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

As I was reading the report of a recent study showing that alcohol consumption increased the rate of at least one kind of breast cancer, the whole subject of the health of wine re-presented itself to me.

This is a subject that I find fascinating, and I always read through the reports of any new study on the subject that appears in the wine-related websites I routinely read.

I have to admit to a certain bias since I would, of course, like to conclude that wine is a healthful beverage. That bias is not just as a wine producer, but also as a consumer, where I would like to think that my imbibing is protecting me from certain diseases and, in general, adding to my lifespan.

Certainly, if you’re trying to find evidence that wine is healthy, there’s lots of studies you can point to. Population studies seem to show that people’s that consume wine live longer. Of course, these studies are very difficult to analyze, since there are all sorts of other factors that could account for the result. Still, when so many different countries where wine consumption is relatively high seem to experience increased longevity, you would hope there’s something to the connection.

There’s certainly a lot of evidence out there as well that alcohol consumption in general, and perhaps wine consumption in particular, is good for the heart. I think it would be fair to say that moderate alcohol consumption is the key, since the benefits seem to disappear with high levels of consumption.

But for every indication that wine is good for you, there’s another study which points in the opposite direction. Certainly, there is mounting evidence that at least certain cancers are more common among alcohol consumers (such as the recent breast cancer study).

Nor can there be any denying that excessive consumption has obvious and incontrovertible downsides. Whatever may be the benefits long-term of alcohol consumption, one drunk driver can render all those benefits irrelevant. Having been rear-ended by a driver whose blood alcohol level was well beyond the legal limit, I can attest that only the good fortune that no other vehicle was coming the other way when I was pushed in to the intersection prevented me from being another drunk driving statistic.

Nor can we ignore the fact that excessive alcohol consumption leads to some very bad health consequences (cirrhosis of the liver, DT’s).

It seems that if there were a clear case that wine was a net benefit or net detriment, then that case would be made already. But I think what we’re going to continue to get is a series of studies that tend to establish that wine is good for some things, and bad for others. Undoubtedly, many of these studies will look compelling, but then fail to withstand the test of time as other studies show different results.

I think my sense of the issue is that moderate wine consumption probably is a net benefit, if only because the afflictions where it seems to be helpful are more prevalent than those where it seems to be harmful (e.g., heart disease is more common than is cancer). I think, however, that the net benefit is much less than at least some in the wine business would argue for.

It would do us well to keep in mind that few of us drink wine primarily for its possible health benefits—we drink because we enjoy it. I would certainly like to think that something I enjoy as much as wine is healthful to boot. While I’m not sure of what effect wine will have on the quantity of my life, I have little doubt that it increases the quality of my life. If it adds a few days to my life, so much the better. And if it should turn out it subtracts a few days from my life, then I guess that’s something I’ll just have to live with.

As you probably know, every Wednesday I post a blog, Good Reads Wednesday, where I list what I consider to be the most important blogs or wine news for the prior week.

One thing that coming through loud and clear from reading through a number of blogs every week is how terribly difficult it is to blog on an ongoing basis and keep up the quality of the writing. It seems inevitably bloggers fall back on reporting events they’ve attended, or a short note on some area, or some winery, or some B & B, or some bottle of wine they had for dinner last night. While I’m sure others find these interesting, I don’t, at least not most of the time, and I don’t want to fall back on these means of filling in space. I sympathize, in large part because I’m becoming concerned about keeping up with the three times per week pace for my blog.

It seemed that when I started the blog, I was always a week or two, at least, ahead of schedule. It seemed like there was more to write about than I could ever exhaust.

But after almost a year and a half, I’m rarely a week ahead of time. Sometimes I only get the blog done the night before deadline. Once, pressed by other business, I didn’t get it done at all.

To some extent, this is due to being busy with other things. But to some extent, it’s due to not being too sure what to write about. I’m also getting concerned that I’m getting a little repetitive. It seems like there is something of a limit to the things one has to say, and then you tend a little to recycle the same old stuff.

