question to John Q Public not in the wine business

[Serge Birbrair]

Why do we visit wineries????

Stamp collectors don't visit printing plants,
steak lovers don't visit farms,
Electronics buffs don't visit assembly plants in Taiwan...

what makes wine so freaking special?

[Ian S]

A good question. For me it's the chance to sample the product before buying, maybe taste some smaller production run wines, plus a chance to spend a day or two in the countryside.

Opportunities for me are limited. UK wines are, (with a small few exceptions), not ones that I'd willingly go out of my way to taste. Therefore my tastings at cellar door have been limited to Oz, NZ and Italy.

Coming back to your electronics analogy, I do believe in listening to hi-fi before buying and wouldn't buy from a shop that didn't have a listening room - the hi-fi equivalent of a Cellar Door?

regards

Ian

[Davo]

Why do we visit wineries????

Stamp collectors don't visit printing plants,
steak lovers don't visit farms,
Electronics buffs don't visit assembly plants in Taiwan...

what makes wine so freaking special?

Stupid question really.

Stamp collectors do visit Post Offices

Steak Lovers visit Butchers

And Electronics Buffs attend electronics shows.

And I am sure all 3 use the internet to chat to like minded idiots.

[Serge Birbrair]

Why do we visit wineries????

Stamp collectors don't visit printing plants,
steak lovers don't visit farms,
Electronics buffs don't visit assembly plants in Taiwan...

what makes wine so freaking special?

Stupid question really.

Stamp collectors do visit Post Offices

Steak Lovers visit Butchers

And Electronics Buffs attend electronics shows.

And I am sure all 3 use the internet to chat to like minded idiots.

Stupid answer, I say.
Post Office is a WINE STORE, not winery,
Butcher is a WINE STORE, not winery
Electronics Shows are mostly attended by ITBs, not John Q Publics.

[Serge Birbrair]

A good question. For me it's the chance to sample the product before buying, maybe taste some smaller production run wines, plus a chance to spend a day or two in the countryside.

Opportunities for me are limited. UK wines are, (with a small few exceptions), not ones that I'd willingly go out of my way to taste. Therefore my tastings at cellar door have been limited to Oz, NZ and Italy.

Coming back to your electronics analogy, I do believe in listening to hi-fi before buying and wouldn't buy from a shop that didn't have a listening room - the hi-fi equivalent of a Cellar Door?

regards

Ian

Ian, here is my story:

I personally feel like a Priest from an old joke.
Priest and Rabbi were sharing the same compartment on the train and Priest asked a Rabbi:
why Jews are so smart?
Rabbi replied:
We are smart because we eat fish head every day.
Priest asked him if he could share a head with him, to which Rabbi replied that he only had one and couldn't share it.
Priest offered him $100 for the head, Rabbi sold it, Priest ate it and exclaimed:
for $100 I could have had 10 pounds of fish!
and the Rabbi's comment was:
"You see, you only ate one head and already got smarter!"

When I started getting into wine, I visited wineries, as this seems to be what everybody else who were interested in wine were doing, and finally it occured to me:
the vineyard is a vineyard is a vineyard,
the winemaker's story is a winemaker's story is a winemaker's story,
and all of it has NOTHING to do how the wine tastes!
I haven't felt more enlighted after the visits than I was before.

For what it costed to visit some wineries far away from home,
I could have tasted the verticals of the entire region.

[Red Bigot]

Why do we visit wineries????

Stamp collectors don't visit printing plants,
steak lovers don't visit farms,
Electronics buffs don't visit assembly plants in Taiwan...

what makes wine so freaking special?

Not in any particular order...
1. It's a holiday
2. It's fun
3. I get free booze
4. I meet a lot of nice/interesting/funny/grumpy/odd/pretty/ugly etc people
5. There is usually some nice scenery
6. There is usually good food to be had as well
7. I learn a lot

I reckon on most trips (in Australia), if I had to buy the wines I tasted and have them shipped to me it would cost more then tha airfares/accommodation and I still wouldn't have the holiday.

Why do people travel? I wonder sometimes when I see busloads of tourists of carefully scheduled sanitised tours. Why do I go to Thailand nearly every year? I just like doing it, it makes me feel good. Same thing for winery crawls.

"the vineyard is a vineyard is a vineyard,
the winemaker's story is a winemaker's story is a winemaker's story,
and all of it has NOTHING to do how the wine tastes!
I haven't felt more enlighted after the visits than I was before."

Obviously I don't feel the same way as you do or I wouldn't still be doing it after about 40 years since I started.

