Through the Grapevine #55
Wine media recap and just a smidge of commentary for April 2, 2025
Life Among the Vines
This week is the one year anniversary of my arrival in California. A cause for celebration? Of course! But also a time in which everything is due for renewal and updating. My car lease came to term and necessitated a trip to the dealership, and there are few tasks I loathe more. I am finally eligible for health insurance through my new job, which is great but involves a lot of decisions and paperwork, and now that I have the insurance, finding new doctors, renewing prescriptions, and figuring out whether I need to have my stupid gallbladder removed are next on the list. I sucked it up and did my taxes, and hoorah, my California refund covered what I owed in Kentucky. Val has her annual vet visit coming up. And then my name came up on the wait list for an affordable housing unit, which has required an incredible amount of documentation, and replacing a long-lost social security card - which hopefully will pay off in a reasonably priced place to live, but that remains to be seen. The time, energy, and money involved in all these things have been a bit overwhelming, but since I don’t anticipate Val helping out, there’s really no choice but to just get things done.
Meanwhile, it is what I believe to be the most beautiful time of year in Napa and Sonoma. Rainy season is coming to a close, everything is green, the vines are beginning to bud, and the flowers are blooming. The views from the office are a beautiful respite from the aggressive adulting of life.
The Grape News
This week at work, we noticed that some of the bottles marked for pouring in the tasting room bore a sticker in both French and English that we don’t typically see on our bottles. I strongly suspect these were bottles destined for Canada, but of course, now Canada isn’t buying. And now it’s Liberation Day, otherwise known as the day our oligarchically inclined overlords further isolate the U.S. from reasonable countries who have previously been our allies, and position the nails in the coffins of a number of industries, including wine and spirits. Between the economic damage of these absurd revenge tariffs, the mass firings of federal employees, and the dismantling of entire sectors of public service, we’re now firmly embedded in “We’re Never Coming Back From This” territory, and that’s without even touching the human rights violations. Anyway, Jason Wilson details some of the coming effects of today’s particular festival of idiocy.
For more details on the strategy behind tariffs in general, and how they’re likely to work out (and not), check out this Wall Street Journal transcript of an interview with Mary E. Lovely of the Peterson Center for International Economics. Particularly chilling to me was this section: “It's really a shift in who bears the burden of funding the government because the tax extensions that the Trump administration is getting through Congress with the support of Congressional GOP is going to benefit corporations and higher income Americans. Meanwhile, tariffs will raise prices. Higher income people will see this along with middle-class and working people. We'll all see the higher prices. But as a share of our income, that's going to fall more heavily on people who basically spend their entire paycheck.” The suffering of the majority is a feature of this regime, not a bug.
Here in this dystopian chaos, sometimes it’s hard to discern fact from fiction, even on April Fools’ Day.
Related to some of the news from last week about restrictions on trade visitors at Dalla Valle, and the ongoing struggles of Hoopes Vineyard, Vinography suggested Napa is in need of more practical governance overall. The same Winery Definition Ordinance also prevents most wineries from hosting weddings, which is just about the most ridiculous, income-impeding thing I’ve ever heard.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what makes a wine “good.” I work in the Napa Valley, where many of my coworkers and guests have very defined ideas of what is good, typically leaning strongly toward classically styled Cabernet Sauvignon as the standard of goodness. I love a Cab as much as the next girl, but it’s not by a long shot the wine I buy/drink most, and I’ve discovered that my definition of “good” often includes some aspect of the wine being “interesting.” There seems to be a division in the wine world between people who think good wine gives them the flavors they expect and know they enjoy, and people whose definition of good includes the possibility of (and perhaps even hope for) unexpected and unusual flavors. Which brings us to Dave Baxter’s Vintertainment post about redefining what might qualify as good flavor in wine:
Vineyard Maintenance
Just a quick thank you to those of you who read this newsletter and support it through subscriptions and other engagement. You all help keep the juices flowing over here, no matter how much soul-sucking adulting I need to accomplish. As always, if you have topics you’d like to see me cover or pressing wine questions, fire them away in the comments or by email.
The Best Thing I Drank This Week
I’ve been digging into some of the wine I didn’t intend to buy in Santa Barbara County. On Monday I mentioned the excellent Chardonnay from Liquid Farm,
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