In the shed.

I played a fair amount of Donkey Kong as a kid. I remember the barrels shattering, I remember the fear of them taking me out. I am now struggling with my little plastic hammer and skinny white ass to figure out what I would do if any creature, let alone THE Donkey Kong decided to come into this room and start chucking barrels at me. There is definitely enough ammo here to force me to break a sweat, if not my neck. Aside from the garage door, there is only one exit.

I figure there is no way around this fear except to treat the barrels with the utmost respect, despite the fact that I am trying to help them with my banging away at their ids and egos. I feel like Dr. Phil. I know I can help.

Big P. gets back from NY, and I am immediately in love with him again. He is a winemaker, he knows what he wants and what to do to get it. That, and he takes off for Napa without mentioning he's leaving just because he needs a solution to a fruit fly problem. I once was told that fruit flies add character to wine. I'd rather know that the person behind the wine I am drinking cares to go away for a couple hours, despite having woken up in a different time zone at an ungodly hour, just to get form fitting tarps to keep the bastards out. I can still feel the little buzzers in my nose.

I walked out into the vineyards surrounding the winery today and tasted more fruit. I am getting confident in thinking that this is a complete waste of space. I am not sure if it would make a difference in quality or not, but these are raisins, past any point of ripeness that might be considered okay for making wines. Sure, I'm a hack, but is this a deliberate attempt to attain phenolic ripeness? At what cost? The fruit is actually closer to a raisin, not in the French sense, than a mature grape, and the sugars remind me of jelly more than fresh fruit. That and the pips break like dried cork in my mouth, leaving a dusty not in a a Sangiovese way residue in the mouth. Hogwash, but, like I said, I'm a hack.