[Wizz]

Interesting question: first let me ask a corollary:

Why do wineries have cellar doors?
Stamp printing presses dont have shopfronts.
Abbatoirs and farms dont have BBQ restaurants.

My own answer to Serge's question is much the same as Brian's. I think there is an element of romance and art in wine, and wine regions are usually pretty.

Theres also the brod question of why visit anywhere - you can see it all on TV now.

To give context, I often cart my golf clubs with me on holiday, theres something about playing golf in far away places. Even though I dont play very often or even have an AGU handicap. Just as strange as visiting wine regions.

[Serge Birbrair]

Guys, so far
4. I meet a lot of nice/interesting/funny/grumpy/odd/pretty/ugly etc people

is #1 reason . I posted this question in Israel, USA, Australia and will post other reasons tomorrow in order of # of stated reasons

[Wayno]

Hmmm nice thread boys

[kirragc]

For me it about feeding the obsession

Mostly I go to learn about a particular region or flavour or variety or soil type etc.

I usually have an aim in mind

Oh and I have a few wines as well.
I guess that means education and entertainment.

[cranky]

Don't you think that a steak fanatic would find it at least interesting if they actually had the chance to go and see all of the special treatment Waygu cattle receive? Not necessarily a visit to the abattoir, but to the farmard. And aren't ranch "working holidays" popular over there? Don't people who go on those eat the products of their labours?

How about a techno geek being given the chance to spend some time in a high end electronics research lab, seeing the products of the future well before they are released on the market.

However, I like to visit cellar doors, not so much the vineyard or the winery. I have found that even though it is interesting to see behind the scenes in the winery, what is available at the cellar door (both tastings and talking) is generally more rewarding.

[bacchaebabe]

I collect coins and I do visit the mint.

Many wines are only available at the cellar door and not at all bottle shops.

Also bear in mind that most cellar doors in Australia are free so it is possibly the only opportunity you will have to taste through the full range of wines, join the mailing list, talk to the winemaker...and get pissed for free. (hey, I'm Australian!)

You also get to meet the winery dogs.

[Davo]

Still a stupid question.

The 3 you ask about are all mass produced. Postage stamps churned out by the millions, cattle bred in their millions and slaughtered in their whatever daily in abbatoirs (certainly a picturesque and sweet smelling location to visit) and eloctinics bits are churned out in their gazillions from factories.

Wine, at least the type I am interested in is limited in production, made by an individual I can usually actually get to talk to about his/her craft, and displayed and sold in usually very pleasant surroundings.

[Serge Birbrair]

Still a stupid question.

Davo, I am terribly sorry it went over your head. Israelies, Americans, Danes, Dutch, Australians, Germans, Austrians didn't think so.

....and this is all I have to say about that.

Here is a smart question for you and ONLY you:

The asymptotic regularity is the limit Lim I^n/n. This limit is the reciprical of the Seshadri constant of the blowup of I.

can number I be irrational?

I am all ears.

[Ian S]

Still a stupid question.

Davo, I am terribly sorry it went over your head. Israelies, Americans, Danes, Dutch, Australians, Germans, Austrians didn't think so.

....and this is all I have to say about that.

Here is a smart question for you and ONLY you:

The asymptotic regularity is the limit Lim I^n/n. This limit is the reciprical of the Seshadri constant of the blowup of I.

can number I be irrational?

I am all ears.

Can i be irrational? I certainly thought so. I really hated learning about a subject where there was no supporting practical use described (apart from keeping socially inept Maths professors from the unemployment queues).

Davo's point is valid, even if it was put in the way it was.

Would we go to a craft centre to buy stuff, or to a pottery to buy a hand-made item? Yes. More likely it's because our long-suffering partners want a break from the the seemingly endless run of 'must-see' cellar doors

[JohnP]

Still a stupid question.

Davo, I am terribly sorry it went over your head. Israelies, Americans, Danes, Dutch, Australians, Germans, Austrians didn't think so.

....and this is all I have to say about that.

Here is a smart question for you and ONLY you:

The asymptotic regularity is the limit Lim I^n/n. This limit is the reciprical of the Seshadri constant of the blowup of I.

can number I be irrational?

I am all ears.

There are some significant differences in these problems, and there are special technical diffculties involved in constructing a geometric example calculating the regularity of powers of an ideal sheaf in projective space.

They have to be non-singluar and show bizarre behaviour!!!

[Serge Birbrair]

There are some significant differences in these problems, and there are special technical diffculties involved in constructing a geometric example calculating the regularity of powers of an ideal sheaf in projective space.

