I’d like to have you believe that real life rarely intrudes upon my wine-induced reality bubble, but that’s simply not true. I wish I could say that I rise every morning having dreamed about Barolo, the Alps rising on the horizon, my glass always full, my lips 
always moist with Nebbiolo, then I brush my teeth with dry Riesling and stumble into the kitchen and pour myself some cru-Beaujolais. Then, from the moment I kiss the wife good-bye to her return from a day at the office, it’s a steady diet of wine, wine, wine; perhaps a cleansing ale at lunch before another half dozen bottles until dinner and bed, my only venture outside amounting to bagging up all the empties and taking them down to the curb to be recycled.
But real life keeps barging into my wine consciousness. Real life, with its road trips, soft caresses, picnic baskets, music venues, swimming pools, baseball games, embarrassing itches and four year-olds, not to mention the incessant text crawl snaking on 
about the primary season, the war on terror, gas prices, and of course the NBA playoffs–and finally here, in Los Angeles, an appalling crisis over taco trucks (marvelous things that were basically outlawed in mid-April by the L.A. County Board of Supervisors).
You’d think that these things would intrude on my blissful wine existence. But what I’m finding instead is that everything starts to coalesce. Indeed, wine has a way of insinuating itself into these real life events.
For instance, all I can think about Hillary Clinton is that she’s overly tannic. Her questionable, at times deplorable tactics in the last few weeks of the campaign have rendered her, like an unpleasant wine, shrill and short. I’ll acknowledge that she has a lot of backbone, and her Chateau (once from Illinois, then from Arkansas, now inexplicably uprooted to New York), has had a longstanding reputation for excellence–though never one, it seems, without controversy. There have been times when the wines from this domaine haven’t seemed entirely natural, even a 
little contrived (some questionable additives in prior vintages from Serbia?) but there’s no denying their fortitude. And, as members of the Chateau seem never to go away; we can assume they’re long-agers. But please, these last few months, her small-minded pronouncements and cheap shots have just had her coming off as astringent as a Cabernet Franc from a place where the sun is bitter and mean–it causes me to purse my lips just thinking of it.
John McCain, on the other hand, seems like one of those bottles of wine that’s just a little past its prime. Looking at it in the 
glass, smelling the bouquet, tasting it, you can tell it was once quite good, but you end up wishing you had opened it, say, eight years ago (wouldn’t that have been something?). Now, obviously, the wine has seen better days–it seems flat, awkward, out of step, it seems like it has nowhere to go but downhill. Perhaps it’s a question of provenance–all those years in an independently-owned Arizona storage locker, only to get transferred to the cellars and pulpits of pundits and politicos–Charles Keating, Rush Limbaugh, Bob Jones, Jerry Falwell–who can really say where that bottle has been?
Where does that leave Barack Obama? Well, there’s the youth of the bottle, for one thing. Vivid fruit, bright in the glass, vibrant, refreshing, as the critics like to say, precocious. It is a supple wine, and the winemaker seems resilient, it can survive a bad 
vintage and come away with some additional perspective. The abysmal Jeremiah Wright Vintage of early April? Well, that looked like a difficult prospect, but Obama managed to make a decent wine out of it, speak of it eloquently, and weather the storm. The gutterball? Well, that was awkward, but there’s always the next frame. This one’s for drinking now and for laying down: I’m thinking young Syrah, like St. Joseph: accessible, plenty complex, approachable, but built for the long haul. That’s what I’m drinking tonight.