Tips for Home Winemakers

Oh hey, it's the lady who never unpacks her toiletry kit because you never know when you got a jam. And welcome back. You're here for wine part two. Last week we chatted with the very charismatic, encyclopedically informed Andre Houston Mack, who gave you an in-depth and a very spirited discussion of all the different wines, how to drink them, so-called old world versus new world wines, what gives a wine its taste, label, drama, the rise of the sometimes hit or miss, funky, kombucha tasting, organic or biodynamic wines, how to order in a restaurant, what to look for. That was great start there. This week we're so lucky to talk to a pair of indie winemakers and analogists from a family-owned winery in California. And one uh was born and raised in Spain, the other is a member of the San Inez band of Chumash Indians and was the first Native American to own and operate a winery in the United States. And together their winery, it's called Camines to Dreams, meaning the path to our dreams. They make wines with this low intervention, natural yeast, low sulf ites, we'll talk about what those mean later, as well as what got these two into winemaking, how grapes are harvested, why some are juiced with the stems, some weird balloon coffin ch ambers, wooden tea bags, lab work, tips for making your own wines, how they met, and the surprising story time on how they became a married duo in life and in work. But first , thank you so much to patrons at patreon.com slash ologies for supporting the show for the last nine years and submitting questions that are smarter than mine. Thank you to everyone out there marching around in Oliogies Merch at Ollogies Merch. com and for folks who need G-rated kid friendly episodes we have a spin-off show called SMLogies and you can find that just by searching smallogies s-m-o-l-o-g-i-e-s in your favorite podcast app, subscribe, tell friends. Also thank you to everyone who leaves reviews for the show, which helps so much. I do unquirk, I enjoy them all. I promise. And thank you for this unaged fresh one from Science Adjacent who wrote, Dang it Allie, not ten minutes after listening to your recent secrets episode, I'm sitting in my car enjoying a nice beverage, and sploosh right down the front of my shirt. Sure wish I had a dish towel right now. And olgies is the lingering ember in their campfire pit that warms their morning coffee. Science adjacent, thank you. Grab a car towel. Everyone, no wine in the car, but I pra y to all that is holy and unholy that you know that. Also, thank you to sponsors of the show who make it possible for us to donate every week to a different cause that is related to the allogists. Cuts are incredible. We've talked about them a lot on the show. It's working for you 24-7. Doing a lot behind the scenes. When it's doing its job, it's quiet, which is great because a boring gut leaves more room for an interesting life. 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I was on the wrong app. Verbo has a loved by guest search filter for their top-rated vacation rentals with near perfect ratings for cleanliness and location and all the good stuff. So no surprises, what you see is exactly what you get. Search, click dot. Book today on the Verbo app. If you know you verbo. Terms apply. See verbo.com slash trust for details. Okay. Analogy, it comes from the Greek oinos for wine , as we mentioned last week. If you are spelling like the Brits, it's with an O in front. It looks like O anal ogy. Unfortunately, I am American, so that's just no O in front. So let's dive into a barrel of facts about wineries versus vineyards, what a winemaker does all day and year, what wines have skin in the game, metal versus oak, carbonic ferment ation situations, DIY an wine, vinegar, cap versus cork for winemakers, indigenous perspectives on winemaking, why this couple needs a rom com deal and how every year is a surprise with winemakers, wives, and analogists, Terra Gomez and Mireya Terrabo . Do you hear right now the cat or no? Mm-mm. Okay, good. Because she's wanting to get out, so she's crying at the door. So that's why I was asking. Luckily I don't hear it. Okay, okay, good. But um the first thing I'll have you guys do is if you could say your first and last names and uh do you both use she her pronouns? Cool. Tara Gomez. And M ireya Taribbo. And Tara, I was wondering Tara or Tara, but to be in the wine business with Tara in the name. Yeah, it is . I know. Has so much meaning now y'all have been anal ogists for a a while too, and you seem like you came about it from slightly different paths. And Mar ia, you were born in Spain, and you have kind of a an influence of wine from. Was that from an early age? Was wine just so part of every meal and culture? Yeah, basically growing up in Spain, yeah. And also from a small village. Everybody has a little vineyard there and a cellar and yeah wine for I always say breakfast, lunch and dinner. Everyone has a vineyard and a cellar? What how I mean not everyone, but like what happens if you have a small vineyard out there? Do you just pick the grapes? It's just to make uh wine at home . Since I was a kid, there was a vineyard at home uh that my great grandparents had planted. But it's just like small amount, like just to make a barrel or two a year just to drink at home with family and friends and yeah, all the neighbors there in the village where my dad is from, which is in the bottom of the Pyrenees. Back in the time everybody had like, you know, olive trees, animals and vineyards, because that's what they would eat. Uh everybody. So so yeah, when I was a kid I I totally remember going to the vineyard and picking the grapes and foot stomping and it was nothing technical at that moment because it was just like made at home and but after a month or so you had