Who's in the Picture

A portrait is a set of decisions somebody else makes about you.

Where you stood. What you happened to be wearing. Which fraction of a second, out of all the ones available, was the one worth keeping. You can cooperate with the process. You cannot perform it on your own behalf.

The second show Metalwood invited us to was called US.

I didn’t think much of the title going in. I was thinking about ice.

In the two years since we last wrote here, we have opened a lot of bottles. Some were old favorites. Some became new ones. But the more consequential thing that happened had little to do with what was in the bottle. Somewhere along the way, we started building relationships with the people who made them.

Most of that happened slowly, and mostly from a distance. A wine we liked became one we poured. A name on a label became someone who understood what we were doing. Wineries began trusting us with their wine, and we began understanding the people and the ideas behind it.

I don’t think I registered how much of that had accumulated until Metalwood asked us to pour at an art show.

April 24. A Friday, which is our night — Roosevelt Wine Club meets every Friday at Roosevelt Golf Course and has for a while now. We take field trips, another course, a reason to drive, but not often and never casually. It takes something to pull us off the home course.

The show was built around Rancho Park. Artists from around Los Angeles made work in response to the course, Darin Howard and Metalwood brought it together.

Then there was our part of the room.

Wonderwerk’s Big Orange, peach and honeysuckle, just enough grip from the skins to slow people down. Big Juicy going out cold, watermelon and cherry, gone nearly as fast as we could open it. Good Boy’s Heavy Petting, a Cabernet Franc pét-nat out of Santa Ynez, fig and baked plum and slightly feral. Deux Punx’s No Comply, tart cherry and blood orange. Demetria’s Pantheon Red, Rhône-style and unbothered. Clif Family. Field Recordings.

Not the rarest bottles, and not the most expensive. These were the wines we kept returning to, which is its own kind of record. A list of what we had been doing, written by accident, poured out in a room somebody else had built.

We served it from behind a giant vintage golf ball that Metalwood normally uses as a DJ booth. Bottles along the curve of it. Five hundred glasses, give or take. A couple of the producers came out and poured beside us, and the rest of the night we stayed back there opening, filling, answering, trying to keep up.

Art on the walls. Golf everywhere you looked. Our favorite wines open on the table.

Nobody found the combination strange.

It’s worth saying something about the course that show was built around.

Rancho Park is a municipal course on Pico, and its most famous object is a plaque commemorating a failure. During the 1961 L.A. Open, Arnold Palmer, then the reigning Masters and U.S. Open champion, hit a fine drive and then put four consecutive balls out of bounds. He finished the hole in twelve. Asked how, he said he missed his putt for an eleven.

A plaque went up in 1963. Somebody stole it. The parks department put up a stone. In 2017, the city dedicated another, complete with a diagram of the hole and an account of each shot.

Even the details are contested. The plaque says first round. Palmer remembered it as the second. Sixty years of commemoration and the monument may have the day wrong.

A course decided what it wanted to keep, and it kept a man’s worst afternoon.

Three months later, another Friday, same room on La Brea, we were back.

This time it was a group portrait show. Photographers from around Los Angeles had made portraits of people from the community, from golf and music and art and whatever grows between them.

We brought wine again. Fallen Grape’s Mother, skin contact off the Central Coast, citrus and apricot and chamomile. De Levende’s Mere Miroir, salted watermelon and blood orange with a whisper of mint. Ambyth’s 2017 Adamo, nine years old, cherry and blueberry jam and warm spice, softened at the edges the way things get when they’ve been left alone. And Little Sun, who brought calimocho slushies.

Calimocho is red wine and Coke, invented by people who needed the wine to go further. There it was in a paper cup, coming out of a machine, ten feet from the oldest bottle in the building. People loved it. Neither seemed embarrassed by the other.

Before the room filled up, my team told me they had it.

Go talk to people. We got this.

I want to be accurate about how that felt, because it wasn’t relief exactly.

Sommelier comes from an old word for someone responsible for carrying provisions. Before the wine list and the ceremony around it, there was the person carrying what everyone else needed.

I like that history because I like carrying. I’m good at it.

Give me a table and I know what to do. Open the bottles. Keep the glasses full. Tell someone what they’re drinking if they want to know. Notice what’s running low before anyone has to ask.

There is comfort in being useful.

The table is also a place to hide.

You can spend an entire night behind one and never have to wonder what to do with yourself. There is always another bottle, another glass, another question. You get to be present at every gathering you build without ever quite being in one.

I have hosted my way out of a lot of conversations.

So when my team took the pour out of my hands, what I felt first was exposure. There was nothing in front of me. I had to walk around the room as a person who had come to the thing, rather than the person running it.

And once I did, I started seeing who was there. Friends from golf. People from wine. Artists. Photographers. Winemakers whose bottles we had once admired from across a shop.

And then Charles.

Charles manages Roosevelt Golf Course, where we meet every Friday. He was on the wall, in a portrait of him wearing Rosey Los Angeles, photographed by Brandon Moninka and styled by Christine Garcia. Brandon just shot our Rosey campaign.

In the photograph he is crouched low on the grass, hands stacked on the grip of a putter with the head resting in front of him, looking directly into the camera without smiling. A floral Rosey cap with a dark green brim. A green crewneck with the Roosevelt Wine Club crest on the chest. Late light coming through the trees behind him.

They hung it in the corner of the room with the putting green. All night, people rolled balls a few feet beneath a photograph of a man holding a putter.

The piece was titled Charles. Not his job, not the course. His name.

I stayed in front of it longer than I meant to.

Charles did not put himself on that wall. Somebody looked at him long enough to decide he belonged in a show about us, and then somebody hung him where people would have to walk past. That is the entire mechanism. It happens to you, or it doesn’t, and no amount of competence makes it happen faster.

Roosevelt was on the wall. Rosey was on Charles. Brandon was in the show. Our team was pouring across the room. Fallen Grape was open on the table. People who had entered my life through completely different doors were standing around talking to each other.

There is a version of wine culture that trains you to look down. At the label, the glass, the list, the score. I understand it. I’m a sommelier, the details are the job, and I would defend every note on those signs.

But looking down has a second function, which is that it keeps you from having to look up.

A municipal golf course decided that what it wanted to remember about Arnold Palmer was the afternoon he could not stop hitting the ball out of bounds. Not the three L.A. Opens he won there. The twelve. Somebody chose that, and chose it again after the first plaque was stolen, and then a third time in 2017. Being kept is not the same as being flattered. It is not even always accurate. It is just somebody deciding that you are part of the record.

Charles was an eleven-by-fourteen hand print, and it sold. Somebody stood in that room, looked at the man who runs a nine-hole municipal course in Griffith Park, and paid to take him home and put him on a wall.

I have spent a lot of nights making sure other people had a good time. I would do it again this Friday. But the second Metalwood show gave me something I could not have arranged for myself, which was hours of walking in a room I had helped build without being responsible for it.

The show was called US.

The photograph was called Charles.

You cannot put yourself in the picture. Somebody else has to see you there, and you have to be standing where they can.