Wine blogging?

Oh hey, guys…

So, I kind of like wine. A lot. Maybe a little more than is reasonable and/or appropriate. I’m trying to learn as much as possible about wine in as short a time as possible – to the extent that I went out and bought an MCAT book over the summer so I could review the basic chemistry concepts I would need to better understand the science of winemaking. My dream is to one day own my own property, make my own wine, be a world-renowned winemaker (perhaps in France? New Zealand? Pacific northwest?), and have a beautiful location for all my friends and family to come visit me. It’s an idyllic – possibly impossible – dream, but I intend to pursue it as much as I can.

The problem is that right now, I’m out of a job. Well, ok, not RIGHT now – I’m still finishing out my job at Benton-Lane, where I am living the dream, and enjoying (nearly) every second of work. Sometimes while I’m running around, doing barreling or punchdowns or just adding vitamins to the wine, I’ll stop, take a breath, look around, and savor a precious moment of realization that I am doing exactly what I want to do for the rest of my life. The fact that my temporary job is soon coming to an end is terrifying, and not because it means I’ll lose my only source of income (not counting my parents – their donations to my bank account are loans or donations, not an income), but because it means I might have to get a job that I DON’T LIKE. And just what the hell is up with that, exactly?

So, this brings me to my next point: I’ve been applying for a lot of jobs, looking around for a lot of different things, and it’s brought me back in touch with one of the other things I love most in life. Writing. Well, there aren’t a lot of writing JOBS out there in the world (and they certainly don’t pay much), but there is a lot of WRITING. Like, an amazing, fantastic, spectacular amount. One might almost be able to argue that people read and write more today than they ever have in the past. People who are skeptical of the power of the internet claim that it’s a bad thing that my generation gets all of its information in short, <140 character blurbs, or in brief news articles, or blog posts. We're not reading books in the same volume that we did just 40, 30, 20 years ago. That doesn’t mean that we’re not reading. Or writing. We’re tweeting, facebooking, blogging, and e-journaling, and all those words combined might add up to far more than the journaling, letter-writing, note-writing hand-writers of the past. Some famous journalist or blogger whose name I don’t know and don’t care to know once said about the internet/blogging age that “never before have so many people with so little to say said so much to so few”. I don’t care to know this guy’s name because a) I think he’s an asshole and b) I think he’s right (write?).

So since I’ve already given up and joined the masses (two years ago, when I started this blog in the first place), I figure – maybe now I’ll try to write about something significant in my life, and not just post my random musings or shitty poetry on this damn thing. So, in an effort to improve both 1) my knowledge and ability to speak about wine and 2) my writing ability, I am going to write about my wine and traveling adventures, both of which I hope to have a lot of in the next five years or so.

Don’t blame me for trying to make a name for myself. It’s a damn tough job market out there, and I’m willing to do just about anything within the bounds of reasonable ethics in order to get ahead. So, read away if you choose, and we’ll see how this goes. Just like everyone else, I’m flying by the seat of my pants, with no plan and no game.

Good luck to me. And you, but mostly me.