. But the tulips on our window ledge are sprouting, the trees thickening with blossom, and the darkness slowly retreating. We’re nearly out of the desert of winter, spring’s red bloom in sight.