Another scuffle with tech today, on this hotter than hot Sonoma County Summer Labor Day; my memory stick won’t dock with my wife’s school computer.  So this unrest on wages.  I won’t call it a war, as it doesn’t deserve that presence in my history book.  Sipping the last of this ’12 Sanglier Cab and I’m committed to so much tomorrow; waking at 5 and running at the gym after Solano.  Going to kill the teaching blog and just print pages for the classes from now on.  In this Great Consolidation, I need to distill everything down to wine, my wines, the wines I make and how I write about them.  And I’m still set on SB and Merlot.  And there are some qualities to this Cab that I’d like be in my Merlot—the texture and smoky ebb to the nose and palate frequency.  Winemaking to me isn’t an “Art” in the banal usual mentioning of it, and not a simple “trade”, or even a science.  It’s a voice, it’s a story, it’s Life and a life of its own and how it intercepts with its “maker”.  But who’s really to be credited, the wine or the winemaker?  The fruit or the vintage—how will that “winemaker” put everything together, to make the biggest buck or to tell something about that vintage and that varietal, something truthful?  Tomorrow I plan on writing out a timeline, like I once saw Dad do in his office for Mom and himself, for retirement or something.  But I’ll tell you this, one year from now, I’ll be in the middle, or if it’s like this vintage END, of harvest; monitoring fermentations and perhaps barreling down, all funded with the selling of the startup, which I need launch in the next 2 weeks.

Beginning to dislike quite ardently my wife’s school laptop.  Should hear from the tech drone tomorrow about my laptop and the harddrive I gave him to transfer all my writings and other content.  It had better word, all I have to say.  Need the rest of that Cab, see what it wants to tell me or what it just directly orders.. all funneled to wine and its voice, narrative, poetry or if it wants to be more musical.  “Well, Mike, haven’t you always described wine as musical or jazzy?” No.  Not ‘all’.  And is this Sanglier Cab musical?  Absolutely.  This is just the type of bottle that makes me write my wild wine writings and wake up the next day thinking, “holy shit, there’s something in that body, in that song…” But I have to temper the momentum of my sips as this bottle as well urges restraint, a particular contained measure of expression.

Quite finally in my day, on this couch, my Cab oer by the window in the kitchen, closed, but should go outside and sip on the patio.  Alice and I only about 30 minutes ago going outside to take out trash and recycling, saying to each other that we should have a cocktail, or in her case water, on the patio, as the night screamed vacation and “NO WORK” to us both.  But no, tomorrow calls, but my tomorrows will continue to change and they’ll be in a place where I want them to be but more importantly where they need be for my daughter.

Wine will solve and write and embed everything.

(9/7/15)