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Happy Trails By Cole Louison Been to the church of Satan It's got a neon sign some barstools and a jukebox and a demon pourin wine -Disturbingly Lonesome Cowboys Ithaca College lies at the mouth of Cayuga Lake, one of the Finger Lakes,which lie in the lovely part of New York state that is often called wine country. As many cars as the IC student populace maintains, it seems few kids ever get out of Ithaca, and even fewer take the opportunity to tour the many wineries in the area. Admittedly, I was one of these people until a few Saturdays ago, when a friend of mine did the wine tour with a group of his friends from home and brought me along for the ride. There were six of us in a suave new Ford Taurus, owned by my friend's pal Scott, who was a year out of college and raking in $66 grand doing something computer oriented. The idea was to get to Seneca Lake, a neighboring Finger Lake, and hit the trail from there, visiting the seven or so vineyards on the 30-mile stretch of land. Now, I don't know anything about wine. One of my best friends from home has been making wine in his basement for about four years now, and my great, great grandfather came solo to this country from France when he was 14. That's about the extent of my wine education, so I was jumping into this day of wine tasting totally na•ve. That's what you do on the vineyard trail by the way: taste wine. There aren't any tours of the actual plantations or facilities, just a bar in the middle of a big, woody room stacked with bottles for sale. The owners of the vineyards let you taste for free, or a dollar, in the hopes that you'll find something you like and buy a bottle, or case, of it. Sometimes the servers check ID, and sometimes not. Everyplace we went, little snacks were served with the wine. It depends from place to place, but usually you get a little less than a shot glass' worth of five to 11 different wines. This means that every place you stop, you're getting a little less or a little more than a hefty glass of wine, so you'd better bring a driver who is going to stay straight. In front of me now is the wine list from Chateau Lafayette Reneau, the first place we stopped. We sat around the square bar and sampled 11 wines, from the award-winning 1996 Cabernet Sauvignon to the 1998 Niagra Mist, a desert wine that tastes like Kool-Aid after you've been sampling for half an hour. Like every vineyard on the trail, Chateau looks out on lovely Seneca Lake. It's probably the most conservative of the places we hit. Everything is very clean and orderly and no one is drinking except the customers, who ranged in age from later 20s to later 40s at the time our group was visiting. Again, I'm not much of a drinker, but wine's kick is a little different from beer's or liquor's. Most liquors hit pretty hard and fast and make you drunk and rowdy and loud. Beer does basically the same thing, but does it slower. It seems wine makes you more sloppy and tired than anything else. Have you ever heard of a fight breaking out at a wine bar? Also, wine doesn't really hit you. Rather, it sneaks up the back of your head and it isn't too long before everything is what it was before, only a little heavier. Of course, if you keep going, as with any alcoholic beverage, you'll get very drunk and sick. The place in between stupid and sober though, is a different place when it comes to wine and we were in that place by the end of the second vineyard, only a mile or so down the road from the first. The name escapes me, but this place was more relaxed, though just as clean and pleasant. Bela Fleck was playing on the stereo, and after the bartender poured everyone a taste of wine, he would sample the goods himself. The corners of the bar were dug out and filled with peanuts and the floor was covered in peanut shells and there was a wrap-around wooden deck through the back door of the place. After a round of tasting, I made my way out to the deck and noticed there was a nest of what looked like bees underneath the planks. Soon, another one of our party came out and insisted they were yellowjackets. We sat for a while watching pairs of them fight in the cracks of the deck, heads locked, snarling at each other. The next place we went was Hazlitt Vineyards, a refurnished, old barn with the blades from giant saws and the heads of deer decorating the walls. A drunken, white-bearded man with a glass of wine hanging from his neck welcomed us at the door and a bright-eyed young man who looks like the kid in the NeverEnding Story was pouring the wine and refilling the bowls of popcorn at the bar. One of the wines we tasted has a normal name, but is labeled with a graphic of a bug-eyed wolf in a hot tub, eyeing some passing females. A bottle floating in the water is labeled H.H.J., which the bartender said stands for Hazlitt Horny Juice, the nickname for what we were drinking. I was sitting on a lot out in the parking lot near the entrance, watching the sky swirl, when the old man started talking to me. "Nice day," he said. I agreed and said it might be cold tonight. He stared out at the parking lot for a bit and then answered: "Just sleep in the long johns." The next place, I think, was called Leidenfrost, and was a lot like the first on our adventure. It was here where we saw the only people our age of the whole trip, two red-haired stallions from Hamilton College getting loaded with their father. One of them said he knew a kid I went to high school with. Leindenfrost was especially nice because of it's charming duck pond, and giant, covered porch. In the back is a long field with a few octangular picnic tables and I fell asleep on one briefly before we had to go. The Rasta Ranch was the next stop, and not much of a ranch at all. It's a cool, dark, unfurnished barn with lots of bracelets and leather jackets for sale hanging on the walls. The list was short, but the wines have names like "Greatful Red" and "Purple Haze" and the server was smoking as she poured. Bagley's was the last stop on our trip, and probably the best. The bar is lined up against the wall of a big, airy room and there are dogs sleeping at your feet. We were midway through the tasting when a giant man in Carhart Overalls and a shooting, white beard walked out from the back carrying a giant basket full of perch a friend of his had caught in Seneca that morning. After several helpings of the fried fish, and some surprisingly intense conversations with my friend Denny, I made my way out to the back field, where I found a skeet-shooting machine and a crate of saucer-sized, orange-topped skeet. I had been laying in the grass for some time with the vineyard's four dogs,two of them chocolate labs and two of them blue-spotted hounds, when a few people from our party ran down the field and said it was time to go. We piled into the car and stopped twice; once to look at a waterfall and once for some other reason at a place where I bought an ice cream cone. After that, I remember waking up in Ithaca, feeling like my bones were made of pudding and my head was an anvil. Once home, I tried to play Vectorman, but instead fell asleep on the couch for the rest of the day, waking up sober and senile, ready for an easy evening in my shitty college years. Cole Louison is too drunk to be out of here right now.
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