A Vintage Adventure

This afternoon I met some of my co-workers at Vintage Ridge Winery, where the youngest of us has been working this summer. Erin led us through a tasting, pouring us samples and describing each vintage in great detail. I learned a lot, both from her and from her boss who sat with us and talked about the five features that affect taste: tannin, acid, alcohol, phenolics, and residual sugar. (I'm typing them here so I can find them again later.) I have to admit that I'm sort of from the Potter Stewart* school of judging good wine. I know it when I taste it. I tasted quite a few good wines today.

Since I was heading for a winery, I looked for some grape-like earrings. I stumbled upon this necklace that my daughter Kathe left behind in her old bedroom, but I couldn't find any earrings, so I made these this morning. Tiny grapes.

I loaded my bike on my car and drove to a parking lot off the main rode. I rode the 3 hilly miles to the winery and back, burning off any residual sugar I'd absored.

 Thanks to Erin, I had a lovely last Sunday of summer. And I just read that drinking wine helps protect the skin from sunburn and skin damage. Salut!

*I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"]; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that. ”

  — Justice Potter Stewart, concurring opinion in Jacobellis v. Ohio 378 U.S. 184 (1964)