Just home now, from a memorable sales trip that started in Parkslope, Brooklyn and ended up in Beaufort, South Carolina. Usually my trips are to one general region, so it was unusual that this one was to one general time zone. A high-spotting and stream-of conscious-ing the memories of the trip yields the following:
- Tasting wines with internet celeb Gary Vaynerchuk-Springfield, New Jersey
- Drinking beer with new favorite artist Andrea Von Bujdoss - Union Hall, Parkslope
- Hanging with my friend American Dave and fam. -Williamsburg
- Seeing a guy walking 16 dogs-Parkslope
- Eating a Phat Burrito-Charlotte
- Walking by (wish I could say ‘chillin’ with’) Kim Bassinger at the airport-Charlotte
- Learning about the family owned winery program at 131 Main -Charlotte
- Eating roadside fried fish, rice and beans @ Katherine’s Soul Food truck- Rural South Carolina
- Sipping Coffee, eating cookies and wallowing in southern beauty- Spring Island
- Eating Tupelo honey and watching Tyler Florence make Brussels sprouts live at Palmetto Bluff wine festival
- Talking surfing, sailing and family with Beaufort SC, restaurant mogul/surf-fisher and my new BFF Lantz Price
All of these things are story worthy in their own right, but none more so than what happened the last night of my trip. It was to be the last of four wine dinners in a row, at Plum’s in Beaufort, and there were over 50 reservations. The previous dinners had all been in elegant white table-cloth restaurants, and though they were each excellent in their own right, I was relieved to see that this was totally different. There was one big dining hall, with wooden floors, a bar and no table cloths. In other words, a very casual and welcoming place.
I was greeted by Lantz (my knew BFF) and we immediately hit it off. A transplanted surf/ski and wine bum from New Hampshire, Lantz has developed a few successful restaurants in Beaufort. Plums is his low-key waterfront place that serves great low country food and wine to families and their young kids during meal time, and beer and shots with live music to older kids without their families wee into the night. As we milled about before the first course, every table was full except one four-top, where a woman sat alone. Once in a blue moon, a single person shows up at dinner that I am doing and ends up blended into another larger group, often mine. That wasn’t the case here, and so I invited her to come sit at my table. It turned out she was waiting for three more women, all of whom were Marine drill instructors from nearby Parris Island.
Never one to miss an opportunity, as soon as the latecomers arrived, I told them that they were in trouble for holding up the whole dinner and as a consequence had until the desert course to come up with a drill routine with which to lead the crowd. They took it in stride and said, as long as they had wine through the dinner all would be fine. Desert came and after they organized themselves in a hallway out of sight, I announced the special guests to the crowd as three Marine drill instructors from nearby Parris Island, and much to everyone’s delight, in marched these three beautiful women who, once set and in formation, started barking custom, wine drinking orders in to all of us in the room. It was absolutely awesome. We repeated after them as loudly as we could, and screamed appreciatively when they were done.
Afterwards, they thanked the Beaufort community for supporting all the Marines on Parris Island and then led us in a moment of silence to commemorate all the deployed Marines- those who were- and weren’t- coming back. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house, and I get chills even now recalling it. It was one of those moments, frozen in time, where a good-time experience transformed briefly, seriously, and directly, into something totally meaningful and memorable. I think those moments are more frequent than we realize, or recognize and we are too distracted to notice them. Not so with this one. It didn’t take the 3 hours of post-dinner wine and stories for those woman to become heroes to me (they had me at ‘okay we’ll do it!’), though it helped me really understand what they do and hear firsthand about the sacrifices they make on behalf of all of us. My new friends Sgt Joanna Mendoza, Sgt Nicole Allen, Sgt Sadys Corcino and Joan Petrucci, and their husbands (two of which are in Afghanistan) and families, will always be welcomed here. Look for an impromptu cell-phone video and the transcript of drill under Wine Creed on our Facebook fan page.
Now for some orders for you: Next time you have the opportunity to pour yourself and/or your friends a glass of wine, toast all the Marines and service people out there—to their health, their sacrifice, to their safe return and your gratitude for it all. And then hope to be lucky enough, once your earplugs are in and your hatches battened down, to repeat the toast again to their face some day.
