Quiz Night Solidarity

As an odd bit of continuity from my life in Boulder, Quiz Night has been resurrected in the Valley, except that the Wednesday night pub venue in Colorado has been swapped for a Tuesday night vineyard in South Africa. Minor difference, really.

Of all the hidden little gems of the Valley-- spinning classes, Wednesday night rugby happy hours, book clubs, art societies-- this might top the list in terms of both originality and notoriety. Joris and Natalie, the owners of a BEAUTIFUL winery called Almenkerk have made the monthly quiz night into quite a fixture on the valley calendar. While the purpose is purportedly a bit of jeopardy, the night almost always ends with people going down the fire-pole in their cellar. This is in large part due to one of the central traditions of the night, everyone brings their own bottle of wine. In a place where most people are in the wine business, the chance to have wine from another vineyard is never taken lightly. People load up on other winemaker's goods, slightly fatigued of their own stock, which is always within arms reach. Lately, the enjoyment of the Valley wine got to such a state that people not only slid down the fire-pole, they hosted a competition to see who could shimmy up it.

Now don't think that this little bit of wine-induced mayhem keeps people from taking the business of the quiz very seriously. People in the valley can multi-task, and as serious as they are about their wine, they are equally serious about all other methods of, ahem, intellectual expansion? Maybe not, but I do know that it takes each "quiz master" at least 6 hours to write these questions and, from someone on the losing team, they are flipping difficult. This most recent quiz was written by a guy named Chris and contained around 50 questions with tangential google answers, (the one's you have to go to the third page of "page hits" to find.) The categories ranged from History and Geography to Songs to Sports to Name That Billionaire, (a section I was particularly abysmal at.) I was on a team with Shereez and Liesel, and though we all complemented each-other with diverse knowledge, we didn't culminate in an ultimate wisdom. Sad but true, we ended with a cumulative score of 14. The winning score was 22 1/2.

What was particularly cool about this quiz night, though, was that it acted as a moment of renewal after a weekend of nightmarish proportions. The Almenkerks woke up on Saturday to find a fire descending on their vineyard. There have been a couple of terrible fires raging in the hills these past few weeks, but this was the first to descend upon a nearby vineyard. The conflagration seems to have spontaneously erupted, and the authorities still have no idea where the flames originated.

However, from every tragedy arises a pheonix of hope, and it took this calamity to showcase the true beauty of Elgin Valley. Within minutes of the fire, neighbors had descended onto the

farm from the furthest corners of the Valley. Everyone had brought their tractors, water pumps, or just themselves, whatever they could find to help fight the flames. I'm very sad that I wasn't here to see the Valley at it's best, to see all the neighbors converging upon Almenkerk in a mass of farmer solidarity. I do like to imagine the swarm of buckies, coming from all the branching farms, kicking up dust clouds on the dirt roads, rushing to the dam with an open trunk carrying a water pump of their own device.

All in all, I believe about 15% of the vines were lost, a tough loss indeed but far from the catastrophic numbers that could have been sustained. What the farm will have to worry about now is smoke damage. The remaining 85% of the vines were engulfed in smoke throughout the fire-fighting process, and there is real fear about what that means for the grapes. Such delicate fruit, grapes soak in flavors from all around them, and smokiness is not typically a characteristic that you look for in Sauvignon Blanc. Everyone in the Valley is really pulling for the Almenkerks, but the real damage will only be revealed come picking day.