The Dead Arm

Just back from the doctor's with bad news: my right shoulder is a mess. My days of ever pitching a baseball again are probably over.

To be honest, it doesn't come as a surprise. Ever since I injured it doing pull-ups when I was in high school, I've had several operations to repair torn tendons, broken bones and eliminate scar tissue. It's enabled me to keep playing here in France, even after age seventy, but now I fear the clock has run out. The latest test, an ultrasound examination which here is called an échographie, shows more tearing, more shredded tendons and that the shoulder muscles have atrophied. There's no strength, nothing. My arm, for all intents and purposes, is dead. It even hurts to lift a glass of wine.

Which brings me to the point of this article. While visiting one of my favorite wine haunts in Paris, I spotted a bottle with the most provocative label. The name of the wine was The Dead Arm. It was an Australian wine, 100% Shiraz, made in 2003 by the Osborn family of McLaren Vale, a township on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula. Why the name?

Dead Arm is actually a vine disease caused by the fungus Eutypa lata which affects vineyards all over the world. Often vines with its symptoms are severely pruned, replanted or abandoned. At the Osborn's d'Arenberg estate, Dead Arm is considered a natural part of vineyard life. One half, or one arm of the vine, slowly becomes reduced to dead wood. That side is lifeless and brittle, but the grapes on the other side . . .

The Osborns note that "Although our Dead Arm-affected blocks are considered by local grape growers and winemakers as having 'one foot in the grave,' these truncated, gap-toothed old vines have been producing small bunches of highly flavored grapes since the 19th century." Each year, small parcels of Shiraz from the Dead Arm blocks are vinified separately from other Shiraz at d'Arenberg. The grapes are hand-harvested and are very small. They are then crushed by an open-mouthed, rubber-toothed Demoisy crusher and pumped into open fermenters where the traditional foot-treading in wader-clad feet takes place. A week or so later, the still fermenting Shiraz is gently pressed by a 19th century 'Coq' press into new American and French oak barrels for 22 months of maturation before blending.

The Dead Arm I tasted was anything but dead. It was ripe, intense and very much alive. In a word, delicious. My shoulder feels better already!