by Jeff Miller of Artisan Family of Wines (Seven Artisans, Sly Dog Cellars, Red Côte)

As everyone is probably aware, the US Government is recommending that the legal limit on alcohol be reduced to .05 from .08.  Supposedly, this will save some number of lives (and I have no doubt it would).

Tom Wark took a fairly close look at this issue (see http://fermentationwineblog.com/2013/05/the-impact-of-lower-blood-alcohol-content-levels-on-wine-lovers/), and pointed out some pretty interesting, and pertinent, facts.

First off, under the present standard of .08, a 200 pound man (such as me) can drink 3 glasses of wine, 3 ½ in fact, and still stay under the legal limit.  The .05 limit would mean I could go up to only 2 ½ glasses, which is roughly half a bottle.

Well, based on this admittedly narrow subset of one (i.e., me), I really couldn’t argue against reducing the limit.  At half a bottle of wine, I feel reasonably able to get behind a wheel more or less competently.  But that’s about it.  My general rule is two glasses if I’m going to drive.

But, like pretty much everything, it’s not that simple.  As I’ve aged, I feel less and less able to tolerate alcohol.  I do think that 20 years ago, I could drive as well with more alcohol in me (though maybe not a whole lot more).   And I am quite sure that there are people who can drink more than I can and drive just fine, and others that shouldn’t be driving with less.

And if you go to the National Traffic Safety Administration publication on alcohol-related deaths, which you can find at http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/811385.pdf, the whole subject becomes murkier still.  A few of the more pertinent facts:  the number of fatalities with “alcohol impaired” drivers did not mean that alcohol impairment was a cause of the accident (in other words, the accident may not have been caused by the impaired driver at all).  I would guess it was in many cases, but the Safety Administration doesn’t even venture a guess as to what percentage of cases were not just “alcohol impaired” cases, but were cases where the impairment was the cause of the accident.  It’s also pretty clear that in most accidents involving the alcohol impaired, it is the impaired driver who died (67% of all deaths), followed by other occupants of that driver’s vehicle (16%).   And it certainly seems to me that where someone makes the choice to drive with alcohol in them, and suffers the consequences, that’s less tragic (though still tragic) than when a totally innocent victim of the drunk driver dies.

Apparently the deaths to the alcohol impaired drivers were highly correlated with not wearing seat belts.  So I’m not sure whether the deaths were due to the alcohol impairment, or the failure to use seat belts.  I’m sure it was some combination of the two, but it’s not altogether clear to me how to sort that out.  It looks like roughly half of the deaths could have been avoided by seatbelt use, but, again, it’s not that clear.

Another point that I don’t know the answer to (and probably no one else does either) is how effective lowering the limit would be in actually obtaining compliance.  In other words, it is one thing to make driving between .05 and .08 illegal—but will that translate into any meaningful change in behavior?  I have my doubts.

At any rate, my point here is not to cudgel you with grisly statistics, but to (finally) get to my main point.  My first reaction (and probably that of most people) is that if we can save one life, then it’s worth it.  But like many first reactions, this one doesn’t make that much sense.  Every activity we engage in has some level of danger.  Just looking at driving, I know I drive worse when I’m tired, hungry, am rushing to the bathroom, etc. etc.  I am quite sure that each of those “risk factors” can be translated into some grisly number of traffic deaths each year.   Somehow it seems incredibly crass and unfeeling to try to balance the number of bodies in a morgue against the pleasure others receive from whatever activity we are considering.

So getting back to the question, should the DUI limit be reduced to .05?  I guess my answer is, I don’t know.  Unfortunately, it’s a little less or a little more sort of question.  And those who enjoy alcohol (I plead guilty to that) would undoubtedly tolerate more risk than those who don’t.

I certainly don’t have a problem with the concept of a legal limit.  It’s just that when you try to establish one, balancing so many deaths against the difficult to quantify enjoyment, there’s no clear answer.  I think .05 is a good limit for me, but I certainly can’t say that it should be the limit for everyone.  But there are a lot of people that it should be the limit for.  But you can say the same thing whether you’re considering a limit of .08, .05, .03, or .01.  I’m sure that reducing the legal limit from .01 to zero would save some lives as well.

It’s a really tough call.

by Jeff Miller of Artisan Family of Wines (Seven Artisans, Sly Dog Cellars, Red Côte)

Sorry, but due to major computer problems, there will be no post today.  Hopefully, I’ll be back on Wednesday.

by Jeff Miller of Artisan Family of Wines (Seven Artisans, Sly Dog Cellars, Red Côte)

As you probably know, every Wednesday I post my favorite blogs of the previous week.  I’ve been doing it for a while now, I can’t really say how long.  But I’m having this sense of déjà vu all over again pretty often as I read through the main wine bloggers weekly offerings.

I think most of these bloggers do a pretty good job overall.  But I’m just having this recurring sense that I’ve read it all before.  Maybe not every post, but way too many.

I have to sympathize.  Beside my Wednesday blog listings, I usually do a post every Monday.  Once a week.  Tom Wark and Jo Diaz and Alder Yarrow and Steve Heimoff put me to shame in this regard.   They do multiple posts every week, often daily, at least during the week.  Yet I find doing even one post a week is difficult.  Wine is a fascinating subject, but there’s a limit to what one has to say about it.  Once you’ve spent a reasonable amount of time and ink on subjects of great interest, you do kind of run out of new things to say.