wine to drink and that's basically what you do there. But I never thought about becoming an analogist or winemaker or like to me wine was just, you know, drink at home and mate at home and didn't need to do anything else for that. Sounds like a a movie that you're just like, oh yeah, we just pick our grapes, we stomp on it. Okay, side note. If you're like stomping grapes in a bucket, sounds like an absolutely impeccable way to craft fungus wine. I got good news, I got bad news. So the yeast that ferments your favorite glass of Pinot, it's a fungus, all right? But that's the bad news, I guess. But the good news is that if you foot stomp grapes, you're going gently enough to express the juice, but not hard enough to crunch the grape seeds and give the wine a bitter flavor. Also, the tannins, the alcohol in it, that ferments it's gonna it's gonna kill the foot stuff. And if that is disappointing, you should listen to our pharmacy episode about cheese to learn about what's growing in your cheese. That's delicious. Another point of good news, no one uses feet anymore for this unless it's a very niche label of wine or maybe it's a kink drink, no shame. But we're gonna talk about how these two make grape juice in just a little bit. And Tara, can you tell me a little bit about what got you interested in wine? Was that a big surprise for you to wind up and go, oh, this is where I'm supposed to be? No, actually it was pretty easy. I mean, um I got my first Fisher Price microscope set, like at the age of four. And I just love looking at nature through a microscope. And then from there it just kind of grew into chemistry sets. So I was kind of uh a little bit of an odd child of really just like wanting to play with my microscope and chemistry sets. But yeah, I just love looking at nature through the microscope. So I knew by like elementary school that yeah, this is what I wanted to do. And none of my family ever, you know, were in the wine industry. Um, they just like to drink wine. And so when we were young, like I remember my parents always um, you know, on the weekends going wine tasting up and down here, the Central Coast. And I just remember going on one of the tours. And I mean, back then it was more acceptable for the kids to, you know, go along with the parents and and go on these wine tours and everything. And so for me, stepping into the cellar and seeing like these huge stainless steel vats and bumping into the lab and seeing them actually doing like titrations and in their white lab coats. I mean like I remember going home and telling my mom like I want a lab coat . And so my high school, I started researching it. And there was at that time only two schools that offered it. It was either UC Davis or Fresno State. And so I chose Fresno State because I wanted the hands-on experience. There was already a winery on campus . Oh my gosh, I could hear her now. I can't keep her out again and she's a mischief maker. She's very mischievous, yes. So whatever, she's fine. Their cat did have a lot to contribute, but unfortunately, we lacked uh interpreter onward. Terry, you're saying that Fresno and Davis both had programs. Was that tough to choose between them? It wasn't because Fresno State had uh already the winery on campus and Fres And you're from California. Yes, I am from California. Can you tell me a little bit about your history with the Central Coast? What is it about California and the Central Coast and Nap a that is so good for wine as well? Yeah, so I'm from Santa Barbara County, and what I really love about Santa Barbara County in general is just like all the different microclimates that we have within our county. I mean, we have over 70 different varieties within a 35-mile radius. We could be enjoying like Bordeaux varieties, burgundy varieties, Italian varieties, all the varieties. And so I think that's what draws a lot of the winemakers to our area, especially the women winemakers. I think the women winemakers represent a larger percentage that is based here in Santa Barbara County itself. So when Tara was at Fresno State studying analogy. She was one of only two women in her whole program. And according to this 2020 study out of Santa Clara University, only 14% of California wineries are women-owned. But in Santa Barbara County, some figures estimate that 's 20 to 30 percent. That's amazing. I never realized how much microclimates must influence it as well. And not to mention, as a microscope person, I've got a microscope when I was eight and it changed my whole life. Um it's like there's so much going on between the soil and the yeast and also the culture and the history of what you're making. And I'm wondering in an analogy program, you you know, both went through separate ones. Um, Maria, I know you were in Spain when you did yours, you were in Fresno Terra. What do those programs look like? How much of it is culture, history, types of wine, how much of it is agriculture, pest control, harvesting like what happens in an anal ogy program? Yeah, so anal ogy is kind of divided into two separate areas. You have anal ogy where you're specifically learning the winemaking process. And then you have the viticulture aspect of it, which is you're learning more about the vineyard and the soil and and all of that. So combining the two together, you learn the best of both worlds. Um and that's very important for a winemaker too, to to learn the viticulture side of it. Because like for us, for example, like we're outside a lot. We're out there in the vineyards, really just like trying to find that conne Yeah, I would say when you go to school and study anal ogy, you really kind of like study a little bit of everything, Astera said, but like there's a lot of chemistry involved. And yeah, you have some engineering, you have you know a lot of physics in