for the heart

Of all the places I have ever lived, Minneapolis is the most confusing. One might have thought it would be otherwise. It was meant to be laid out, after all, on a Jeffersonian grid. Yet one cycles down the street, blithely confident that the 3800 block of Sheridan Avenue South will lead ineluctably into the 3700 block, only to find that an unkind providence has interposed a lake, a railroad, or a freeway. Reason, one feels, has been defeated by Nature, or at least by Life.
Occasionally, it is true, Minneapolis gives inklings of the organic process of its growth to the hard-pressed cyclist trying to find the house where he has been invited to dinner. If he bumps and rattles his way over the monstrous potholes in the southeast quadrant of Lake Calhoun Parkway, he will come to Richfield Road, originally the wagon route from the infant Minneapolis to the neighboring township of Richfield (which originally included modern Edina). On a good day, the remains of the streetcar rails can be made out beneath the asphalt of broad old thoroughfares such as Portland Avenue. But in Edina the farms that defined the landscape in the late nineteenth century are gone. Only their names survive in Grimes and Browndale avenues.

After trying to get the Minnesota landscape into larger perspective, I went to see the Jeffers Petroglyphs down beyond Mankato. These lively scribings are etched (by who knows what anonymous hand) onto rocks that slope and tilt like the bed of a prehistoric ocean. The wind passes through the prairie grass like cat’s-paws at sea. Here at last I found a sense of the size of the state.

If these waves of prairie have the breadth of an ocean, Mont Ventoux in the South of France has the height of a tsunami. From its summit you can see for miles (all right, kilometers). The fourteenth-century poet Petrarch discovered this when he climbed it—possibly the earliest example of mountaineering, or at least hill walking, done for no other reason than the fun of it. Not that Petrarch was capable of anything so innocent as fun. He took with him a copy of Saint Augustine’s Confessions, which he duly opened on the summit (at random, he claims), and conveniently found a passage that assured him that landscape is less important than the soul: “Men go to admire the high mountains, the vast floods of the sea, the huge streams of the rivers, the circumference of the ocean, and the revolutions of the stars—and desert themselves.”
The modern climber will descry on the southern slopes of Mont Ventoux gravel terraces planted with vineyards sheltered from northerly winds by the mountainous bulk behind them. One of the Côtes de Ventoux wineries that has had a remarkable run of good years recently is Château Pesquié. The red wine made here by the Chaudière family called Ch. Pesquié les Terrasses is a round fruity Rhône. It is composed of slightly less syrah, the grape variety most often associated with Rhône reds, and slightly more grenache, the variety familiar from the wines of Châteauneuf du Pape, about twenty miles to the west. One can confidently commend it for consumption with cheese and meat (including turkey).

Claret, they say, is wine for the head; Burgundy and Rhône, wine for the heart. Even a poet as sententious and self-absorbed as Petrarch would, one feels, have been able to allow a wine as appealing as this one to penetrate the formidable defenses of his self-consciousness. Perhaps, too, it could have inspired him to appreciate the pleasures of landscape without his having to decide in advance what he was going to think about it.