A Wedding Story

Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That's all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
William Butler Yeats 1865 - 1939

This past weekend, we had a wedding at the vineyard! Since a vineyard is not a catering hall, a vineyard wedding does not mean you get things "your way". In order to make the entire thing workable (and profitable, of course) these are the rules:

1. The entire B&B must be booked for the weekend, regardless of whether or not all the rooms will be occupied.

2. The rehearsal dinner is composed, served, and cooked by the vineyard. The only alcoholic beverages served are house wines.

3. Any wine served at the wedding reception is - you guessed it.

While this may seem to be a little restrictive at first blush, consider this:

1. The vineyard is a small family business, not a conglomerate - it would be impossible to host a wedding with non-wedding customers in the B&B, both for logistical reasons and for the privacy of the bride and groom, and it would be unreasonable to expect the vineyard to lose revenue on rooms that would have otherwise been occupied, and so the "all or nothing" policy.

2. If people want a wedding where Uncle Joe gets his required six scotch and sodas, then they are free to go to a catering hall. If they want a real vineyard wedding, the only thing to do is sit back, relax, and enjoy the wonderful food and beverages specially selected and prepared by the chef. When enjoying a unique and specialized experience, the best thing to do is to let the proprietors do what they do best. (Same goes for restaurant service - when dining in a specialty restaurant, it's wise never to insist on ordering something the way your Aunt Bessie made it... you will never be satisfied. Better to give Aunt Bessie a visit. She misses you, and you never write.)

3. We're assuming that people chose a vineyard wedding because they like wine. And as a vineyard is a business, we need to sell wine! So, if someone gets married here, it follows that they have tasted and enjoyed our wine, and will be happy to serve it to their guests!

***

FRIDAY NIGHT

As it turned out, the bridal party and their immediate family were lovely people. The rehearsal dinner on Friday night went off without a hitch. Hors d'oeuvres were served on the outside deck along with a few selections of our lightest wines.

I wasn't entirely sure that all the guests were aware that there would be wine served with every course of the meal, as they were really slugging it down out there on the deck! I was "wine girl", and the other servers trotted around with plates of goat cheese rolled in fresh shredded basil, mushroom toast, and vichy-soise soup shots that had a spoon of shrimp salsa balanced on the top.

When it came time to go inside and eat, the guests all seated themselves fairly quickly. Thank goodness there was only one toddler, and she was a darling. Brenda went and got the little girl her own basket of grapes and a bowl of melon, since most of the food being served was "grown-up food". The tyke was thrilled to have her own special little setup, and was good as gold.

The dinner comprised a salad starter, followed by delicious rare steaks of perfectly seasoned Long Island Duck breast, striped bass with a crumbled breaded topping, summer squash and zucchini with blistered cherry tomatoes, and a pasta called "fregola" (resembles extremely large cous-cous) with dried cranberries tossed in. The meal was served family style, so we brought around platters and let folks serve themselves.

Fregola

Dessert was a heavenly confection of home-made shortbread scones, split and filled with crème fraîche and the largest, ripest blackberries I have ever seen in my life. Those berries were half the size of a golf ball, no lie! Unfortunately, the desserts were made exactly to order (there was even a momentary panic because the little girl had taken one, and they had only prepared enough for the adult guests), so there were no leftovers for the staff - waaaaaah!

However, there were leftovers from the dinner, and we all got a nice glass of wine and a heaping plate of dinner after the last dishes were cleared. It was wonderful!

***

SATURDAY

On Saturday, the day of the wedding, a hurricane was due to hit Long Island. It rained all day, and I don't really know how the wedding ceremony went because the tasting room was actually open for regular business during the day, and the ceremony was being held after hours so I was gone by then.

What I do know is that some hours before the wedding, an improbably huge tour bus pulled into our tiny gravel parking lot and hordes of elegantly dressed guests poured forth and began to stroll around the grounds.

Some of them wandered into the tasting room, and asked if free wine went with the wedding. Upon discovering that they would have to pay for it unless they were willing to wait until the reception, they then requested to buy bottles of wine and bring them over to the reception tent and start their own little pre-wedding party. This request was also denied, partly to stop the ceremony from becoming a drunken fiasco and partly because the glassware in the tasting room is ours, and the glassware in the reception tent was from the rental company. Any of our wine glasses that ended up over there would disappear into the rental truck, never to be seen again. So the slightly miffed guests ordered a glass of wine each, tossed them back like a shot, and left the glasses on the tasting room counter.

