Sometimes it is good to get philosophical. So please allow me the privilege in this newsletter to do just that! The subject: explaining the art of winemaking in a single sentence!?? One cannot even describe a ghastly wine in one sentence, but since I love complicated matters made simple, I’ll try:
My goal in life is to leave a legacy here on earth. In order to achieve this, I need to manage my time. Seeing that we all receive the same amount of time, a quite logical assumption to make would be that the harder you work, and the more you do within the time assigned to you, the more successful you’ll be at building something of worth – a legacy.
In the past few weeks I was faced with a few challenges, the biggest and most profound, being the news that our soon to be born baby has a Bilateral cleft lip and palate. Secondly, we moved house and office, and to top it all, BLANKbottle is gathering momentum like a Boeing 747 taking off to who knows where! In this time, what I found was that the harder I worked, and the better I invested my time, the less initiative I had and progress I made! Since fresh ideas and enterprising energy is at the core of my business, I had to take immediate action.
So that’s why now, as I’m putting down my thoughts, I am sitting in a reeded hut on the beach at Mozambique’s Ponta d’ Ouro, waiting for the tide to drop so that I can paddle out and surf one of the best waves around.
The result: after one day on my own I have my initiative back…. by not working harder or doing more! The conclusion: It is therefore not the moments I work, but the art of identifying when I need moments in-between work, which counts! The quiet times…
The same counts for wine. There are many things you can do with wine. Millions of little actions to get better extraction from the grapes, but that is not the point.
So how do you describe the art of winemaking in once sentence? You don’t, you use two. Winemaking is not only about what you do with the grapes, it’s about the timing and length of the moments in-between. The resting moments – the art of winemaking most often overlooked.