“Smarties???” I’ve got two Canarians looking at me with furrowed brows as I take another sip of an enthralling white wine. They lean closer, tilt their heads sideways a bit like dogs do when they don’t know whether to lick you or bite your face off, and repeat with even more inflection, “Smarties?? Really??” 

“Yes, Smarties. That’s what this wine reminds me of.” But, apparently their version of Smarties candies is completely different from mine, so I start frantically searching for a picture of them on my iPhone to avoid the oenological equivalent of taking a shit on someone’s family heirloom Persian rug. I show them the little tablets in their clear cellophane wrapping and they say, “Ohhhhhh! Here, Smarties are a chocolate-coated candy. That’s why we were confused! We call these little candies aspirina.” The furrowed brows relax and a Cheshire smile washes over Jesus’ face.

“It makes complete sense! When you bite them, there is chalkiness. And there’s a sense of both acidity and fruitiness. I have never had anyone make that connection before!” He nods with equal parts approval and understanding, and I’m pretty sure I’ve just succeeded in not only averting an international snafu but simultaneously impressing the dude who made the wine I’m so enamored with. 

Being enamored was what found me on the north shore of Tenerife to begin with. I had been visiting a wine shop in Delray Beach and the owner turned me on to Envinate’s Migan, a sensuous, earthy, funky, seductive red from Valle de La Orotava—the exact region I was currently sitting in while jostling to avoid the snafu. I’d always had a thing for volcanic wines but when that Migan passed my lips, all it took was a text to my friend, Thea: I wanna go to the Canary Islands and taste through some wines. It was as simple as that. She was all in. A couple of flights later, we were traipsing through an island that immediately, intrinsically felt like a second home to me. 

Looking downward from Jesus’ steep vineyards, you can see the wide, crystal blue of the Atlantic Ocean with a lace of haze hovering just over it. Looking upward, you can see the impressively high crown of El Teide, the volcano that graces the island and whose eruptions and landslides created Atlante’s vineyards. The wine in my glass—made from albillo criollo and listan blanco—has a salinity and minerality that taste of both the ocean to my left and the volcano to my right. Its 13% ABV gives it these long, sexy legs that go for days and I find myself wishing my legs could do the same, but the damn 40° climb up his vineyards had completely betrayed mine. They weren’t long or sexy. Not so much. They were old and tired. But it was the most glorious sort of tired they could aspire to be. Tenerife is dizzying. Roads wind like sinew, and its terrain makes the slopes of San Francisco look like ant hills.

Atlante’s pre-phylloxera vines, gnarled and braided, are at least 150 years old (but likely much more) and run parallel to the ground, stretched out over the arduous slopes like the arthritic fingers of some ancient, volcanic diety. What the islanders call cordon trenzado is a training system that plaits vines together, trellises them, and lets them grow anywhere from 10 to 50 feet in length. And while this system was originally designed as a space saver that left the ground below free for planting food, it also makes mechanical grape harvesting laughably impossible. Every last grape is collected by hand. 

I continue sinking softly into his wines and Jesus beams as he discusses finally being able to live solely off of his wines and not have to work a second job. The Canary Islands aren’t exactly a place that trips off the tongue when discussing wines. Sun-soaked, beachfront vacations, sure. Wines, not so much. There are no shelves for them in the Spain section of Total Wine. Nobody’s holding free tastings of them from 12 – 2 at your local wine shop with some cute chick pouring listan negro into a plastic cup for you while she flashes you a smile and some cleavage. And they ain’t showing up in any wine-of-the-month clubs, either. In fact, the only way I can feed my monkey is by tolerating one insufferable shit show of a wine merchant in Miami that carries more than a handful of Canary bottles. So, Jesus being able to ditch the second job and rely only on his winery is a victory not easily understood by many outside these islands. 

Atlante’s vineyards are organically farmed, its wines are fermented using only indigenous wild yeasts, and the final product is neither filtered nor fined. But you don’t once hear the words “natural wine” spill out of Jesus’ mouth or see it on his labels. The nebulous term gets trampled under his boot heels and kicked off later for some slick marketing agency to lap up. There is plenty of chest pounding in this industry from winemakers who boast about their insistence that human intervention be minimal, but we all know what they say about good intentions and that road to hell. It’s not paved, folks. It’s riddled with potholes and it will dent your rims if you taste “natural wines” made by people more concerned with an ideology than they are with the final beverage. Jesus is making wines that taste of fruit, and sand, and clay, and sea salt. His listan negro has an almost indescribable nose and the only sensible notes I manage to scribble down are iron/red meat. It isn’t until days later that I realize that those vines grow in iron- and aluminum-rich basalts and then it all makes complete sense. He’s making wines that are an homage…a love song…a veritable sonnet…to his island.

