(continued from home page)...and enchanted. He spoke of sense of place, a sensual taste for terroir and a life tempered by seasons. I left that day with a yearning. Poet Wendell Berry's pensive words, "If you don't know where you are, you don't know who you are," lingered. I wanted to experience more. A graduate student at the time, maverick wine metaphors edged wildly into papers. Was it love or infatuation, definitely lust?
I set to find out, by galosh, flip-flop and passenger side in giant pickup trucks, I cruised hillside rows with growers, pen and paper in hand.
How you beguile, vitis vinifera: delicately etched and naked silhouettes in winter and barbarous, leafy canopy in summer. Starlit nights on the sorting line, followed by arduous or was it amorous pigeage furthered a seduction for words from wine.
Stories now fill the yearning from that autumn day. Stories of possibility. Soren Kiekregaard wrote, “If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of what can be…Pleasure disappoints. Possibility never. And what wine is so sparkling, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating as possibility." -- Soren Kierkegaard
Freelance writer Kerry Newberry covers wine, food, sustainability and lifestyle for a variety of magazines and newspapers. She lives in Portland, Ore., the result of an impromptu road trip west Kerouac style in the name of romance, adventure and, well, being a bit prudent, graduate school too.
Since bit by the wine bug, she has studied with the Wine & Spirit Education Trust and received the Robert Mondavi Fellowship to The Symposium for Professional Wine Writers at Meadwood Napa Valley in 2008. In addition to writing about wine, she dabbles in photography and has had shows at Vino Paradiso Wine Bar in the Pearl, Urban Wine Works, Ecotrust/Jean Vollum Natural Capital Center and on tour with the Oregon State University Art about Agriculture Exhibit.
When she’s not regaling the fine food and wine culture of the Pacific Northwest, she savors running the trails of Forest Park and discovering the Zen of bocce on the Park Blocks.
Kerry may be reached at kanewb@aol.com