“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,’ writes Joan Didion, in The White Album. ‘We live...by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.” Every other Thursday morning, for the past four years, my friend and business partner, Daniel, and I – both stubborn procrastinators - have woken up early to write. We write to share the stories that bring meaning to our lives, stories that help us understand our place in the world, that make us laugh, or change our minds.

When we opened Oakland Yard in November of 2016, Daniel suggested we share the task of writing of a weekly ‘newsletter’ featuring amusing stories, new products, events, and promotions. I’d say I have a great appreciation for wine, but I don’t know anyone who wants to read a weekly essay about the stuff. My delight in wine comes from the unmediated experience, a smelling and touching and tasting that has nothing to do with words. Wine, like music, does not fit into words, or rather words are unfit to describe them, and much of the value of wine - and all food and art – for me, is that it sends me places words cannot go. We still write about the store, or about wine, occasionally, but these days, with no events on the horizon and fewer actors onsite, more often than not, we just tell stories. I suppose we do it to try to make sense of our lives, to freeze the phantasmagoria.

So we try to let our wines speak for themselves – they may whisper, groan, roar or sigh; far be it from us to tell you what they’re saying – and instead we put words to our hopes and fears, to the funny thing that happened last week, to a persistent childhood memory, or any of the unlikely events that make up a half century of life on this planet. When I was young and learning to write, I felt I had not lived enough, not seen enough, to have anything interesting to say. I used to joke that I was busy gathering information, storing data, and that one day I would release my findings. Maybe it wasn’t a joke after all. Daniel and I have each written over a hundred of these missives, all archived on our website for binge-reading or general reference. Some mornings we’re sharper than others, but it always comes from the heart.

Thank you for reading,

Max