The Canaries are so far removed from mainland Spain that most people don’t even know where the hell to find them on a map. They sit in the Atlantic, just west of Morocco, at 28° latitude N which is pretty much on par with Tampa, FL. Compare that to Madrid, which sits in the center of Spain and is even with central Jersey, and you’ll understand why Tenerife has as much in common with Rioja as Florida oranges have with Jersey tomatoes. These aren’t Spanish wines. Their identity is completely divorced from the ones made by the lispers up north. Go ahead and fight me—you’ll lose. Being called Spanish wines is a technicality at best. Much the same way that Don Q rum is Puerto Rican rum and not American rum, Tenerife’s wines (and that of the other islands) is Canary wine, not Spanish wine. Jesus didn’t say that, but his wines did.

We leave Atlante, but as excited as I may be to hit whatever’s next, I’m bummed. I want to sit at the sun-lit table and shoot the shit with Jesus for a few more hours. Taste through more of his wines. Ask incessant questions about the island’s winemaking history. Fold him up and pack him in my suitcase. But I resist the folding part, hop into Olga’s minivan, and watch Atlante disappear in the rear window, in a cloud of sand and volcanic dust. 

I once read an article that quoted Jonatan Garçia Lima of Suertes del Marqués winery as saying, “I would like to get to a point where people don’t think, ‘I’m ordering a volcanic wine’, but ‘I want to drink a Suertes del Marqués wine’. I’m taking a long-term view…looking at the bigger picture. I don’t just want to be a cellar of fashion, I want to be a classic. I want people to say, ‘This is a great wine’.” And I can’t help but call bullshit. It’s a false dichotomy. There are days when I say, “I want to drink an Atlante wine” and in those moments I am hyper-aware of the fact that what I want is a volcanic wine and that it is, without question, a great wine. These ideas aren’t mutually exclusive. They can coexist, assuming of course that the volcanic wine is, in fact, a great wine—which Atlante is. A great wine is many things, but ideally, it speaks of place—of terroir—and for Canary wines, that place is inarguably volcanic. To hope for that identity to eventually be stripped away is to hope for wines that get lost in the din of every other bottle out there. And that is a fool’s hope, to be sure.

*NOTE: Atlante’s wines are just beginning to be imported into the US by Rosenthal Wine Merchant. 

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“Joe!” I called over and over, half expecting a neighbor to come crashing through the door at any moment, thinking I was in some sort of peril. “JOE!” He was showering.

It took seven screams to be heard. “Come!” I couldn’t manage more than one syllable at a time. I was getting tired of clawing the kitchen counter for stability, and had decided to attempt the five steps from there to the couch. It may as well have been the run from Marathon to Athens.

“I’m coming, mom!” I threw myself down on the couch to wait for him, staring at the screen saver cityscape that my AppleTV had thrown up, listening to what I’m pretty sure was the White Buffalo, and wishing I could remove the 10-gallon water cooler in my head that someone had just knocked into. What the fuck was taking this kid so long? Did he not understand the gravity—or lack thereof—of the situation? Waiting those 45 seconds for him felt like an hour.

Turning 50 was a cake walk. The number had no affect on me. I was feeling great, was completely at peace with my life, and didn’t want for anything. I was living in the tropics, I was off all my fibromyalgia medications, and was fixing to make an appointment for my next bit of ink. The birthday fell on a Thursday so I wasn’t about to make any grand plans, but my brother had invited me out for dinner at a new rooftop eatery that opened nearby. I was all in. “Be here by 5:30. Dinner is at 6.”

I had just finished putting on a pretty, new blouse, throwing some actual makeup on, and feeling pleased that for once my hair was on point, when the kid got home from work. He was looking to take a couple of hits off his bong before showering and getting ready for dinner, and asked if I wanted a birthday hit. At this point in my life—and given what weed has become in the last couple of decades—I only smoke once in a very blue moon, and usually only one hit. And so I had a “fuck it” moment as I am wont to have, and took a rip off the bong, listening to the gurgle, gurgle, gurgle of the water as the smoke disappeared into my lungs. A few minutes later I decided to head inside because I didn’t want the humidity to ruin my hair.

I remember looking at the clock on my DVR and thinking, cool, I’ve got about an hour before we need to head out…I think I’ll get some writing done. I threw myself down on the couch, cracked open the laptop and murmured under my breath, “Fuck me, I forgot how to write!” And that’s where the carnival ride began. A carnival ride that would leave me celebrating 50 with a Whopper, fries, and some sort of sweet crap in a triangular box they were trying to convince me was a slice of chocolate cream pie.

