Who Am I?

Have you ever dreamed of making wine?  I have.  I am drawn to the beautiful vistas of wine country- rows of vines clinging to a hillside, full leafy canopies, and green tendrils creeping up wooden stakes.  Think of a postcard: fat bunches of grapes, wet with morning dew, and “Welcome to Napa Valley” in bright yellow letters at the bottom.  I visualized this during labor, when the OB told me to “relax and breathe” (as if!).  Sometimes I imagine that if I could capture that magic my life would be better, amplified- like life in HDTV.  What if I lived in Napa Valley and did my grocery shopping exclusively at Dean & Deluca and the local farmer’s market?  Sure my grocery bills would explode, but their tomatoes probably taste sweeter, their produce juicier, and their greens leafier.  Would my kids actually eat kale if it were 100% organic and from an outdoor stall?  I imagine myself spending all day cooking and baking seasonal dishes from scratch.  While the kids frolicked in our (perfectly groomed, naturally) backyard, my husband, my friends, and I would sit down to a leisurely dinner at our restored, antique, wood farm table.  We’d crack open a bottle of Bruliam pinot.  Think of the “slow food movement.”  Eat organically!  Choose local produce!  You know the drill.  As the sun set, we’d finish those last, precious drops of wine.  We’d put our sleepy kids to bed and wax poetic about our perfect, civilized life, at one with the land.  Aaahhhhhh. 

OK, the reality is that none of my kids eat anything green.  While I do love to cook and often make things from scratch, I am not above reheating frozen gnocchi from Trader Joe’s.  I can coax (or bribe) one kid into a few teeny, weensy bites of apple if I promise banana bread as the dangling carrot.  Our kitchen table, far from a precious antique, is now permanently ruined from Lily banging her plastic snowflake fork into the wenge veneer.  We do drink wine with dinner, but the “soundtrack of our lives” is The Wiggle’s “Henry the Octopus” theme song.  But what’s the harm in trying to steal some of that dream?  Who doesn’t long for some tranquility when our lives are so crazy?  Elbow deep in dirty diapers and soggy spaghetti, I didn’t know a thing about enology, the wine business, marketing, or web design.  Brix, pH, and relative attributes of old vs. new oak seemed pretty unlikely, but here we go…