Funniest bit was finding out later that the tour bus? With the wine-crazy guests? Had come to THE WRONG WEDDING. They were supposed to be at some other vineyard wedding! I never got to find out if they made it on time, or whether the guests from our wedding were on some other tour bus somewhere in Dubuque... I was too busy serving wine to the lunatic people that ventured out on a hurricane day to slog through the mud and go wine-tasting. There were quite a few!

***
SUNDAY MORNING

I had to get there extra-early on Sunday, as the bridal party was having one last hurrah - a brunch. We set up tables in the bright sun and gusty winds, which all promptly tried to take off like three-masted schooners, knotted tablecloths filling like sails.

Plonking heavy things down on top of them seemed the only solution, so we had one table full of glassware and pitchers of water, juices, and iced tea. Another table had a coffee urn (non-functional, rented, no big surprise there) with coffee cups and assorted coffee-related accoutrements. Two other tables bore plates and flatware, and hosted frittatas, home-cured maple bacon, fruit, granola, and yogurt.

We had artfully arranged teak lawn chairs and tables around on the grass, leaving the deck free for buffet traffic. All was in perfect order, and we were set for a lovely brunch.

Except.

That same day, there was a local tour happening in the area, and the first stop on the tour was our vineyard. Which means that loads of people were being directed to park outside the front entrance and walk up the drive, past the brunch, and lots of these people thought the brunch was part of their tour! They tried to wander in the front walkway, they artfully dodged the bright yellow caution tape we'd put up around the lawn area of the brunch, and I was the watchdog who spotted them and redirected them to the rear of the house where the tour tickets were being sold.

Excuse me, are you with the
wedding brunch or the tour?

My security duties did not end there. No, sir. You see, the kitchen in which the breakfast was being prepared is part of Daniel and Brenda's personal home. It's attached to the B&B but separated by locking sliding wooden doors inside. We servers had one glass door through which we were bringing out food, bringing in used plates and glasses, bringing out refills for the coffee urn and drinks, bringing in emptied serving platters, bringing out refilled food platters... you get the idea. This one door was the service door. Would have been apparent to anyone that had half a brain.

And yet.

The guests that appeared at this brunch were a far different crowd than the ones that attended the rehearsal dinner. They were rude and pushy and greedy. The brunch was prepared for sixty guests - guests who were arriving in dribs and drabs, not all at once. Therefore the food being prepared was portioned to feed sixty people. And yet the first twenty people to arrive ate almost half of the food! One chubby pre-teen brat came up and loaded his plate with seven pieces of the maple-cured bacon... Daniel nearly went apoplectic.

When are they bringing out
more baconnnnn Mummy?

Luckily, the groom saw this happen and came to us and asked that we "slow down" the output of bacon, as people were just scarfing the stuff down like it was a bag of Cheetos. He didn't exactly put it in those words, but Daniel sure did, once safely back in the privacy of the kitchen.

Not that there was much privacy - there were five or so brunch guests who made multiple attempts to walk into the house, and each time I stepped in front of them, standing in the doorway, and politely asked if there was anything I could do for them. As the doorway is small and I am not, there was nothing they could do short of bodily shoving me out of the way (which I am absolutely sure one man considered doing - he had that certain gleam of entitled malice in his piggy little eyes which says "I'm dressed up and I've got lots of money and I kick my dog when no one is looking, so what do you think I'd do to you?"), they could not gain entry.

What do you mean I can't go in the house?
Don't you know WHO I AM???

I explained as briefly and politely as I could that this was a private residence, and guests were welcome to enjoy the brunch out on the lawn. I explained that this was the service entrance, and that allowing people inside might cause injury, since hot foods were being prepared at the open cooking surface. I did not mention that the most likely cause of bodily injury might come from the owner, who was standing inside ready to rip people's heads off if they didn't get the hell out of his house.

There was, of course, the bathroom issue. There is a one-person bathroom down a hall past the kitchen which was available for guest use - however this did not mean that crowds of people were welcome to go trooping into the house and lounge around the cooking area waiting for their friends to vacate the lavatory.

The same five nosy, annoying guests tried the "but we have to use the restroom" ploy, and I told them I would happily let them in one at a time just as soon as the person currently in there made an exit.

Ms. Attitude snapped "Where's my escort?" when I told her that the restroom was free. Mr. Obnoxious (who muttered something like "killer" during a previous attempt to enter the house - I'm not entirely sure he didn't say "kill her"...) let his four-year-old son run into the house unaccompanied, and I promptly asked him to call the boy back and accompany him to the restroom when it was free. As he and his son left the house afterward, the little boy asked loudly, "Why aren't we ever coming back here, Daddy? Whyyyyy aren't we ever coming back heeeeere?".

I wanted to shout, "Because someone up there LIKES US." Instead, I clamped my jaw shut. I should get a prize or something.