I didn’t want the kid to see me losing my shit, so I went into my bedroom and locked the door behind me, figuring I’d just go lay down and ride this thing out so my head would be clear by dinnertime. There was a tiny hole in my ceiling and it was trying to suck me into its vortex. Marcus King was blaring on my TV, being challenged by the hip-hop coming out of the kid’s room, and all the while I couldn’t find my fingers. He knocks on my door. I’m fucked. “Come hear a new beat I’m working on, Mom.” Gimme five minutes, kid. Five minutes. Just gotta find my fingers and I’ll be right with you.

I opened my eyes and the light blaze that is the Miami sun seared my corneas. Find your fingers, woman! I pulled my hands up toward my face and started counting them over and over and over, making sure that the count was 10 each time. This kid’s gonna wonder what’s taking me so long. It’s gotta be 15 minutes since he knocked. But it had barely been five. And just as I thought I was beginning to pull myself together, the desire to puke surges up from my toes, propelling me toward the only thing within reach—the garbage can by my desk, which happened to be in the corner of very white walls. Well, that’ll be fun to clean tomorrow. 

I head for the bathroom to wash my face, imagining that my perfect hair is now covered in vomit, but it’s actually holding up OK. I tap the face gently so as not to wreck the makeup and that’s when I make my move towards the kitchen to call for Joe. There was no way I was doing dinner on a rooftop when I could barely find my extremities. He came out of the bathroom to find me sitting in one corner of the couch. “Yo, you OK, Mom?” No, no, fruit of my loins. I am in no way OK. “Call…” I paused. Use your words, Katie. “Uncle.” That’s it. No more. You can’t get blood from a stone or words from the stoned. 

“Are you OK, mom? Mom, look at me.” That fucker was making me open my eyes. Again with the sun. His face scares me and I pull my head back a bit. “You don’t think you’ll be OK in 30 minutes?” I shook my head, closed my eyes again, and managed to lay my head back on the couch despite the complete lack of sensation or sense of place. “What are you feeling?” I could only manage the word hot. “You want me to put an ice cube on your forehead? Or a wet towel?” I grimace. “Will ruin makeup.” Three words strung together—a clear indicator that I could do it when it really mattered.

He disappears to call his aunt first. “Hey, we have a bit of a situation…” was all I heard before my mind trailed off. Blah, blah, blah, “…I swear, it was only ONE toke…” Then he calls the uncle. “Mom, can you talk to Tio Alex a sec?” Are you out of your goddamned mind? Head shakes aggressively from side to side and I swat my hand at my poor child who is trying to respectfully bail on dinner plans and manage his mother’s fade, all while resisting the urge to laugh his face off. I need to puke again. He helps me get to the bathroom because I can barely walk. I slam the door behind me so he doesn’t watch his mom at the feet of the porcelain god and somehow pull together the wherewithal to take off my new blouse so I don’t fuck it up. 

I purge everything but my spleen, hyper-aware of the tears that are streaming down my cheeks and the complete mess I have likely made of myself. But when I go to the sink to clean myself up for the second time, still somehow trying to keep from fucking up the makeup—for whose benefit I have no idea at this point—I look at myself in the mirror and am shocked that I still look really damn good. So let this be a lesson, ladies (or dudes who wear makeup)—primer and setting spray are worth every penny. I will never again look at the price tags on those things with doubt. I head back out toward the living room but not before grabbing a towel to throw over myself because I am now in my bra and have already done enough damage to my kid’s psyche for one day.

I lay myself down on the couch by first sitting and then slowly sliding sideways, and pull a blanket over me. I’m trying desperately to fall asleep but that weed paranoia that often creeps through the cracks? Yeah that’s now in high gear, giving me supersonic hearing that can detect every conversation that child is having in his bedroom. He’s got the girlfriend on speaker but she is either speaking a combination of three languages or speaking backwards. I can’t make out which, but I know they are fucking with me so that I don’t know it’s me they’re laughing about. Someone please shoot me. They shoot horses, don’t they?

I give up on trying to decipher the coded conversation and focus on sleeping, when I get peeled out of my skin by the sound of Rage Against the Machine being blasted only a few inches from my swimming head. You ever listen to Bombtrack? The beginning, just after the intro, where it kicks in? That’s my damn ringtone because I like to make sure I can always hear it. And of course it’s the ex-husband calling to wish me a happy 50th birthday. Of course it is. Yup. And instead of just letting it go to voicemail, the kid, in his infinite lack of discretion, answers the call and walks off with my phone to tell his dad all about how mom can’t take his call right now because she’s completely ripped and immobile on the couch.