They have to be non-singluar and show bizarre behaviour!!!

I have to disagree.

We study singular semialgebraic, subanalytic and complex analytic sets from a metric viewpont. Each connected set of these types can be considered as a metric space with different natural metrics.

The most interesting metrics are induced (euclidian) metric and intrinsic metric. A set is called normally embedded if these two metrics are bi-Lipschitz equivalent. The main result of the talk is the following : Every closed semialgebraic set is intrinsically bi-Lipschitz equivalent to some normally embedded semialgebraic set. This result does not admit a complex analog.

We present an example of a complex analytic set which is not intrinsically bi-Lipschitz equivalent to any normally embedded complex analytic set.

[Davo]

Still a stupid question.

Davo, I am terribly sorry it went over your head. Israelies, Americans, Danes, Dutch, Australians, Germans, Austrians didn't think so.

....and this is all I have to say about that.

Here is a smart question for you and ONLY you:

The asymptotic regularity is the limit Lim I^n/n. This limit is the reciprical of the Seshadri constant of the blowup of I.

can number I be irrational?

I am all ears.

Now you have gone to extremes.

That is a totally stupid question and anyone who knew you would never need to ask it.

Of course you are irrational, big ears

[Michael McNally]

To get back to the original question....

There have been some good reasons cited, but I think the two key ones are (in no particular order):
personalisation
learning

Personalisation is important because we like to be connected to the things around us. Far better to pull a wine off the shelf that means something to you because you have visited the winery, the region etc. It has a personal meaning to you. It is the same for special wines. If you always have a particular wine on your birthday for example, that becomes your "birthday wine". It is still the same wine, you have simply personalised it. Same goes for wines from wineries you have visited.

Learning is important as we want to know stuff about stuff. We particularly like to know stuff about stuff that other people don't know, so that we can say to them "I know this" and they can say, "Hey, I didn't know that." There are all sorts of reasons why this is cool (tell my 5-year-old anything and he will say "I knew that already!"), but they involve power and politics, so I'll skip them. We all know the most gratifying tasting (either cellar door or exhibition) is one where you find out some stuff you didn't know before.

So, the trip to the cellar door provides us with the ultimate opportunity to personalise and to learn about something we love. Easy, and you can get pissed on the free grog (I'm with you Babe!). You personalise some wines and hopefully learn something most people don't know.

Michael

PS Note to Serge and Davo: we are all stupid - look at the state of the planet and the things we do on a day to day basis in spite of this.

[Gavin Trott]

Guys

Simple policy we have here, discuss wine.

We do not get into personal insults, and if we do, I will remove such posts.

Disagreement is fine, personal insult not.

I'm sure you will understand, without this type of policy, boards like this dis integrate.

No more into the 'personal' please.

[Davo]

Guys

Simple policy we have here, discuss wine.

We do not get into personal insults, and if we do, I will remove such posts.

Disagreement is fine, personal insult not.

I'm sure you will understand, without this type of policy, boards like this dis integrate.

No more into the 'personal' please.

No probs

[silkwood]

Agreeing with the above points about the opportunity to speak to the maker, learning and just getting out for recreation, it's a lucky thing (from my perspective) that many Australian (&NZ) wine regions just happen to be in good (okay Craig, sometimes great) flyfishing country!
Cheers,

Mark

[Serge Birbrair]

PS Note to Serge and Davo: we are all stupid - look at the state of the planet and the things we do on a day to day basis in spite of this.

hahahhahahaah, the argument I can't resist!


ok, I heard all good reasons to visit wineries and your personalization point begs for another related question:
how often have you discovered the wines which tasted great at the winery became disapointing at home?
Is this personalisation good for one's objectivity or not? Pro's don't personalize wines when they visit wineries.

[kirragc]

no but its gone the other way plenty of times.

Ive often underrated wines at CD only to adjust up once tasted at home.


But Im not a pro

[Red Bigot]

ok, I heard all good reasons to visit wineries and your personalization point begs for another related question:
how often have you discovered the wines which tasted great at the winery became disapointing at home?
Is this personalisation good for one's objectivity or not? Pro's don't personalize wines when they visit wineries.

Thirty-40 years ago, may 1 in 10-20, in the last 10 years - about 1 in 100, I've known what I like in a wine for many years now. I've more often been disappointed by how a new vintage of a wine I've liked at home in the past tastes at the winery.

There's a big difference between enjoying the personalities and personal interactions and personalizing the wines being tasted when it's your own hard-earned cash on the line. There are many, many places where the people have been great and I walk out without buying or intending to buy any wine.