X Factor

When I got there, he was already seated at the bar with a generic glass of synthewine. Inky dark, almost completely opaque, probably even a 10. So he was a Cabernet Sauvignon kind of guy, stern and exacting, matching his precise linear silhouette. No one called it Cabernet Sauvignon anymore, of course; no one appreciated the old names, from the time when grapes came primarily from the ground.

“Light, medium, or dark?” the barkeeper replied when I asked for red, settling into the vegan leather swivel next to him. Wine aside, my date had chosen well. This was exactly the setting I liked: the feel of Brooklyn from a few centuries ago, soft jazz, even amber halogen lighting, though I knew the buzz of the filament was fake.

“Medium dark, 7, no, make that 7.5,” I said. “Oak aged 20, 70% dry, notes of peat and jasmine.”

“You got it.”

I was impressed. They synthesized half-levels and barrel years here.

“Hi,” I said to my date, lightly pressing his shoulder.

“Oh, hi,” he said, finally touching his left ear to switch off his eyeset and turning to me. “Rinn, right? Sorry, didn’t see you.”

I tried to not immediately say, “Well, yes, because you were literally playing cyberball.” Or whatever it was he was doing in his private mind’s eye.

“Just catching up with some work,” he said. Again, very Cabernet Sauvignon of him. Everybody keeps telling me: keep an open mind, not everybody can afford to avoid technology the way you do. Not everybody has the opportunity anymore to grow up away from the city, it’s true.

The vineyard was dying, but the real surprise was that it had even survived up to now. It had been my mother’s, and her mother’s before her, in an undying matriarchal line beginning with a stalwart Ruth who dared to plant French vines in the sandy loam of the Pacific Northwest. California, everybody agreed at the time, could be an interloper, but Oregon? The genes for stubbornness persisted. Even after the rising seas had leached their salt onto all the coastal areas, after Manhattan became a ghost island and Napa was no more, when suddenly the best place to live became the heartland, the formerly uncool flyover states, Iowa, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Kansas. Most families flocked there, but not mine.

The land in the Sitka Watershed my many-times-great-grandmother had chosen was on high ground surrounded by a natural stone moat of sorts that shielded us from the brunt of the sea; she had dabbled in the occult and supposedly had consulted a feng shui master, a water dowser, and a local shaman before she purchased the property. If she were still alive, she would have much to gloat about as well as much to wring her hands over. It wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, really. No winery could survive first the onslaught of nature, then the rapid development of synthehol, a drink that not only smelled, tasted, and uninhibited like alcohol but was immediately counteracted by an enzyme, so you could drink, take a tablet, and drive within twenty minutes; you could party and not be hung over the next day; you could even have happy hour margaritas at lunch and go back to the office with no one the wiser.

I let them know I was a wine enthusiast but always let them choose the place. I was not picky; I said yes to every holographic profile, every gender, every compatibility percentage, replied to every message or invitation. I was lucky to look passable enough for most, with an interesting plus of growing up in exotic Oregon. I went on one or two dates every night, sometimes three on the weekends if I started early enough.

Every date was an opportunity for conversion, one-to-one, the only way I knew how to work. Yes, I knew there were other ways to go about spreading the gospel of genuine vino, but the Web had long since become fractured into self-contained communities of the like-minded; so antique wine-lovers were only ever talking to other oenophiles, and what good was that.

I hid my proselytizing tendencies until at least the latter half of the date. I was a good listener. I let them talk, but really, I was gathering data. I knew what even the most sophisticated algorithms couldn’t know, the ones that could suggest a drink based on your mood of the day and profile, the detailed surveys that asked if you preferred raspberry or hibiscus, coffee with or without milk, if you were a night owl or early bird, the ones that analyzed even the make-up of your taste buds to find your dream drink—I could do it in twenty minutes just from a sense of you. It was an imperfect system, but I liked the inconvenience of it. I could never download my knowledge base to a computer.

This guy, for example, thought, in the way of women being attracted to dark and brooding types, that he also had to like dark and brooding wines. But beneath his gray-suited exterior and the typical architect’s habit of cool assuredness, there was something warm and quicksilver about him, a mind that would not be afraid to go to strange places. Was he a Prosecco? Hmmm, no. A dry Rieseling, perhaps? Yet I wanted something paradoxical, a wine that was light but had substance. He worked for Exohomes and designed sleek monstrosities, he told me, but he really wanted to rebuild tiny houses in places like the land I had left in order to fulfill my mission.

