Last March, I met the mystic and mysterious Mr. Vino. I have been in the wine biz for many years, but I have never met anyone quite like him. I was at a Burgundy tasting and he crept upon me like a panther. He must have been in his early 60s, in a gorgeous dark-blue Italian suit with a crimson tie, but his long hair tied in a braid was still jet black with the exception of a skunk-like white streak in the middle of his hair. He was short in stature, but with broad shoulders and the coolest of blue eyes and a handsome face. His voice was deep and authoritative. He was electric; a rock star born for an audience.

He spoke of wine like no one I have ever met before. He lifted a glass of Pommard: “Look beyond the wine,” he said. “Find the essence; the meaning of the experience.”

A buxom emerald-eyed Goddess nodded her approval as I listened.

“What if I just want a wine to go with my mushroom pizza?” I asked, wishing to challenge him.

“You want to go beyond that comfort zone towards true enlightenment,” he corrected me.

I was confused. I always thought that wine was about food matching, fun and revelry.

When the wine tasting was over and I started out of the lavish hotel ballroom, I found just a few steps behind me was the short man in the beautiful suit. He caught up with me and asked if he could spend the night for he had nowhere else to stay. Sure, I said. He seemed harmless enough.

As we drove home in my orange truck, I asked him his name. He slowly replied, “My real name is common, so I am known as Vino, but if you prefer, Mr. Vino.” He bowed his head ever so slightly as an accent.

I could never quite make out where he was from. He looked French or Spanish. He had an accent but where from I was not sure, but he was good company and he knew a helluva a lot about wine. We engaged in a long conversation about red Rhone wines.

I asked where his home was and he told me that he had no home but the world. “Why limit yourself to one location when you can wander, teach and enlighten,” he said. He told me that he only had what was in his suitcase and nothing more.

He said he was going to spend a few days with me and all that he required was wine, food and lodging, and, in turn, he would teach me a few things about wine. I agreed and arranged to take a few days off of work from the wine shop.

I spent the first evening watching Mr. Vino in an extreme form of meditation. He was in an old gray pair of sweatpants and an old T-shirt. He was staring at a taper candle and slowly sipping on a glass of ’02 Flowers pinot noir. He asked me to join in. I sat on the hardwood floor and joined him. He made an ohm sound and asked me to empty my mind and become no mind.

“Wine relaxes the soul and makes your spirit soar into the waves of nature, becoming part of the seamless universe,” he said, his fingers dancing like spiders as he spoke.

“We being Western men always want to quantify things, put things in little black boxes. We label everything. Straight or gay, you are the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker. Wine used in the purest sense can peal back the masks and find the inner truth and real beauty. We try to separate ourselves from nature, put ourselves above it, and that is the insanity of Western men. As we drink wine, we are drinking the blood of the earth. We become natural man freed from categories and boxes.”

How did you learn all this, Mr. Vino?” I asked.

He smiled very broadly, “I learned it, of course, in Bordeaux, in the vineyards among the rows of black ripe merlot. Closing my eyes and taking the delicious delicate fruit in my mouth, that is where I found my Zen.”

“The Zen of wine frees us of the shackles of preoccupation with the mundane, the trivialities of life, the dotting of the i and the crossing of the t. It opens the magical door of life and nature.”

“But what of drunkenness?” I asked.

Mr. Vino became very serious, “Drunkenness, like any excess, should be avoided because it overwhelms your spirit and darkens your heart and mind. You lose the beauty of being in the waves of nature and become self-absorbed and fall outside your true nature. Wine is powerful, you can go to the edge of drunkenness like the ledge of a cliff – what most people call tipsy – but don’t fall into the abyss.