A foray into hyperlinks.

I've come to discover that people unfamiliar with the wine industry tend to think of vineyards and wineries as the same things. Simply, vineyards are where grapes are grown, wineries are where the grapes are processed to become wine. Notice, I did not say "where wine is made," as many, including myself, adhere to the belief that the quality and essence of wine is made in the vineyards through the collaboration of soil, weather, nature's other intangibles, pruning and whatever additions or subtractions the vineyard's human handlers wish to make. Not that you can't screw up a wine once it gets to the winery, this is just the observation that, like any product, wines can only be as good as their raw materials.

Some think that this is only partially true, that juice can be manipulated through various means to make up for imperfections created by poor vintages or lack of attention and/or greed by vineyard managers. Yields can be high if the wine can be concentrated later to make up for thin, dilute character. Familiar oak flavors, used to an extreme, can mask undesirable flavors or aromas, wrapping flawed fruit with the known cloak of vanilla, dill and mocha. Colors can be fixed, tannins may be added or removed. Sweet, high sugar grapes, naturally producing high alcohol wines are not a problem, as the overall alcohol levels can be scaled back thanks to dear technology. Dear technology.

All this is pretty remedial stuff that one encounters early on reading books like “Making Sense of Wine” or talking to a particularly opinionated winemaker. What brings this to mind is the care that Papi takes with all the fruit that crosses his path.

More on this later…I can hear the barrels calling.