At some point, I finally get near sleep. Just let me ride this out oh mother of Zeus, and I am done with the maryjane forever and ever. The kid emerges from the bedroom again, kneels besides me, and whispers in my ear, “Ma, can you hear me?” I nod. “I’m going to go get Alaniz now, will you be alright without me?” I nod. “You sure? Because it’s gonna take me a while before I get back.” I nod…do you not see me nodding for the love of all things? Go away so I can sleep. Go, go, go. You have seen enough for one day, child.

An hour later, I manage to pull my eyes open. The sun has graciously disappeared behind a wall of rain clouds and the kid had been kind enough to turn off my music before leaving. I grab my phone to call him and see a missed text from my brother. It’s a photo of my glorious niece sitting at the rooftop restaurant, wearing the Addidas sneakers I had bought her, with the caption, “Where’s Tia Katie?” Fucking guilt trip of all guilt trips. “Joe are you on your way back yet?” He was. And I was now starving. “I need you to grab me some food as you get near home.”

Being an April Fool baby never made for a joke more apropos than spending my 50th birthday dinner scarfing down a Whopper (no pickle, just like I taught him) and washing it down with a bottle of Champagne that the kid had bought me (and had remembered to chill), all from a plastic Starbuck’s cup. The “sundae pie” was shoveled to my mouth with my fingers—faux whipped cream repeatedly wiped from my still near-flawless makeup between bites—while I fumbled for the remote control to hunt for a movie. Getting old is not for pussies, and the thing is that I can’t decide whether what went down was pure gonzo for having bailed on a rooftop dinner because I was passed out on my couch after hitting a bong with my kid, or if it’s the saddest, most “welcome to the other side of the hill you fucking relic” sort of pathetic awakening ever. I settled on The Birdcage, and as the sounds of salsa music filled my darkened living room, I grabbed the phone to text Mike about what had gone down over the last four hours. “OK, are you ready for this?”

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“You get a good thing goin’ then you blow yourself out…”

by Katie Gomez June 3, 2019
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She called me one Sunday, wanting to go on a road trip up to Savannah…said she wanted to get away. The sooner, the better. And quite frankly, I’m at a place in my life where I’m pretty much game for just about any getaway, so I was all in, but with one caveat—I wanted to […]

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“Yo soy un hombre sincero, de donde crece la palma…”

by Katie Gomez January 12, 2018
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For as long as I lived in the Dirty Jerz, I always seemed to be the de facto voice for the entire Cuban American population, be it in school, or at work, or amongst friends. If Castro was on his feline, 9-lives deathbed, I would get asked what I thought would happen after he passed. […]

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“And while the king was looking down, the jester stole his thorny crown…”

by Katie Gomez May 30, 2016
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The American Dream is dead. It is lying by the side of a winding stretch on the PCH, mangled, shattered and gasping for breath as it drowns in the blood that is beginning to fill its lungs. The American Dream has been pummeled, and every last one of us has taken a turn at it, […]

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“I’m the man! I’m the man! I’m so bad I should be in detention…”

by Katie Gomez September 23, 2015
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While unfortunately this blog has gone by way of the history books for the sake of my attention span being devoted to an upcoming line of Gonzo hot sauces (stay tuned), every once in a while something waltzes into my line of sight, lingers in my crosshairs and all but dares me to satisfy the […]

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“Freedom, you’ve gotta give for what you take…”

by Katie Gomez April 28, 2015
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I remember sliding onto the operating table and the anesthesiologist bitching about something to a nurse, but then the world faded out to black softly, just like it does on the big screen. Probably one of the few things Hollywood manages to portray with any kind of reality. After it was over, I was in […]

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“I’m not dead yet…”

by Katie Gomez April 6, 2015
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Things that are often described as difficult, high risk, and overly sensitive are nearly always worth both the wait and the trouble–yeah, damn right that includes me. So, I tend to have a weak spot for a really well-made pinot noir because I know that both the grower and the winemaker didn’t take the easy […]

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“But glittering prizes and endless compromises shatter the illusion of integrity…”

by Katie Gomez November 5, 2014
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Those that have been watching the growth of the craft beer/microbrewery movement this last decade with a diligent eye know that Big Brewing has done its best to steal back at least a portion of what it’s lost to the little guys—mostly by screwing with the less-than-diligent consumer. The A-B family of brands now includes […]

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“No! Don’t sign it! Give me time to think. I mean hold on a second boy, ’cause that’s magic ink…”

by Katie Gomez July 23, 2014
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I’ve just had the pleasure of spending the last couple of weeks with Randall Grahm. Nobody knew. In fact, Randall didn’t even know. Hell, if I’m being honest, I didn’t know until I had drained the last bottle. Though this could quite possibly be the post that finally lands me a one-way cab ride to […]

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