Monthly Archives: January 2014

The Third D

      Let my inspiration flow…

I love wine. I love being involved in growing and making wine. I love talking about wine. I love thinking about wine and though for me, this process is a monumental struggle, I love writing about wine. Clarity and poetry do their utmost to avoid me, generally choosing to associate with a better class of writer. Gibberish and garbled nonsense are my bothersome neighbors but I, have an advantage, a mighty, mighty arrow in my quiver. I have inspiration. I am immersed in it. I find it in the morning light awakening a vineyard, in the first spring buds and in the low clouds, drifting over Seneca at sunrise, before an October harvest day begins. I also find it in my wife’s smile and my daughter’s grace and I find inspiration in every bottle and every glass of wine and what I know is, wine is so much more than what is in the glass or in the bottle.

We try to define wine within the narrow confines of metaphor and measurement but wine, is not so easily corraled. Wine is more than a season, more than Spring or Fall and so much more than a single Summer. These metaphors, the scores, the descriptors, the chemistries, these all provide glimpses, glints of light which pull this mystery out from shadow. But a shadow’s reach can be quite extensive.

Wine is…

Wine is about geography and place, it is about agriculture and commerce, it is about ritual and transformation. Wine is about history, our history. Wine is about time and our place in time. Wine is also about water and bodies of water. Bodies of water that moderate climates, cool the nights, warm the Winters, bring earlier Springs and extend the Fall. These waters can be oceans, rivers, or an ancient sea, that left behind calcium rich soils or a glacier, that carved out sloped landscapes and incredibly deep lakes, like the Finger Lakes.

But water gave more than nourishment and climate, it also provided a means of transportation that brought wines to markets, fairs and ports. These rivers, lakes and oceans also transported the people who made the wine.  Wine is especially about people and not just the people who make the wine but equally important are those people who grow the grapes and toil in the vineyards.  In a very real sense wine is not made, wine is grown.  

       Here we are now, entertain us…

Welcome to 3d Vineyards where I hope to open a window into this world of wine. Window is more than apt and you will see, more than a metaphor. Whether you find this interesting or compelling is, perhaps within my reach but may be beyond my grasp. Who knows? Hopefully you will be more amused than bemused and not confused, but my wish is for you to understand and appreciate wine a little more.

This is about story telling and while this will be a different way to tell the story, I am still trying to achieve the same outcome, just with a different set of tools. Everything rides on the storyteller and whether he can transport the viewer…

     Droning on (it is a shortcoming)

       The future, generally doesn’t stick around for very long but when he does show, he is hardly ever empty handed. What he leaves behind, as he’s headed for the door, might be for good or ill, castastrophe or pure magic. The one certainty is, that whatever gifts he does bear will themselves have a future, they will all too quickly take up residence in the past. The new, is never new for very long.    

      One day the future may be delivered to our door from the heavens.  Angels from on high?  Close, Jeff Bezos and a future sky filled with Amazon delivery drones. There are those visionaries (Bezos certainly is one) who are designing the future and in doing so, perhaps are deciding ours but what I have learned after working on this site, for a very long time, is that, NO ONE HOLDS A MONOPOLY ON THE FUTURE.

Best viewed in Chrome on a newer PC or newer Android(in Landscape Mode).   Both of the Kindle HDXs(with Chrome and Firefox) are unbelievable.   The retina Macbook Pro(thank you Eastview Apple) is incredible.  This site can give mac users and others some help, http://www.x3dom.org/?page_id=9 .

 Everybody else can play along with our Home Version!

Full Screen