The Table
by Judy O’Kane
The wines pour clockwise:
Bourgogne to villages, premier cru
to grand cru. Begin.
Bourgogne Maison: bruised apple, quiet.
Rully Village: honey, oak still to settle.
This fruit had a tough time (hail).
St-Romain Village: imagine an outline
leaving space for the wine to fill out.
Monthélie Premier Cru Les Duresses:
Related
translucent, lemon curd, still a little spritz
across the tongue. Taste, spittoon, note
as the wines keep circling the table,
untasted samples funneled back into bottles
to return to the barrel. Everyone speaks English
as a courtesy; still I contribute little
to the conversation. I am conscious
of the edges of the tongue. Puligny Village:
This site is surrounded by premiers crus.
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These roots reached right down. At some stage
everything aligned this season, the hottest year yet.
Les Taillepieds, En Carelle sous Chapelle,
check the spellings of the next taster,
Corton Clos du Roi Grand Cru.
I imagine roots reaching down through limestone.
I check the notes of the next taster
and am mid-metaphysics exam:
I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me.
Laughter rises, and the tasting table
is a poker table.
The house keeps dealing,
each hand circles faster and faster.
La Route des Grands Crus
by Judy O’Kane
For Andrea Frost
The Côte is in motion:
vineyards flash by, bright gold
and burgundy: Ladoix-Serigny,
Vosne-Romanée, Flagey-Echézeaux.
We stop at Chambolle-Musigny,
we climb the wall at Les Amoureuses.
At Les Bonnes Mares we examine
root depths—we look down into red clay.
You open an app: each parcel of land
appears on-screen in pale pink
and purple: the climats and lieux-dits
of the Côte de Nuits subdivide
and kaleidoscope; the phone waves
like a magic wand, a divining rod.
About the author
Judy O’Kane worked the 2009 harvest in St-Estèphe and trained at Ballymaloe Cookery School on sabbatical from partnership in a legal practice. She has recently completed a PhD at the University of East Anglia and holds the WSET diploma. Judy won the National Memory Day Prize, the Charles Causley Poetry Prize, the Irish Post Prize, and the Listowel Writers Week Original Poem Prize. Her prose work Thirst, an exploration of terroir, a work in progress, was shortlisted for the Tony Lothian Award by the Biographers’ Club. Judy has read at the House of Lords, at Pinot Celebration, New Zealand, and at Borough Market in London.