Tom Wark has published what must be a zillion posts on the wine distribution and the three tier system.  I agree with much of what he has to say, but I have to admit my eyes glaze over when there’s yet another one to read.

But what are you going to do?  The show must go on, so you end up resorting to the tried and true, and, because they are tried and true they are also, by definition, old and shop-worn.

Even though I only do one new post a week, I can’t, unfortunately, not count myself among those guilty of these retreads.   If I go back to review my posts, I find some of the same themes repeated multiple times:  need to try new and different wines, how hard it is for a small winery to gain reasonable distribution, how conservative an industry we are, etc.

So you end up with a lot of the same sort of stuff that, to my mind, is just filler.  Photos. Wine tastings.  Reviews.  I guess I shouldn’t be too harsh in my criticism since I’m sure there’s an audience for those things.  Just not me.  I hate wine reviews, which, by the way, are generally at or near the bottom of the barrel of good English writing (verbose, lots of adjectives that don’t say much of anything).  Vineyard photos–I was never a big Reagan fan but, to paraphrase him, seen one vineyard, seen them all.  Vineyards are exquisitely beautiful, to be sure, but I’m not sure what another vineyard photo adds to the opus of human achievement.

I’ve often thought of cutting back my posts to those where I really feel I have something new to say, but never have, but I’m thinking about that again.  Not sure what I’ll end up doing.

by Jeff Miller of Artisan Family of Wines (Seven Artisans, Sly Dog Cellars, Red Côte)

A little too busy this week, so no post today.  Back on Wednesday.

by Jeff Miller of Artisan Family of Wines (Seven Artisans, Sly Dog Cellars, Red Côte)

My wife, Beryl,  was driving down the road we live on in Napa when she saw this dog wandering along the road.  She stopped to ask some people near by if the dog was theirs, but it wasn’t.  She hadn’t closed the door to her car, and when she got back into the car, there was the dog in the passenger seat, happy and at home.

Beryl found an animal hotel near by, where she parked the dog until we could find a good home for it.  They christened her Georgie.

We’d always been cat people, so we really had no interest in introducing our cats to a big dog.   So we tried to find a home for Georgie, but without any luck.  Georgie, like all pit bulls, suffered from the bad reputation that that breed has.

So, somewhat reluctantly, we decided to see how Georgie would get along with our cats.  Well, they took to each other without any problem, and they all became fast friends.

So that was out first dog.

Georgie was something of a pig.  She’d eat anything.  Including grapes.  So she’d sneak into the vineyard, as our Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon was ripening, and chomp away.  Very expensive dog food, but what could we do?  Supposedly, grapes aren’t good for dogs, but they never seemed to bother Georgie.  At any rate, she became the Sly Dog that eventually found its way onto our wine labels.

Several years later, I was taking Georgie out for a walk in Los Angeles when I saw a lone dog coming down the street from the other direction.  I quickly put Georgie back in our apartment, and went downstairs to see what was going on with the dog.  I found him right outside our building.  He was a little frightened, but obviously in pretty bad shape.  He let me pick him up and I brought him inside.

He, too, was a pit bull, and we didn’t even bother to try to find a home for him, since we knew, from our experience with Georgie, that that would be well-neigh impossible.  We did place an ad in the Los Angeles Times to see if he belonged to anyone that would claim him, but no one did.

So that was our second defog.  We named him Kingsley, after the street where we found him.

He wasn’t the chow hound that Georgie was, but he nonetheless also acquired the habit of sneaking into the vineyard to savor our Cabernet Sauvignon.

When Georgie died a few years ago, Kingsley inherited the mantel of the Sly Dog.

So Kingsley lived something of charmed life, going from being abandoned on the streets of Los Angeles to the life of Riley living in a house in a Napa Valley vineyard.

At least that was the case until about a month ago.  Some disturbing signs led us to take him to the vet.  After a few series of tests, they decided they needed an ultrasound to try to figure out what was wrong.  The results couldn’t have been worse—advanced liver cancer.

The rest of the story was, sadly, similar to the ends of our many other pets.  There was nothing to do but keep him as comfortable as possible for as long as possible.  That involved ever increasing doses of pain pills and various and sundry other mediations, trying to stave off the inevitable.

The inevitable arrived yesterday.  We’d been battling with the decision of when it was time.  I’d been in favor of calling an end to it for several days, but Beryl was reluctant, so we did nothing.  Finally, yesterday, Beryl acknowledged the obvious.

We took Kingsley to the vet.  He was actually in better shape than he’d been for several days.  I started to have second thoughts, and we got our primary vet on the phone.  The bottom line was that if you don’t do it on a “good” day, you’ll end up doing it on a bad day, which will come all too soon.  Much better to do it quickly and mercifully than wait what would only be a few days with more suffering in the interim.

So I fed him the dog treats that the loved until the drugs did their job, and he was gone.

I don’t know whether I did it too soon, but the truth of the matter is that you can’t get what you really want.  What you would want most of all is to postpone it until the moment just before things become bad enough that you can’t postpone it any more.  But that precise moment is impossible to determine until it’s past.  Between doing it too soon or too late, too soon is by far the better choice.  I feel good about my decision, because the thing I feared most was his suffering.  He’d probably already had more discomfort that I would have liked, but at least he didn’t have any unmanageable pain.  So I’m thankful for that.

But he’s already sorely missed.