Les Taylor's sometimes-daily thoughts: September 2008

Oakville Grocery in Napa this weekend

... wine

"In France they do things through meticulous study with very little experimentation and trying to understand what they have around them. In the US you have people over here that go, 'Well, well shit can I grow wine here? I don't know? Well Frank lets give it a try. '"

Madeline Puckette, Wine Folly

Somm: Into the Bottle

"Wine is sunlight, held together by water." The poetic wisdom of the Italian physicist, philosopher, and stargazer, Galileo Galilei. It all begins with the soil, the vine, the grape.

The smell of the vineyard - like inhaling birth. It awakens some ancestral, some primordial... anyway, some deeply imprinted, and probably subconscious place in my soul.

- Steven Spurrier - Bottle Shock

I like to think about the life of wine. How it's a living thing. I like to think about what was going on the year the grapes were growing; how the sun was shining; if it rained. I like to think about all the people who tended and picked the grapes. And if it's an old wine, how many of them must be dead by now. I like how wine continues to evolve, like if I opened a bottle of wine today it would taste different than if I'd opened it on any other day, because a bottle of wine is actually alive. And it's constantly evolving and gaining complexity. That is, until it peaks like your 61’ and then it begins its steady, inevitable decline.

And it tastes so fucking good.

-Maya, Sideways

You have to have it in your blood, you have to grow up with the soil underneath your nails, the smell of the grapes in the air that you breathe. The cultivation of the vine was an art form. The refinement of the vine is a religion that requires pain and desire and sacrifice.

- Gustavo Brambila - Bottle Shock

Wine is like people. The vine takes
all the influences in life all around it.
It absorbs them and it gets its personality.

- Luc Teyssier - French Kiss

Les Taylor's sometimes-daily thoughts

Pages

Sunday, September 21, 2008

Napa, getting lunch for the trip up the valley