terms of like conversion of heat to cold and because you we use all that for the tanks and sensory analysis. So it's not just like oh I put grapes in a tank and I ferment them. There's like a lot more involved to it. So yeah. Yeah. And if you're an aspiring anal ogist, you can focus on an agricultural school and you can find just a dazzling course catalog. Like Fresno State, for example, offers programs in viticulture, which is the study of the grapevines themselves, anal ogy, the study of wine making with those grapes. There's the business of marketing and selling wine. The distribution in the US is a particular headache . We'll talk about that later. There are also courses in advanced sensory evaluation of wines, wine microbiology, there's one on regulations, introduction to vine, grape and yeast biochemistry , as you can imagine, there's enough to where this decide would be very lengthy. But in the US alone, winemaking industry generates nearly $400 billion annually. So grape juice plus science times some patience. That's your bottom line. But some things, if I may pair this wine with a little cheese, are worth more than money. Like did you guys know you're in love the whole time. No. No. Really? No, it was a little it was the opposite actually. I don't even have time for that, but yeah . I wasn't a fan of her. I wasn't a fan of her either. It's fine. You guys were like a rom com where in the first act you were like rivals or something? Not rivals, but not 100% friends either. No, it wasn't it wasn't like that. Yeah. So we both worked at the same company in Pasorobles and she would always come into the lab and disrupt and disrupt the lab and like again, everybody like, oh, you know, stop doing their work and everything. And I always used to be like, what the heck? Like, get out of here . You're off of work, go home. Oh my god. And you know there's two sides of each story, but I'm not gonna explain me . Were you in there flirting or no? Not at all. I I um I was an intern . I had when we met, Tara was working at JLore and I came to do a harvest. It was my first time in California doing a harvest here. And I was living with two other interns and the other or three other interns, but the other ones were working with Tara in the lab and I was working in the cellar. The cellar would start earlier but also finish earlier. And we only had as the interns we only had one car and we all had to wait for each other and things like this. So I would go into the lab because there was the only place where there was computers and we're talking about twenty years ago. So there was no social media, no cell phones. So the only way to communicate with my friends at home and everything was like I don't know what it even was and that time. Um some messenger, I guess. Yeah, she would check her emails, turn up the volume and see when she opened up her email. It would just like disrupt the whole lab because everything just all this music starts playing and everything go off and so one day Tara takes me and I I am in the lab checking my emails and trying to send emails to my friends and family and Tara is like yo come with me. And I'm just like, oh God, like now I'm really in trouble. Like she's sending me back to Spain. What's going on? And then she just walks me to her car and she takes me for a ride and I'm just like, where are we going? Like I was like all scared. And I mean, it was also like I didn't speak English as good as now, so communication was a barrier too. And anyway, she takes me like she was at that moment making wine basically the I don't know, like a mile down the street from where her friend had a winery and she was making her own label there. So I remember her taking me there and she's like, Hey, this is where I make my own wine. And she takes me into this kind of like garage winery and opens a fridge and she's like, You like beer? And like, Yeah. So she gives me a beer and she's like, All right, start making punch downs. Yeah, I had like twenty punch downs to do. That's fine. And and then after that every day she would come put her ass to work. Yeah. she would come and pick me up at four a.m at home and help her making pantoms in the morning and then when I was done with my work at the winery she would take me back there and that's how we got to meet each other and became friends and that's so sweet. It's so sweet. You guys need your own winemaking rom com. You need to somehow sell the rights to this. The cutest . I'm so glad that you guys got together. And I know you're wondering. So was I. So doing punch downs in winemaking is when you push the floating grape skins back into the juice to extract more flavor and more color. So picture like a giant potato masher squishing around a cranberry bog, but it's grapes and it's baby wine in a huge trough. And this surprised me, but the average winery only has four or five employees. I pictured dozens like factory setting. But well, most of them no. So with teams being just about the size of a family, how are the chores divided? Well I', m not sure like who does what roles when it comes to wine, but you guys are winemakers, but then there's winery owners. So those are people who grow the grapes, those are people who get the grapes and make the wine. Are they the same people? Like who does what when it comes to making wine? I mean it depends on the winery, I would say. It depends on the size of the winery. We are a really small winery, so basically we wear all the hats, Tara and I. We do have a little bit of different roles just because we have our strengths in like different areas and what we like to our different things. But yeah, depending on the winery, I mean, bigger wineries normally you have, yeah, you have the owner, which is actually at the end the one that makes money and pays money. But but you have a