The Wall Says...
Venture: Early Returns Report
“How did you decide which varietals to plant here?” I asked.
“Basically, I threw everything at the wall to see what sticks…”
It was harvest a few years back at the largest planting of merlot grapevines in Virginia. I had been at a meeting there a few seasons before, and had been curious that just a very few vines within a row of merlot, were showing anomalous reddening of grape leaves mid-season.
Viticulture by eye, without the aid of soil and petiole analysis for minerals, or a PCR test for virus, can be dicey unless you are a world famous ampelographer like Lucy Morton. I had seen her merely look at vine leaves and correctly predict which clone of cabernet sauvignon was giving us fits with fruit dessication one season.
A further possibility to be ruled out by the discerning vinyardist and vigneron, was that the California nursery had mistakenly shipped a few bare-root cuttings of the wrong varietal among a much larger shipment of a closely-related grape like carmenere.
That issue was never solved due to the microscopically small proportions of the reddened vine that appeared no threat to the wine production at that site.
I did, however, remember Dave Collins’ metaphor about varietals and here apply it to my recently instituted Substack venture.
…
My body count for the first thirty-one days on Substack is as follows.
Of a total of 935 reads across 70 posts, about ten percent of viewers read about wine and winemaking, cooking and wine pairing; about seven percent read about coming of age and loves lost; seven percent cats, and four percent aviation and flight lessons.
From this, I infer where my future effort ought to lie.
Playing to my strengths, I am pleased to announce my next literary endeavor.
…a full-length novel in which a cat, who took flying lessons but had other priorities besides becoming an airline pilot, drifted into French haute cuisine to complement prior technical training in biochemistry…
Sounds dubious, but there you have it.
Facts don’t lie.
Oh: forgot appetite: a widely experienced, but grossly underappreciated concern of the greater proportion of all Substack authors.
Ok, well we can always use another cookbook that is authored by a cat that reaches beyond the strictly feline line of tastes with enough inclusivity to accommodate all.
Enough said: back to scribble, scribble, scribble, eh, Mr. Gibbon?