So Condemned

The first thing I do every morning is check the bank balance. If there’s money there, we’re still in business. So far, so ok.

Then I walk downtown at lunch time with a bag of samples on my shoulder to see how many people are eating at the restaurants I sell wine to. The restaurants are the canaries in the bitumen hole.

Wine will never be gone completely though a whole slew of contemporary challenges are conspiring to make me clench even as I type it.

Their worth is a zero-sum game. Put out or drop dead.

There is a virtuous circle to be found in verdant vineyards. From them, we get the fruit we need to make great wine. The great wine gets presented to club members at home or to restaurateurs and wine shop owners in the larger world. These talented wine professionals then put just the right bottle into your hands when you need it to pair with the dinner you’re cooking for your friends or for that friendly support you need as you get through whatever challenge in which you’re currently embroiled.

When the vineyard dies — as in the photo above — the chain, with all of its connecting links, is destroyed. Joy is lost.

All vineyards run their course. Vines are amenable hosts to all sorts of nasty bugs and if they are required to churn out a commercially viable crop every year, year after year, their span is delimited by the pestilentially decreased number of tons they are able to ripen. Their worth is a zero-sum game. Put out or drop dead.

Vineyards need to produce to be worth their care. If they produce too little fruit or the wrong fruit, they will be transformed (hopefully) into something more current and productive.

If, on the other hand, there are too few buyers for fruit, too much uncertainty in the financial zeitgeist, a waning desire for one of the great human things that makes life better and worth living, in short — just a shit show of economic and societal and neo-prohibitionistic forces ganging up to suck the fun and daily worth from life, you get the dead-armed vines in the photo above.