Tuesday, August 25, 2015

Part 2 of a series "There are three kinds of wineries in this world, my friend . . ."

 The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, a.k.a. the Authentic, the Vanity, and the Corporate.
(In Cal-Ital, we call them Il Buono, Il Brutto, y El Nino.)


In the scene above, the Vanity winery moves in next to the Authentic winery;  the guns represent the huge, deep new wells they drill, enabling them to flood their acreage in July in the middle of a drought and plant nursery-started green-growing vines instead of dormant cuttings in spring.  They're in a hurry!
Soon afterward, the Authentic winery's wells go dry.











"Hey, what happened to my vineyard?!?"

     The Vanity Winery's owner got rich doing something supremely, somnolently boring and/or utterly odious, according to your perspective, dear reader, (real estate development, environmental law, waste disposal, rock band management) and is heavily motivated to start his winery by the hoped-for purchase of social status and the drowning of nightmares.  (There are female examples of the type, but 'exceptio probat regulam';  they are rare and will go unmentioned.)
     The tasting room and offices generally represent an obscenely large fraction of the winery's cost, and there are ostentatious displays of questionable artworks that have no relation, symbolic or otherwise, to Elvis Presley.
Perhaps he wears a powerful cologne more expensive than any of his wines, but he almost always has little real knowledge of viticulture or enology; in the worst cases, he pretends to be or actually is the winemaker.  (If the latter, the visitor should be prepared to spit with 99.44% efficiency.)  
     In extreme cases, the owner will be seen to use horses in place of a tractor in the vineyard when there are cameras present, much as the Hollywood Morgul drives a Prius by day and a Bugatti by night.  In Napa, there will frequently be caves, unnatural, if not a Batmobile taking up valuable barrel space.

Band practice

Band practice