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In 1989,
Melissa Moravec and her husband, Kurt Reaume, planted a seven-acre vineyard
at their home in Napa Valley's half of the Carneros wine-growing region
close to the San Francisco Bay. Because of the ideal climate for traditional
Burgundian grapes, they planted eight different selections, or clones,
of Pinot Noir. Casa Carneros, both
the vineyard and the wine, reflect the beauty of the region, and the
care and passion Melissa and Kurt have for wine.
A poet once said, "The whole universe is in a
glass of wine."
We will probably never know in what sense he meant
that for poets do not write to be understood. But it is true that
if we look at a glass of wine closely enough, we see the entire
universe. There are the things of physics: the twisting liquid which
evaporates depending on the wind and weather, the reflections in
the glass, and our imagination adds the atoms. The glass is the
distillation of the earth's rocks, and in its composition, we see
the secrets of the universe's age and the evolution of stars. What
strange array of chemicals are in the wine? How did they come to
be? There are the ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and the
products. There in wine is to be found the great generalization:
all of life is fermentation. Nobody can discover the chemistry of
wine without discovering, as did Louis Pasteur, the cause of much
disease. How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the
consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some convenience,
divide this glass of wine, this universe into parts --- physics,
biology, geology, astronomy, psychology and so on --- remember that
nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not
forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let it give us one more final
pleasure: drink it and forget it all!
-- Richard P. Feynman
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