“Homes that look almost as if they had sprouted out of the landscape themselves,” I said, almost muttering to myself. “That don’t announce their presence, that you barely even notice until they’re pointed out.”

“Exactly!” he said, then looked puzzled. “How did you know?”

“I had a drawing teacher once who said the way you could tell a statue of a man was really great was by looking at the bottom of its shoe,” I said. “The place no one would even pay attention to.”

Suddenly it occurred to me. Not the first red you’d ever think of, unassuming in the glass, and yet exuberant when it fizzed against your palate.

“What are you smiling about?” he asked. “Not that I mind.”

“Let’s go,” I said, taking his hand, his left hand, the one he used to dream up cabins in the salted wilderness, the one we both favored. “I want to show you my favorite spot in the city.”

Leopardi’s was a wine shop owned by an old friend of my mother’s. What their relation really was, I could not say, but part of why I had even moved to Kansas City was because of my mother’s stories of a shop that was like an antique Paris bookstore, back when Paris was Paris, except all the shelves were filled with wine. It was a dusty place, especially now in the late summer twilight when all the motes swirled around us as we entered, still holding hands.

“Well, well, well,” Leopardi said. I did not hold hands with most of my dates. “What is it today?”

“Lambrusco, early 2200’s,” I said breathlessly. “Mantua if you have it, any general one from Lombardy otherwise.”

“What’s going on?” said Rob, or was it Raymond, I guess it didn’t really matter. Not all priests needed to know their congregant’s birth names. They only needed to give them the opportunity of being reborn.

“You, my son, are a very lucky man,” said Leopardi. “Follow me.”

And so it was that Rob/Raymond became a convert and a loyal customer of Leopardi’s for years to come. It hardly even took a mouthful.

“What is this?” he sputtered, then sipped again with his eyes closed.

“Ah, they don’t make stuff like this anymore,” said Leopardi.

“Boysenberry,” I said. “Cinammon, swallow’s nest, and just the slightest hint of… salami.”

“Salami?”

“The X factor.”

“That old singing show?”

“No, no,” I said, bringing my hands around his neck. His lips were perfectly stained. “This.” And I kissed him, tasting the berries, the lost vineyards, Italy eighty years ago, steel, sea, triumph, tenderness, and some other things no survey could ever have sophisticated.

“What are you?” he asked later that night. “Can I taste you, too?”

“That’s only fair,” I said, and yet inside I was calculating. I had only so many bottles left of it… Seven, divided by how many years left of my life? The other dates hadn’t even bothered to ask though. Was Rob worth it? Buzz said he was only 57% compatible, after all.

But when I realized I was turning into an algorithm, I reached behind the headboard into the secret space beyond and brought out the familiar bottle with the tessellated gingko insignia. The Rinnfandel, my namesake, my mother’s play on her own all-American wine favorite.

“Ruth’s Vineyard, Oregon,” said Rob. “Wait, isn’t that—”

“2237,” I pointed out. “The year of my birth.” The last year the Rinnfandel was ever bottled. When my hoard was gone, I would have to learn how to explain who I was in a different way.

“You’re a… mer-lot?” he said.

“Mer-low,” I said. “Oh man, you have a lot to learn.”

“I like the color,” he said, squinting. “Like a pomegranate when you hold it up to the light.”

“At least you didn’t say a 7.”

“Why Merlot?”


Loyal, I thought. Familiar, likeable even, but still mysterious. Easily overlooked by those wanting something louder, best appreciated as something that slowly grows on you like soft lighting until one day you can’t quite imagine life without candles. Merlot was a home-body wine, chocolates and plums, cedars and cashmere. But I didn’t tell him any of this. He would have to find out for himself.

Once we asked my drawing teacher how many drawings he wanted by Monday.

“A bunch,” he said.

“How many is a bunch?” We were students used to being sheep. We were prepared for three, or five.

“How many grapes are in a bunch?” he asked. “That’s how many drawings I want.”

Some of us went to the grocery store to count grapes. Some bought the smallest bunch they could find. One wrested the tendrils until only two were left on the vine. But they were missing the point. Art was not in fulfilling the letter of the assignment; it was in the immeasurable, as imprecise as a bunch of grapes.

Those of us less literal learned each alveolus of the lungs filling with aliveness is a grape, each gripe at our assignment becomes a sour grap, and that a grape of wrath shrivels into a raisin even more quickly than a dream deferred. We knew he was not testing the fruit of our labors, but the fertility of our souls.

When Monday came, you could tell immediately whose vineyards were overflowing and whose had long ago surrendered to the sun, the sea.