Then there’s the press of business. Running a small wine company takes lots of time. In our company, there’s just two of us, Richard and me. If you want to make and sell wine, you need, obviously, to make the wine, and the grow the grapes that you make the wine out of. But wine isn’t immune to the slog of stuff that all other businesses have to deal with. There a seemingly endless slew of clerical type work that needs to get done. If you ignore it for a while, as I sometimes do when I get overwhelmed by the boredom of it all, the consequences are dire. When someplace places an order, until you get in touch with the warehouse and make sure they know a truck is on its way, then that order for all intents and purposes doesn’t exist. And if the order doesn’t exist, then you run the risk that one of your distributors will run out of stock. Which in turn means you can lose your place on some retailer’s shelf. So, boring or not, purchase orders tend to have a high priority. If it’s blog or purchase order, the purchase order comes first.

Once the trucker has picked up the goods, then there’s the billing and, more important, collecting. In this economy, everyone is struggling, and no one is going to go out of their way to pay a bill they haven’t received. So getting that invoice out ASAP is a high priority. Invoice vs. blog—invoice comes first.

Which is all a long-winded way of saying that that the Friday episode of this blog is going to become a sometime thing. I’m hoping to keep it up on a regular basis, and maybe rerun some of my older postings when I don’t have a new post to run. But I’m not going to run a post every Friday anymore. It’s just become too much for me.

In light of the holiday, I’m passing on doing a regular post today.  The regular Monday/Wednesday/Friday schedule will resume on Monday.  I wish you all a good and happy new year.

To paraphrase Mark Twain, everyone talks about global warming but nobody ever does anything about it.

Unfortunately, that’s all too true. No matter how strong a case you can make that we need, on a global scale, to immediately cut way back on our discharge of greenhouse glasses, there’s no reason to think it’s going to happen.  The past several decades have seen repeated and increasingly shrill warnings about warming, accompanied by release of ever increasing levels of greenhouse gases.

I see no reason to harbor any illusion that these ever more shrill warnings will result in a massive change in our behavior, any more than they have in the past.  When you factor in its not just our behavior that would need to change, but the behavior of China, India, and other developing countries as well, all of whom are instead busy expanding their use of fossil fuels at a rapid rate, it is delusional to think that a reduction in greenhouse emissions is a viable solution.

Against this backdrop, this article appears in the NY times a few weeks back:

The Earth Is Warming? Adjust the Thermostat

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/11/science/11tier.html?th&emc=th

Image of the world accompanying the NY Times article

It’s an article that everyone should read. It’s long been known that major volcanic eruptions can result in world-wide cooling as a result of the clouds of smoke and soot that block out and reflect the sun’s rays back into space.

Various man-made methods of putting into effect something similar have been proposed. This article summarizes the status of some creative ways to address Global Warming that, unfortunately, are not being pursued with the anything close to the vigor the situation dictates. I think, on the right, there’s still a lot of denial about Global Warming, most of it of the “ostrich with its head in the sand” variety.  While scientific consensus in the past has been proven wrong, I think it’s foolhardy to ignore what those most conversant with the problem are telling us.  It seems the better part of prudence to plan for the worst rather than hope for the best.

If the right denies global warming, the left seems wedded to an essentially moralistic view that the only remedy is greenhouse gas reductions.  This view seems to be yoked to a view that fossil fuels are an evil in and of themselves, instead of an evil because they cause climate change.

Unfortunately, the result is a de facto conspiracy between the right and left to do nothing meaningful. If the right turns out to be correct that global warming is giant hoax, then there’s nothing to worry about.  If, as seems more likely, those most knowledgeable on the subject turn out to be more or less correct, then we are facing a disaster of unimagined magnitude.

So back to the NY Times article.  It examines the possibility of tinkering with our atmosphere in ways that reflect solar radiation back into space.  The criticism raised against this approach is that we’re dealing with a complex system where anything we attempt could have unforeseen and unfortunate side effects.  That’s a fair criticism.  But the solution isn’t to jettison the idea.  It is to conduct small scale trials where we can get some idea of what works, what doesn’t, and what steps can be taken to mitigate any adverse side effects.

