clean pinch

I took up work at Vinostrology, because I felt it would be a good first step towards conceptualizing living and/or working on a vineyard in some idealistic European city, someday. Sometimes I imagine it within youth: backbreaking, sweaty, no social ties, just the dirt, the vine & I. Also, of waking up on cold mornings, looking out a window on the rows, sipping coffee. Another dream is of retired me, living on land that is slow to cultivate, where there are dependable relationships budding, the wine for family & then a bit more & more still. Growing up, I always admired my father's friend's hands: leathery, deeply lined, dry from borax & egg cure cocktails. Something about the thick hands made me think: Experience, Sasquatch hunting, De-feathering fowl, De-boning fish. I want my own Experienced hands, the kind of purple-lined, dirt under nailbed, but soft from handholding between rows & rows to the house on the hill covered in vines-kind.
At Vinostrology the wine is flowing so fastidiously it's all I can do to remember the varietal's common tendencies, which isn't entirely helpful when our varietals are usually complex abstractions from the traditional. The cool part is that I am forever in that part of learning where you're never quite getting to the answers & the hunger for such maintains. This is probably healthy for me, me being impatient & exploitative of experience. It teaches me to accept patience in earning the hands.
I've become the MC for trivia nights at the bar. Originally it was supposed to be speakers & microphone with a magazine editor prompting sales by MC'ing the event/s. This evolved into me sitting on the wood bar with a glass of unoaked chardonnay, talking as loudly & as clearly as I can, asking trivia questions I accumulated based on self interest: 80's, 90's, cats, animal fetishes, porn, food, wine - the usual. Last time I created a category called, "Urban Dictionary Terminology." One of my favorite words: gynotician, which no one knew, is, "a politician who feels more qualified than women or their doctors to make women's healthcare decisions." Another: clean pinch. Everyone in the bar knew this one, except for an older couple who looked me in the face and in trying to better understand the word? asked, "is your face a 'clean pinch.'" I said, "Perhaps."
In the next month I'll be joining a women's wine group called: WOW, organized by the owner. The way it'll work is that a group of us will meet at the bar once a month, each with a varietal or country specific chosen wine, with one dignified as bread & cheese deliverer. We will brown bag all bottles, then do a blind tasting, writing down the notes, etc. testing ourselves, with a reveal in the end & likely a favorite or two. It'll be like wine school, another small step towards dream creation.