Anti-Expertism

Despite my recent quip, I have been enjoying myself immensely. The wine industry in California for all its immensity is much smaller than I imagined: everybody knows everybody, unless I just have happened to meet a bunch of somebodies which is a distinct possibility. Of course, being a cellar rat pretty much makes me a nobody, but I am comfortable and accustomed to that (I cannot help but hope, however, that Sheila is a prophet). Mostly, outside of work, I have been lazy. I barely write and spend most of my days lounging around with my roommates and reading a ton of books and conversing about unusual topics. My favorite was about the preposition “on” and its various functions which involved us reading the entire entry from the Webster’s dictionary (a topic I will return to in future blog post).

Perhaps lazy isn’t the word, maybe leisurely is. I guess I am just feeling the cultural difference of the West Coast from the East. Either way, it is different and I am taking sometime to adjust and figure out what I should do when I am not working –or, perhaps more pointedly if there is anything I should do? This is a question that has been lingering in my mind for sometime with no clear hope of answer. While I am working on the crush pad, I am thinking about the Pauline perspective I was reading about last night, or bees, or how both of those relate to the metanarrative I seem to structure my life around.

Whoops. I nearly forgot, I am supposed to be talking about wine not my existential crisis.

I have found the industry quite a bit different than I imagined. For one, industry is the word. The cellar I am working for is more like a factory than I would have thought. I expected some old Italian guy wandering around tasting from barrels and chatting with his cohorts about tannins. Instead it is mostly a bunch of twenty somethings talking about the bars they haunted last night, 3500 gallon tanks filled with juice, and a barrel room infested with forklifts. This demythologizing, however, has not soured the experience; rather, it has vivified it. And for that I am grateful.

I will, hopefully, have some pictures soon and more thoughts but I am tired. I think I will take a nap and then sit outside and read a book on the patio over looking the mountains in the sixty degree weather.