April Newsletter: The Caterpillar
An inspiring insect, a peaceful place, and a bottle of something special.
You can listen to an audio version of this newsletter by clicking the playback above.
The Sea of Brilliant Ideas
The beige enamel kettle whistles a thin jet of steam into the air. I pad over in my socked Birkenstocks and lift it off the stove. It’s late Monday evening. Andrew and I just returned from our last CSA deliveries of the week. I’m preparing tea for us both: my favorite end-of-day ritual.
As I pour hot water into a mug of dried ginger, a snicker bubbles up from the kitchen table. Glancing up, I see Andrew flopped into one of our high-top chairs, one hand obscuring a smile.
“What is it?” I ask, wandering over to the table.
“Look at this,” he says. He thumbs over the screen of his phone and turns it to me. It’s a product listing for a T-shirt with Eric Carle’s “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” centered on the chest. Stamped along its friendly, green body are the words “EAT THE RICH.”
I crack a smile. “We should do a collab,” I say.
Andrew nods in absent agreement, rubbing his eyes. Another brilliant idea in a sea of brilliant and unmarketable ideas. Good enough for a laugh.
We move on from the caterpillar to dinner and Spanish practice (another end-of-day ritual). Like mathematics and color theory, Andrew has a knack for languages. I, on the other hand, do not. You can imagine how this plays out.
We racket between English and Spanish, or at least, Andrew does. When I try to switch between the two, my brain gets confused and defaults to my high school French. The resulting language is Sprench or Franish, depending on how flustered I get.
After this bilingual thrashing, Andrew heads upstairs for some light cookbook reading. This is how foodies relax after they batter you with foreign languages.
I hang back in the kitchen. I’m still thinking about the caterpillar tee (and recovering my linguistic wits). Not the collab, per se, but the idea. If you can put laughter on a shirt, can you put it in a bottle? I shake my head to myself. Humor isn’t generally our aesthetic. But something else is. Something softer and gentler.
Laughter done right brings us back to the same place all pure things do: peace.
“How do I bottle peace?” I ask whatever muse happens to be on the overnight shift. The empty kitchen offers no answers. I close my eyes and inhale. When I let my breath out, I wait for the first thing that comes to mind when I think of peace.
Then, I go there.
I’m just outside Santa Fe, New Mexico, hiking the Aspen Vista trail. The trailhead starts at about 9,000 feet and meanders up and around the Sangre de Cristo range. Its mouth is a wide patch of dry, pale dirt and wind-worn rocks. At its peak, it’s little more than a deer trail, cutting through a saddle meadow. But I don’t know that yet.
The trailhead is always a bumble of hatchback caravaners, pausing for scenic photoshoots. I’m beyond that now, one crunching step after another up the steepening incline. This far along, the human population thins out. It’s just me and the aspens and my backpack full of water bottles. I’m hiking in shorts and a tank top: a bad choice when you’re this close to the sun. I can already feel my shoulders and thighs pinking from exposure. A maladapted creature in a heliotropic landscape.
Straight-backed aspens tower upwards on either side of me, heart-shaped leaves murmuring a checkered chorus. Their smooth bark is pure white in the piercing sun, and the reflected light turns the forest luminous. There is very little underbrush at this altitude, and I can see miles deep into the trees. Rails of white and green, eventually blurring into nothing.
Aridity means no insects. No insects means no birds. No chirps or whistles in the branches. Just a tonal, unceasing wind, keening over the peaks. And the raucous human noise of my clumsy passage.
The smell of piñon resin baking in the heat hangs in the air. Every time the wind blows, I lose it. When the wind stills, there it is again. The friendliest haunting in broad daylight.
The trees part at the neck of a switchback, and I scramble onto a boulder for a look at the city below. It’s a sprawl of cubic adobe homes, all tetrised together in a flat sheet. Santa Fe’s development ordinances prohibit buildings over a certain height and require that all construction mirror the color palette of the landscape. This keeps the city from visually marring the infinite expanse of beige and orange beyond.
A loan vulture wafts on a rising thermal in the indeterminate space between earth and sky. I’m wafting too, drunk on the bright sunlight and the thin air (and maybe dehydration). If I linger here long enough, I might just float away, like a scrap of paper caught in the breeze. This place is peaceful in a way that my suburban upbringing has never known.
“I could stay here forever”, I whisper to the aspens.
Part of me will.
I open my eyes.
I’m back in our farm kitchen. Everything is grainy and dim in the low light. I breathe in the last of the echoes of Santa Fe and hold it, just one moment more.
I know what we can make. I’ve found our caterpillar.
Very Hungry Indeed
Andrew pulls a steaming tray of raisin-studded cookies from the hot oven. He murmurs a joyous little jingle to himself as he slides them onto a cooling rack. There’s something about raisins and cookies and yum yum yum, but, just like Spanish, the nuances are above my pay grade. I’m beside him, taxiing botanical tincture jars from the kitchen (my impromptu development space) to the “production room,” where all finished things and raw materials live.
