I had my first glass of wine in almost a whole year yesterday. It was great. It was a 2017 cabernet sauvignon from the Napa valley and Mendocino valley. It was dark, complex, and pretty darn good. It lifted my spirits and once again had me dreaming of wine culture. What really fascinates me about wine culture, and what makes me so interested in picking it up as a hobby/research interest is the lifestyle of these winemakers. In beer brewing you can turn a new batch of beer in a few weeks and be on to the next. If a mistake is made either capitalize on the mistake by selling it as a special or dump it. In wine making, real wine making, every year it's on the line. The harvest is going to make or break your vintage if that's kind of wine you make. (champagnes for instance are rarely vintaged and are usually a blend of several harvest years unless that year was exceptionally great.) If your harvest is small that year then you sell less wine. If your harvest is great then you bottle more wine. The terroir of the wine, which is a combination of all the factors that affect the grapes such as sunlight, wind, rain, soil, sand, etc all compound to affect that vintage so much so that trained wine drinkers can pinpoint years and geographic locations based on the taste of the wine and their own knowledge of each region.
Wine making is something that is passed down for many generations. There are wine makers in France who are working on passing down to the 12th and 13th generation now. Hundreds of years of mastery being passed down and bottled year after year. What a thing to think about, that this wine we can drink today is probably very similar to the wine drunk by the knights templar, the explorers who mapped the unknown in the 1500's and what not. Yet here I am, in 2021 and I can barely keep a blog going on a weekly, much less a daily, basis.
Perhaps I wasn't meant to master anything, but maybe to be a consumer... Well screw that, I want to master something and dammit I won't stop until I do.