It is hot. The sun bakes. Chalk crunches under your feet. You're faint from last night's fête in the main square of a town that lies behind thick medieval ashlar walls. Sulfites bang around in your head. Or is it phenolic flavonoids? You try to remember what causes red wine headaches. A cathedral mirage ripples before you. Aluminum stings your eyes. You want to crawl back to town and cool down in a deep stone wine cavern. Slowly you take the path into the winery. Funny, the word they use…it's what you call the place on the corner where you get your daily bread and milk.

Last night you wandered the two-thousand-foot-high town with the big-city-airport name. You can still smell the red peppers that hang from balconies. The dancing doll clock still chimes in your head. Last night, men with saddle leather tans told you the wine region has gotten rich since the old goat died years ago. They filled one "little cup" after another and recited "The Cicada and the Ant" and the "The Old Man and Death." A parable with backbone, you think of the latter. You downed cups until sacramental red splashed the cobblestones. A good-looking girl walked past. A waiter mopped off the table. Then, you got up from your comfortable wicker chair. You followed the "hill walk" around the village to the poet's bust. You do not know what time you got to bed in your awfully clean hotel.

An Englishman, you read, compared the national music to the "beating of a frying pan, to call down a swarm of bees." Hardwood shells clack softly in your headphones. The slow rhythm of a forty-nine-year-old Miles Davis work brings you back to life. You look beyond the sinuous building to the "pastoral wave of white-tipped hills." The mountains divide the cool north from the dry plateau. An armed group makes you think of an estimated time of arrival. You wonder if separatists hide up there. That's crazy…they really are a swell people. An old man with stubble and long, sunburned hair tells you the river divided two empires and gave its name to the peninsula. A capital has a horse statue with mighty cojones. Go to another town, he says. Calm caped men there perform smoothly and beautifully. Make the pilgrimage north to a titanium master's museum.

You remember that the creator of the winery lives in the Alps. You know his works in the Midwest, in Malmö, and in his hometown on the sea. You go sit by the long cedar wall and watch it reflect in a pool. You think of barrels in the water. You eat "thorns" and your strength comes back. The fog in your head burns off. Clarity and vision return. It's time for the tasting. Time, as you learned in Acapulco, to curarse la cruda.

Where are you, anyhow?

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