2009 New Mexico Wine Festival — my first time

While I’ve resided in Albu­querque for almost 20 years and have spent all my drink­ing years firmly ensconced between the moun­tains and the rio, I’ve never been to the Bernalillo Wine Fes­ti­val. You’d find this odd if you knew how oppor­tune I can be to arrive when it’s a gath­er­ing that involves “tast­ing.” Yes, that’s what the kids call it nowadays.

That I haven’t been is due to a vari­ety of rea­sons, mostly coin­cid­ing with out­ra­geous lack of plan­ning and the gen­eral social amne­sia that peo­ple deeply embed­ded in their daily rou­tine tend to have toward spe­cial events. Some­times I spaced it out, other times I’m already doing some­thing else. I’ve been try­ing really hard to over­come the Sat­ur­day Lazies (though they can hap­pen on any day, not just Sat­ur­day). For me, the symp­toms of SL often include an excuse for not attend­ing or par­tic­i­pat­ing, some­times my finances are the scape­goat, other times I develop a sud­den dis­dain for the rest of human­ity; the mere thought of being with other peo­ple makes me change my mind about going.

This Sun­day, how­ever, proves to be an excep­tion. Along with a cou­ple of fun friends, I’ll be traips­ing across the Bernalillo land­scape, sip­ping wine and mak­ing ama­teur­ish deci­sions about how much I like it while enjoy­ing the cooler post-summer dog days weather. There’s even chance of thun­der­storms! I’ll be grab­bing my umbrella on my way out the door. I’m look­ing for­ward to tast­ing wines from Blue Teal and St. Clair, who are my favorites, as well as dis­cov­er­ing new bot­tled friends to get me through the ran­dom, emo­tional Sat­ur­day night. Hey, it happens!

The crown­ing jewel of this achieve­ment of local, social par­ticip­tion would be totake the Rail­run­ner up to the shindig. How­ever, my mates are less keen on the envi­ron­ment and more keen on hav­ing an imme­di­ate exit strat­egy avail­able. I must say that I under­stand. Should some­thing unto­ward hap­pen, I don’t want to have to wait for the train; I’d like to be able to jet outta there as quickly as possible.

So this leaves me with not hav­ing taken the Rail­run­ner yet. That’s okay, my next daytrip to Santa Fe will be trans­porta­tion­ally spon­sored by our quick, if not some­times deadly, light rail sys­tem. It’s dif­fi­cult to move the Wild West out of the men­tal­ity that the auto­mo­bile rep­re­sents the con­su­mate indi­vid­u­al­ity, the ulti­mate free­dom to go any­where and do any­thing. Instead, our mod­ern Wild West soci­ety needs to empha­size and cham­pion the causes of com­mu­nity, coop­er­a­tion and that small-yet-huge amount of self-sacrifice it will take to shift the par­a­digm toward a cleaner, more effi­cient trans­porta­tion system.

All that said, I know I’m going to enjoy the car pool­ing up to the fes­ti­val, as well the com­pany of some great friends and fine local spir­its. I’ll be tweet­ing from the Fes­ti­val, in case you expected any­thing dif­fer­ent. See you around!

Rel­e­vant Links:

New Mex­ico Wine Festival

NM Rail­run­ner Sched­ule & Pricing