“Well!” He says, pulling off his oven mitts, “I guess it’s time to try one…”
No sooner does he reach for the cookies than I drop my jars with a clatter and lunge for his arm.
“No! Wait!” I yell, grabbing his elbow.
Andrew freezes in place. His eyes run from me, to the cookie inches from his fingers, and back to me again.
“I’d, uh, like to show you my latest wine concept…” I stutter. He stares at me over his glasses. “…and, you’ll ruin your palate.”
Andrew’s hand recoils from the cookie tray. Years removed from working in wine sales and retail, and we still keep to protocol. Sugar is the fastest way to ruin a tasting palate.
“Okay,” he sighs, glancing longingly at the steaming cookies. “Let’s have it.”
I vanish to the winery refrigerator and return with a jar of liquid amber. I pour a few ounces into a glass and hand it to Andrew. He takes a sip, swishes it around in his mouth, and swallows. He gives a pleased “Huh,” then asks, “What’s in it?”
It’s a surprisingly simple blend, mostly chamomile and pear with a few other minor additions around the edges. I give him the footnotes in brief.
“Yep,” he says, nodding. “You got it.”
“Wait, what?” I fumble. “Really? That’s it? It’s done?”
“Yep. It’s great.” he says, snagging a cookie from the cooling rack. He pops the cookie into his mouth and gives such a deep grown of contentment that I actually feel a prickle of jealousy.
I have the irksome suspicion that he’s giving me a free pass in exchange for cookies. As if reading my thoughts, he turns back to me, cookie in hand. “Do you want one?” he says through a mouth full of cookie.
I accept the offering and take a bite. It’s dense and sweet, heady with cinnamon and orange zest. Andrew soaked the raisins in spiced butter before adding them to the dough. They pop like little molten gems of ambrosia. Nice touch. Divinity aside, something is missing.
“There’s no oatmeal,” I say.
“I left it out,” he confirms.
“You can’t do that. Without oatmeal, they’re just raisin cookies.”
“Yes. I didn’t want the oatmeal. I wanted just raisin cookies.”
“No, that isn’t right. You can’t just do that.” My confusion gives way to subtle panic. “This just isn’t right.”
“I wanted cookies without oatmeal. That’s the point.” His eyes flash between bites of just raisin cookie.
“I can’t believe this,” I mutter, stunned.
Andrew shrugs. It’s one of his most defiant gestures. “I like raisins.” He extends his hand and motions for my half-eaten cookie. “You don’t have to finish that.”
I hand it back to him, mostly out of spite. If I’m being honest, it’s just not the same without the oatmeal. He consumes what remains of my just raisin cookie without mercy and makes his way up the stairs to our office.
Someday, I want to make aperitif based on whatever Andrew was feeling when he bit into that first cookie. Very hungry indeed.
Bottling Peace
Andrew cranks his standing desk up to its fullest height. He then spreads a sheet of paper over its surface and pins it in place with the palm of his hand. I peer over his shoulder to get a better look.
I’ve seen this before, half-formed on Andrew’s tablet screen. I’ve heard him tinkering with it late into the evening: just the soft quiet of nightfall and the tik-tik of a plastic stylus. It’s the other half of my caterpillar: the label.
Have I mentioned that Andrew does the artwork for our wine labels? Let me tell you again:
Each label is an image from our farm, drawn and painted digitally. It takes him weeks, sometimes months to complete a single work. Like my botanical wine, each draft goes through countless revisions.
This particular label is a happy one. Tiny white impressionist flowers fan out of the right corner. They crowd into the foreground in a dainty, optimistic fan. Behind them, a bright blue sky fades into a gently textured ombré. The foot of the label spells out just one word: Chamomile.
Andrew runs a pair of scissors along the edges of the print, cropping it into a rectangle. He wraps it around a 375mL Jersey bottle with the word SAMPLE stickered to its side. Our bottle distributor is always sending us new glass to play with. Very convenient in moments like this. I suppose that’s the point.
“Okay,” he says, using his fingers to pin the label in place, “What do you think about this?”
It’s my turn to stamp the seal of approval. “It’s perfect,” I say. “It feels peaceful. It’s exactly what I had in mind.”
Quiet Dissent
Chamomile is a tonic for the times. Sweet with local honey and infused with chamomile blossoms and pears, it’s the quietest dissent we can bottle.
Most of this vintage will go to our wine club: a twice-yearly drop of our botanical wines, bitters, and seasonal releases. It might just be the geekiest wine club in Virginia (maybe the nation?), an accolade we’re happy to hold.
In the case of Chamomile, we have a little extra to share. You can pre-order a bottle on our website, if you’d like.
That’s the story of our latest creation: two simple humans, trying to bring a little peace back into an unsettled world.
Until next time,
Kelly & Andrew
Feedback
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Hi Kelly,
I continue to love reading your monthly newsletter. You are an honest writer and your topics are interesting. Thank you for sharing them with me.
And don't worry about being the Geekist winemaker in Virginia; you are already the Geekist in the World!
Sounds amazing! Looking forward to tasting it soon