Bookworm, Issue 24
The Book: There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension by Hanif Abdurraqib
Whether in the company of athletes legendary or unknown, on the streets or a national stage, basketball players and spectators alike embrace hope, disappointment, and sometimes even, jubilation. But basketball is more than a game in There’s Always This Year where it anchors essayist and poet Hanif Abdurraqib to his home; a place from which some yearn to escape, but to which the author holds fast.
Abdurraqib invites us to reminisce alongside him about life on the east side of Columbus, Ohio, during his childhood in the 1990s and into adulthood. The book combines astute cultural analysis and poignant memoir, ranging from basketball, music, and movies, to poverty, homelessness, and police brutality. All the while, Abdurraqib creates a portrait of his home and the people he loves – defined from within, not from without.
This novel is deeply personal, a love letter perhaps, from the author to the place that shapes and sustains him. Fittingly, our paired wine’s character is a result of the place it calls home. The wine is made from a “terroir-expressive” grape variety that thrives, primarily, in one region. Here, it produces some of the world’s finest and most age-worthy wines.
You do not need to love basketball to be in awe of the sport's greatest players, especially under Abdurraqib’s poetic scrutiny. For example, he introduces Kenny Gregory, a neighborhood boy who goes on to play at the University of Kansas. During the 1997 McDonald’s All-American dunk contest, Kenny competes, “heaven bound, the basketball an offering to the sky…(He) was in the air long enough…for an entire neighborhood to hold its breath…”
In the book, this moment lives on the page well beyond those that Kenny Gregory is airborne, as Abdurraqib chooses the dunk contest to describe a kind of homecoming. “It is where one goes to fail, often spectacularly. I wish all failure could be as beautiful as failures that arrive to us midair, a reality setting in that we are incapable and yet still in flight.” In this case, Kenny Gregory does not fail. He succeeds, spectacularly. He “left the ground as ours and returned as everyone’s.”
The beauty of Abdurraqib’s writing lies in how he connects what is seen and what is felt. He tugs at the truths between the concrete – his father’s bald head, for example, or a rusted basketball rim “left naked” without a net – and the conceptual – belonging, worthiness, heartache, and impermanence. His threads are loose and long and tangled, sometimes spanning pages, but steadily encouraging us to feel our way through the narrative.
Near the end of the book, in the “fourth quarter,” two stories powerfully collide; that of the Cleveland Cavaliers’ 2016 NBA Championship and nationwide uprisings against police violence in Black communities. Abdurraqib writes about “the cops the politicians who call the places you love war zones” and “the blood-stained concrete” where Columbus police murdered 23-year-old Henry Green on the block he “lived and loved in.” While a city revels in the glory of a long-hoped-for championship, the author considers what it takes to “rattle people at least somewhat permanently out of the self-made mythology of a clean and holy place.”
Like a highly-competitive basketball match up, it is impossible to turn away from this book. The tension between triumph and defeat demands our attention. Sometimes the action is on the court, but more often, it’s on the streets where Abdurraqib suggests that there’s always hope as long as we’re still in the game.
The Wine: G.D. Vajra, ‘Albe’ Barolo DOCG, Italy, 2020 $40.99
A youthful Barolo, pale ruby, red-fruited, fresh, and approachable; but underlying this initial carefree display is a wine with a serious side, suitable to age for a decade. Its charm is evident at once – ripe red cherry, pomegranate, cranberry, candied strawberry, and rose petals. The pleasure derived from smelling this wine is like the sunrises, albe in Italian, after which it is named – an unfolding array we hope will not end. Another breath in reveals wet soil, fresh mint, cinnamon, and dried roadside herbs. Grippy tannins support bright acidity on the palate, layered with more tart red fruit, flowers, savory herbs, and a hint of orange essence. Like its home in the Alpine foothills, the wine is ethereal, yet simultaneously grounded.
‘Albe’ is 100% Nebbiolo from a blend of organic vineyards in Piedmont’s famed Barolo denomination, where winemaking is all about patience. Nebbiolo grapes ripen slowly in high-elevation vineyards. Once hand-harvested, destemmed and gently fermented, more time passes. Barolo cannot be released until the fourth year after harvest, and it must spend time in oak (26 months in Slavonian casks in this case). Taste with intention, to appreciate the grape, the land, and the winemaking, and be rewarded with this wine’s varietal purity and beauty.
Why the pairing works:
Hanif Abdurraqib’s affection for and devotion to East Columbus, Ohio, is evident throughout There’s Always This Year. He helps us understand the specialness of this place and the feelings of belonging among the people who live there. “(L)et it be known that some of us never once dreamed of leaving,” he writes, “Tell me if you have ever built a heaven out of nothing, and then tell me what it would take for you to look for a new one someplace else.”
A similar affinity exists between many wines and the places and people that produce them. In this case, the grape variety Nebbiolo was born in and remains in the foothills of the snow-capped Italian Alps. Ampelographer Anna Schneider considers it a “non-migrating” grape, and in fact, Nebbiolo rarely grows anywhere else.*
Early-budding and late-ripening Nebbiolo achieves its truest expression growing on Piedmont’s sunny slopes. Here, the natural environment, but as importantly, the region’s history, culture, and farming and winemaking practices influence the style and taste of the wines in our glasses. In Piedmont’s Barolo denomination, the grape produces famously-complex and long-lived wines where “even the subtlest differences between vineyard patches” are evident, according to The World Atlas of Wine.
Nebbiolo is “terroir-expressive,” and so like Burgundian winemakers, Barolo producers are devoted to site-specific wines. Wines from the various crus are distinguished for characteristics such as elegance, elevated aromatics, concentration, power, or flavors that lean toward fruit, flowers, or earth. But all Barolo shares a light ruby to garnet hue, high tannin and acidity, and complexity that deepens with bottle age.
This extraordinary link between a grape, Nebbiolo, and its growing region, Piedmont, results in some of the world’s most profound wines, Barolo. A sense of place that is deep-rooted, yet sometimes hard to define, permeates both G.D. Vajra’s ‘Albe’ Barolo and Hanif Abdurraqib’s There’s Always This Year. Together, the wine’s pretty and lifted aromatics and the author’s poetic prose invite us to contemplate the significance and meaning of home.
*Outside of Piedmont, Nebbiolo grows in a handful of zones between the Alps and the Apennines in northwest Italy. Small plantings also exist in North and South America, Australia, and South Africa, but none of these vineyards produce wines that rival those of Italy.