I fear the alternative is a continuation of the creation of more hot air.  Hot air in two senses; warming, and the meaningless promises of our leaders to do something when everyone knows it’s a charade.  If we fast forward another 30 or 50 years, we could be facing the worse ramifications of global warming, with an hysterical demand from the world’s populations to “do something”.  At that point, in response to a crisis, these ideas may be need to be implemented, ready or not.  Instead of discovering their side effects in small trials, we’ll be discovering them real time on a worldwide scale.

When that day comes (and I suspect it will), we’ll look back with regret that we didn’t do some advance planning.  In comparison to the cost of efforts we’re already undertaking in a vain effort to cut back on green house gas emissions, the cost of implementing some of these ideas is very modest.  If they buy us time, as a world, to wean ourselves off fossil fuels, they will have been a godsend.

If we do nothing, figuring out how to grow Cabernet Sauvignon in Labrador will be the least of our concerns.

by Jeff Miller of Artisan Family of Wines (Red Côte Rosé, 7 Artisans, Sly Dog Cellars)

One of our labels, Sly Dog Cellars, is named after my dog, Georgie. My wife Beryl was driving down Wooden Valley Road (where we live), and saw this dog wandering along the side of the road. Wooden Valley seems to be the locale of choice for abandoning animals. She stopped and got out without closing the door, in order to ask some people walking down the road if the dog was theirs. It wasn’t, so she walked back to the car, only to find the dog happily sitting on the passenger seat, wagging its tail, as if to say, “I’m home”. And I guess she was.

We tried to find a home for her, but to no avail. She’s a pit bull, and pit bulls are hard to place. So she ended up our dog. I have absolutely no regrets on that score, as one couldn’t ask for a better friend.

The “sly dog” part comes from our discovering that as harvest approached, she’d sneak out into the vineyard and eat grapes right off the vines. I’ve since learned that grapes aren’t good for dogs, but she’s never seemed to suffer any ill effects.

Georgie in the vineyard.

When people come over for the first time, often they are frightened at the prospect of meeting up with a Pit. Generally, a couple of minutes of Georgie’s licking them to death is enough to convince them that she’s not a menace, even if she might be a total nuisance.

So that brings us to Michael Vick. I do believe that once someone has “paid their debt to society”, as the saying goes, they should be free to get on with their lives. I just have a really hard time getting my head around that concept when it comes to Vick. Setting up often lethal dog fights for entertainment, and executing the ones that don’t measure up, is, for me, about as bad is it gets. Taking pleasure in the suffering of some poor animal isn’t just a passing transgression of youth—it’s vile beyond words. Georgie, instead of lucking out to find a good home, could have lucked out the wrong way and ended up at Bad Newz Kennels. My forgiveness can’t go that far.

I can’t see any use to Vick spending any more time in jail. At the same time, I have an ever harder time imagining that after what he’s done, he can go on to fame and fortune for his ability to pass a football. If he shouldn’t have to spend the rest of his days in prison, then a future as a free man doing something less rewarding (maybe cleaning out latrines) seems more just.

Money buys a lot of PR, and the money behind Vick is fashioning a story of his repentance, that in turn is supposed to warrant our forgiveness. I’m not buying it. Someone who would do what he did is missing something basic to what it is to be human. I don’t think he can suddenly resurrect an empathy that simply isn’t there. Maybe to that extent, it’s not really his fault. But I can’t help but believe that his “repentance” is the feigned repentance of the sociopath.

Pits have a bad reputation, much of it the result of the Michael Vick’s of this world. Take a dog and train it to fight, thrown in a certain amount of abuse along the way, and you’re going to end up with a mean dog. So Michael Vick is responsible not just for the dogs he killed, but indirectly thousands of others that can’t get adopted out due to the pit’s bad reputation. Many of these dogs, unadoptable, end up being euthanized, becoming yet other Vick victims.

So if you ask me what to do with Michael Vick, I just don’t know. But I do know I’m not going to be very happy with the likely ending, Michael Vick doing high fives with his teammates before an adoring crowd willing to ignore any transgression as long as he can score touchdowns.