When deciding on where to go on holiday this year, we thought we might avoid planes. You see, the antics of Captain Crapshispants has made travelling in the air a bit more unreliable. We didn’t relish sitting on a tarmac. No, we thought we might stay on the ground and get around somewhere by train. This led us to the eastern part of the Czech Republic: southern Moravia.
Southern Moravia is known for its white wine, hearty food, chateaus, and for cyclists – seriously, they’re like ants at a picnic. Basically, southern Moravia is like the Czech Republic’s Italy for people who don’t want to leave the country. Since a good chunk of the local tourist draw is wine, we decide to do a private wine tour on the first day we’re there. This is because the most I know about wine is that if you buy the twisty guys you won’t end up with cork in your drink.
Anna picks us up at 11 am. She has an easy smile and a calm demeanor. This might be because she’s built like a professional volleyball player and can just throw us all into a vineyard if we cause any trouble. Anna tells us the deal: a vineyard, a winery, another vineyard, and then a cellar.
We pull into a vineyard outside of Mikulov. We get to drinking fast, a decision of which I approve immensely. The landscape is a mix of plush and arid. It’s spaces of baked earth next to vast vineyards and rows of grapevines, all under limestone cliffs. One might expect Don Corleone to meander by in a white shirt and a vest and a terrifying look in his eyes. But that doesn’t happen.
What does happen is the beginning of our wine education. Anna tells us what we’ve looking at and what it adds to the local wine. (Limestone regulates water, minerality, acidity, and also looks really cool.) She explains that the heat – while pounding down on us – actually helps the wine quite a bit. I soon feel the heady rush of learning . . . though there’s a chance it’s the four glasses of wine we’ve had since stopping nine minutes before.
The dog? Well, the dog is like me. (Yes, she’s short-legged, white, pug-nosed, and hairy, but that’s not what I mean.) She too likes basking in the sun . . . for a few seconds before realizing that she hates heat and the sun and sweating and instead wishes she was in that Twilight Zone where the Earth has snapped off its axes and is flying away from the sun. On the other hand, there’s all this dirt to roll around in. She does that for a while.
It’s at our third stop – another vineyard, after a winery – that the now significant volumes of wine coursing through my veins begins to have an effect on me. This time, the dog and I ask permission to go off and look at the grapevines. We are granted such access. A diminutive wine glass dangles from my fingers, a crisp Welsh Reisling sloshing around in it. The dog’s overwhelmed by the new scents and all the new pokey things that can jab her in the eye and cost me a few thousand Koruna. She approaches a grapevine and then honors it, evidently, by flopping onto her back and rolling around in its subservient soil.
While she does that and Anna gets Burke more juiced (in the distance, I hear: ‘oh, yes please. So there’s food on the next stop?’), I enjoy the pseudo-philosophical thoughts that invade with the white wine. The least embarrassing of these insights is this: what amazes me about being on holiday is that you live in someone else’s world for a little while. In Mikulov, Dublin, Tokyo, even Disneyworld. You are living in a world that’s not yours. Though I do try to leave my own world and its expectations at home, which I guess this is the goal of the tourist: be somewhere else. For us at the moment that person is Anna. Since she was a teen, she has lived and worked in the area’s wine industry. This was interrupted a few times by work in the US, where she also worked in wine. Wine is her life. She studies it as one does a thing they are joyfully obsessed with. We can’t imagine a better life for someone and – at least I – try to put myself in her life for a brief time.
Sadly, I fail. In order for me to be set in my ways, I’d have to first get out of my comfort zone – which I do not like doing. I am very much in my element in my local pub, or reading in my living room with a Netflix show on in the background. Going to a pub across my neighborhood gives me the hives, going to one across the city gives me a stomach ache. I’ve taken to keeping Tums in my jacket pocket. Nevertheless, I try to occasionally break out of that zone in small ways – one of which is travel. Though its success is intermittent, minute, and questionable, here I am.
The dog – who has absolutely no idea why she’s been brought here – agrees. She is giving me looks questioning our location and our reason for being in it. Why is everything suddenly dry? Why were we on that weird long car for a few hours? Who is this new person getting you guys drunk? When are we going home and when am I getting some cookies? I answer with a shrug.
We are both called back and Anna piles us all into the van. We head to the sklep (a wine cellar). We go down the steps and instantly bask in the cool, which is a welcome change from the hot day. We sit on benches. The dog reclines long and straight. We are treated to a phenomenal charcuterie board of sausages, ham, homemade duck pate, cheeses, bread, rolls, olives, cucumbers, carrots, and tastes of ten bottles of the cellar’s wines.
Maybe it’s the vast amounts of wine, but this is a life I can imagine. The cool room, the huge vats of wine. The big metal doors to keep out the zombies, the demons, the werewolves, and my students. Cheese. The dog, clearly reading my vibe, concurs. She stretches out longer, more relaxed. I slip her little bits of ham and bread and sheep cheese and in between her grateful whines she lets out contented sighs. Maybe I’m not so bad at getting out of the comfort zone. It only has to be underground, cold, and filled with wine and food. I wake up a few hours later upside down in the bed. It’s a temporary holiday flat, so the windows are confusing and the perspective is off. I wonder if maybe I have successfully broken out of my comfort zone. Burke calls me out to the living room to figure out where to go for dinner. She has Netflix on and the dog is chilling on a pillow.