winemaker, or you have like a general manager, you have a marketing person, you have a lot of different And as Minea said, like we all know our strengths and weaknesses within our own winery . And so Mire ia, for example, she's more in the cellar. She's the one that does a lot of the tank movements, barrel movements. And I'm the one um hauling the because we work out of a few different buildings . So I'm the one that goes and picks up the barrels or picks up whatever she needs to get the work done. And I'm always like in the truck like hauling things from one building to another or or I'm doing the analysis. So we know within ourselves what our strengths and weaknesses are. And so it makes it easy to kind of fulfill those roles. When it comes to let's say a winery, I think what I was confused with is I thought a winery was only a place and not a business. And so I always thought that whatever wine you made only came from the grapes that you were growing outside. I like didn't know that that's something that winemakers did because I haven't been on enough wine tours. But as a winemak er, sourcing the grapes is I'm imagine a huge part of it. Can you walk me through it a little bit? I mean, there's a state wineries that they have their own grapes and sometimes there source also grapes from outside, but sometimes not. I would say like in Europe there's a lot more state wineries than here. You know, they we don't have vineyard ourselves. I wish we could, but we purchased grapes and that's it has good things and bad things. I mean you have less control obviously over your grapes and it takes a lot of like research but in other way also it has a lot of like advantages and it's a lot more flexible and you can play every year with a different variety if you want or you can just try something and if it doesn't work, you change the vineyard then you don't have as much pressure in terms of like, you know, always having to work with the same variety and in Santa Barbara County we always say that we're like kids in a candy store 'cause we have all these varieties. So it's really nice when you are able to purchase grapes from different vineyards and different areas every year. So that's cool. I always thought a winery and a vineyard were synonymous. Didn't realize that those are very different words and really different rules. I'm sure you're not the only one. Yeah. Like it didn't occur to me that those were two different nouns. I thought it was just so interesting that so many of us experience wine from a bottle to a glass to our mouth, and that there's so much and so many people and knowledge and history and science and art that go into it. Can you give me some like basic process steps? You mentioned tanks. I thought they were in barrels. What's the deal with that? Do they age and thing? Like, how does the magic happen. So we'll start from the very beginning of it. I mentioned we're out in the vineyard a lot throughout the growing season. And so, you know, with the two winemakers, I actually go out to the vineyard on the nights of the pick. We're bringing our bins that they pick into out to the vineyard. We're out there doing quality control in the back of the tractors as the pickers are picking into our bins. And then we haul the fruit out back to the w inery. So when the fruit arrives to the winery, depending on what time of the night it is, it could be some I mean like we get scheduled to picks anywhere between like seven PM all the way to five AM. They'll tell us what time to kind of go in there and what when we'll begin. And so it makes it a little bit easier for us though because like we have our own bins, we have our own equipment to be able to pick into and and we haul in and haul out. But the fruit comes in, we pick the fruit comes into the winery. Sometimes it just goes directly into the cold room and then we'll go to sleep that night and then wake up in the morning and then begin processing. We have a sorting table, we have a D stemmer, we have an elevator to get it to the D Stemmer onto the sorting table, and then into the final vessel. And so once we process the fruit, depending on if it's red or white, white goes directly into the press, whereas red goes through the D stemmer to the sorting table to the final vat that we're using to ferment in. And then the fermentation begins. Um we do everything all native yeast fermentation so we're not using commercial yeast and everything that we make is um no additive so unfined and unfiltered as well. With just a little bit of SO2 added right at bottle. But that's pretty much about it. So it's like just grape juice going through fermentation and then goes um into barrel for aging and and then depending on however many months you're you're aging the wine for and then it goes into bottle. And why at night? Is it just cool er weather? Yeah. So nighttime allows us to bring the fruit in already cold and kind of, you know, frees you from any sort of like bees coming into play , coming to kind of like make their marks into the grapes or any sort of microbial bacteria that could happen when you're picking during the daytime. It prevents all of that from happening and you you already have the leg up with it being cold. So yeah, that's why we pick at night. Either at night or early morning basically, yeah. I would say it's also a little better for the pickers, for the workers itself, because pickinging dur the day here like in Santa Barbara County in September and beginning of October it's still pretty warm. So it's not the same picking at 50 degrees that you know you you're all night peeking, you're tired because it's night, but during the day you would be picking at 80 degrees, so it's definitely a lot better on them to pick at night. Yeah. And why does the white wine go one way with stems and all getting crushed, but