My husband and I found ourselves over the weekend in that gap between wedding ceremony and reception and desperately in need of a drink.
Now, I must admit, I’m a bit bewildered by the whole traditional formal wedding affair. It’s always seemed to me more show than celebration, a day seized by the "happy" couple to make other people a) focus attention on them b) follow their directions and c) WAIT. There’s the "everyone turn to look at the bride as she makes her way down the aisle" moment; the "you may not leave your pew until the newly married couple greets you" ritual; and then, of course, the "we must take several dozen photographs before leaving the church so you should hang out in the vestibule or on the street or in the empty reception hall waiting while we do so" tradition.
Which is exactly why I got married barefoot on the deck of a boat with only my children in attendance and a preacher (Mitch Omer, from Ode to a Sycophant fame, in fact) who got his license from the back of Rolling Stone. . . .then threw a big party two months later with a lot of food and wine and absolutely no requirements of the guests but that they come and enjoy.
But I digress.
We’d just left the church on Saturday afternoon, where the brightest moment of the ceremony — for me, at least — was the minister’s recounting of the "love story" in Rocky. I’ve never seen Rocky, which sounds incredible, I know. But after his telling, I probably will. The anecdote had to do with the thug played by Sylvester Stallone falling in love with a plain woman who worked at a pet store then explaining to someone who questioned the romance "she’s got gaps, I got gaps, together we fill gaps," which was as fine a description of the strange magic of marriage as I’ve ever heard.
So we were talking about this and dawdling along Dale Street in St. Paul, on our way to the reception near Cathedral Hill, when suddenly I remembered something wonderful: Il Vesco Vino was just around the corner!
So we went.
What a lovely interlude, a perfect place to fill the gap. Because first, this is a simple, warm, rectangular room lit with the sort of turnip-shaped fixtures you might imagine at an Italian carnival. But better even than this is Junior, one of the area’s best and most unusual sommeliers. This guy KNOWS HIS WINE. He was trained at D’Amico Cucina and he’s a friend of Bill’s (Summerville, that is). But he’s also, well. . . .just freakin’ cool, in a way that most wine experts — I’m sorry, guys — simply aren’t. The son of jazz saxophonist, Irv Williams, Junior has that low, blue, lazy, smooth-voiced style.
It’s all an act, however, in that behind the laid-back facade is a man who keeps a sparkling bar and makes the best personalized wine recommendations in town.
I, for instance, love an earthy, sweaty red. ("Dirt," my husband will sometimes say when he sniffs the wine in my glass. "Terroir," I will respond. Just one example of our gaps.) So Junior poured me the Azienda Agricola Morellino di Scansano, a hot muddy Sangiovese that’s full of plum and cherry with the strangest hint of banana underneath, also black roses, leather boots, and peat. Just the way I like my midafternoon, post-wedding wine.
John drank a far lighter and generally more approachable Nero d’Avola — again, selected by Junior — which tasted of raspberry and black cherry and finished clean.
And we sat, holding hands under the bar, until our wine was gone, at which point we said goodbye to Junior and reluctantly got up and headed to the clamorous wedding reception where there were too few tables for the guests and the only wine available was heavy and tannic and about as subtle as a brick to the head.
Sometimes, I find, it is in filling the gaps that the best of life occurs.
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