Vintage 2020: A Very Good Year…

Autumn is upon us in Wisconsin. Daylight goes home earlier with each sunset. Leaves are shedding bright green togs for more substantial reds and warmer browns. This year, summer’s goodbye was a long one, ultimately drenched in cold and steady tears.

Fall is associated with harvest, yet it is also a time when in due course things die. Trees dressed gaily in apple red and curried ochre, shed festive apparel worn to a celebration of life, to mourn, skeletal arms reaching skyward, braced against winter’s frigid sleep, pleading to heaven in faith that spring will come again.

On my walk this morning I received an unexpected gift of the season from a bold and exuberant, darkly handsome stranger. Passionately kissing my hand, even provocatively nibbling it a bit, he then swung his gorgeous head, gallantly proffering in his teeth a fallen frond of sycamore, a garnet-stained memento of our chance meeting.

I kept his gift, pondering this lovely, fragile thing as I continued my trek, reflecting on a year passing swiftly despite its abundance of change and conflict. Perhaps the magnitude and import of all its events, in obedience to some metaphysical law, had this year careening as if down a mountainside. If it was the sheer weight of 2020 that had time seemingly flying, I cannot say it was all or even mostly “fun.” Still, perhaps there is more to the best times in life than easy-going pleasure. 

Twirling my treasure between my fingers, I considered this exceptional season and year, as a harvest of grapes, both personal and collective. The best vintages come from grapes that struggle, concentrating their content, and thus, viewed as more precious in the sight of the vintner. A well-watered grape with a happy, untroubled life offers little dimension when called upon to sacrifice itself in the birth of wine. Though this year had known long, relentless stretches when the skies wept, it has been in many other ways an arid year, fostering tinder, bitterly susceptible to fires that could consume the harvest, and leave the land irrecoverable for many seasons to come. Yet 2020 persists, surviving to its season of vintage, despite fire and storm, loss and pain.

Vintage. It is a term appropriate to this singular year, since, as a word, it is a fine wine of complex meanings, of many-layered usage. In its earliest incarnation it derived its substance from the grapevines of its origin: A season’s yield of grapes or wine from a vineyard; wine as from a specific type, region, and year. As the word matured in its original cask, its meanings developed to reveal many layers.

Among these analogized definitions, vintage refers to a collection of contemporaneous items or persons; things though old, still recognized as of enduring interest or value. In song, for example, vintage describes the standard, called such not because it is routine or run of the mill, but because the piece sets the bar. A most distinguished example has settled in my brain like a ghostly anthem to this strange year’s harvest. Autumn Leaves, composed by Joseph Kosma, with the original French lyrics by Jacques Prevert, weaves a haunting melody that mourns more than a love lost. Though three quarters of a century old, this song only grows more beloved, its value standing the test of time. The inimitable Johnny Mercer contributed the English lyric to this classic standard:

“The falling leaves

Drift by the window.

The autumn leaves 

of red and gold.

I see your lips,

The summer kisses

The sunburned hands

I used to hold.

Since you went away

The days grow long

And soon I’ll hear

Old winter’s song.

But I miss you most of all,

My darling,

When autumn leaves

Start to fall.”

Of the myriad recordings of this exquisitely sad strain, I find Eva Cassidy’s poignant rendition stays with me.  Simply accompanied by a softly weeping acoustic guitar, she serenades her own final season of harvest, a breathtakingly beautiful voice silenced too soon. 

How many other voices had been silenced too soon this year as people lost their loved ones, those forced to let go of life in not only silence but solitude? How much of what was familiar in life seems to have died in this reckoning harvest of 2020? In my own life, the voice I had raised in defense of the voiceless had been silenced earlier than I had planned and without warning. Has the loss been for naught, or is it part of the pressing? Though jobs vanished—and along with them dreams and hopes—human experience counsels that from such residue new dreams derive. 2020 had certainly known its grapes filled with wrath and rage. And yet, in such a time as this other voices have been born to their purpose. Wiser voices whispered the age old adage, this too shall pass. If we wait, not in despair, but in active hope held in the promise of that which survives, we may see it bear fruit of lasting value.

Vintage continues its fermentation of definition to encompass that which is considered the best and characteristic of an artist’s body of work. Musing the seasons of life and loves, It Was A Very Good Year, by Ervin Drake, was covered by other artists, but old “Blue Eyes” made it his own. Today it is considered vintage Sinatra, being characteristic of his style of delivery and choice of material.

“And now the days are short

I’m in the autumn of the year

And I think of my life as vintage wine

From fine old kegs

From the brim to the dregs

It poured sweet and clear

It was a very good year.”

Looking back on 2020, a year of struggle and growth for me personally, tears water vines long since planted, faith in what is to come gathers the grapes to harvest. I see around me that this year has brought others to the same place in which I find myself. As we crush this harvest to retain the precious juices, and rack 2020 to mature, one wonders what this vintage will yield.

Shall we discard the pomace, or in the habit of the frugal vintner, seek to extract from these remains, an essence to distill a stronger spirit against the cold of coming winter? It may well be that with time to mature in perspective we shall uncork 2020 to find an excellent vintage of fruitful memories, balanced with tannic lessons, a complex, many layered revelation as satisfying as a 2014 St. Francis Old Vine Zinfandel.

As the days grow shorter, I shall watch and wait by the fire, sipping something full-bodied and red, as vintage Frank sings to me of lives lived his way, and loves lost. I anticipate with a hopeful heart that looking back on 2020 in the season of dormant reflection soon to be upon us all, that wisely, a bit wistfully, I shall declare,

It was a very good year…