Where Does Wine Come From? (Part 3)

I have a good to awesome memory.  I can read textbooks and regurgitate information verbatim.  I’m able to remember where I have read arcane bits of text and picture those parts of a page in my mind’s eye.  Brian jokes that I can bend spoons with my tremendous memory. 

Just days before our first meeting with our winemaker, Chris Nelson, I completed James Halliday’s and Hugh Johnson’s The Art and Science of Wine.  Textbook in mind, I thought that I had a pretty decent understanding of what I theoretically wanted to do with our disparate batches of grapes.  In fact, I like to think that I surprised Chris with my spiffy wine jargon, apparent technical prowess, and forthrightness.  But beneath the veneer, I am 100% poser.  I am that nerdy kid in school who knows every statistic about every MLB player but can’t swing a bat, let alone play on the team.  Obviously, I have never done any of this “wine stuff” before, and everything I pretend to know derives from a single textbook.  After spewing a river of scientific verbiage and wildly nodding my head in response to numbered yeast cultures, I reluctantly let Chris do his job (”Brian, what do you mean that I always try to lead when we dance?”). 

In this video clip, you’ll see our winemaker, Chris Nelson, discussing our wine plan.  CrushPad is a working winery, and the noise you hear in the background during the first minute is the bottling machine hard at work.

 
If you can’t see the video in the box above, you can click here to view it.

I think Chris is terrific.  He comes from a science background, too, having worked in a lab before returning to school for an enology degree.  This appeals to me.  Now I am only halfway bossy, at least today.