the red wine grapes get dest emmed? So white grapes can also go both ways. But traditionally, let's say white grapes go directly to the press because you want your white wine to be you're gonna have a juice that it's really clear. So for white wine you want that. For red wine you wanna have a lot of color, dark. So you're gonna ferment it with the skins. Because if you would go directly to press you would have like a really light rose, basically. White wine now, or not now, it's since the beginning of history of wine, but you can also ferment it with the skins. And that's when you get a wine that has a lot more tannin and a lot more color and it's where nowadays a lot of people knows as orange wine or skin contact wine, which is a white wine fermented the way that we make red s. Okay, so just imagine eating just the skin of a conquered grape, right? You can taste the acid, you can feel the dryness, and we talk a lot about tannins, compounds that uh plants make to say like, hey, don't eat me, in part one with entree. Also, is there more than one way to skin a grape for a moment. I I was like, I feel uh like surgeons practice on grapes to test their dexterity and learn precision by like peeling the skin and then suturing it back up. And I was like, am I hallucinating this? But a cursory Google not only confirmed that they do, but it sent me to a whole Wikipedia page titled simply Grape Surgery, which told me who's now telling you that grapes serve as a cheaper and more readily available alternative to animal eyes, artificial model eyes, or human eyes sourced from eye banks or donated cadavers. If you listen to our ophthalmology episode with iDoctor friend and surgeon Dr. Reed Waynus, um you can hear about the time that he mentioned a ruptured globe as part of his work day , which um almost made me like block his number. How about in this context? And so how are they getting the skin off of the white wine grape? I always wonder because it's so hard to skin a grape. I'm like, how do they do this? No, we don' sktin them by hand, believe me. That would take forever. We put the grapes in a press. There's different kinds of presses and I'm not gonna get technical on that, but basically our press is a pneumatic press and it's like uh a tube with a hole on top, you put the grapes inside, fill it all, and then there's like a balloon that inflates and deflates and it presses and then it has some drains where the juice comes out and the skins stay inside the press. So yeah, the skins and seeds stay inside and and just the juice comes comes out. Comes out. Yeah, through some drains and stuff. So yeah. What happens to all that stuff? Are there like hogs sitting by being like, if it's me? I mean if you have your own vineyard, you can take it back into the vineyard and use it as a compost there or like you ferment it first and compost it. For us, we put it in a big container that we have outside the winery during harvest and then it gets picked up by a recycling company and then they use it for compost or recycle it taken somewhere else and that's it. Okay. So I was curious about these balloon machines and I looked up a video taken with some sort of GoPro in a tank of grapes being mushed . Wow. Imagine like a giant water heater cylinder on its side, or better yet, like a small submarine. It's filled with grapes. All right. Bunches of grapes are tossed in from a hole at the top, like a submarine hatch, and then it's sealed shut. And the thing spins this way. It spins that way. It tosses them all around. And then suddenly half of the tank starts to inflate like a big clogged artery and it smooshes the grapes against each other and the side of the tank. Then it gets spun more of the juice is drained off, and then the big balloon inflates again and then spinning, smushing, draining, spinning, ballooning. I was mesmerized. I was just watching this thing like a toddler with an iPad. It's like seeing thousands of uh bubble wraps popping all at once or like sugar cysts bursting. It's so gratifying. It's a little gross. It's beautiful. But once they've squeezed all the juice out, what happens to the leftover stuff, like the pulp and the seed and the stems. Okay, that stuff is called pumice. And yes, it can be used for fertilizer, for animal feed, biomedical treatments they're looking at, or increasingly in the making of food from chicken meatballs I read to pasta and cereal and according to the twenty twenty four paper the high value and sustainable utilization of grape promise a review in the journal food chemistry, it's like grape pulp. It's what's for dinner after making the thing that you drink with dinner. Very clever. And so the difference between the big vats, the big stainless steel vats and the barrels to age. How long does wine stay in one of those big metal silos versus off to barrels? I mean it depends a lot of the winery, but in our case , we ferment in tanks in stainless steel for the whites, and actually in beans, or sometimes in stainless steel for reds, and that may last like a month at the most, or a month and a half if it's a longer fermentation. And then after that the white wine it's racked, so it's transfer to the barrels, either a stainless steel barrel or oak barrel. And then the reds uh you press them 'cause you still have the skins and then uh the same the juice you transfer it to barrels. We use for our wines all neutral French oak , meaning the barrels are used for another winery before we use them, so they've been used several tim es or one time or we use them for a few years and then we resell them too. So it's barrels they're barrels that they don't have that much oak influence. Uh we want the barrel to give us more like stability and give us some texture and help us with that. But we don't want to have okay wine. We wanna showcase really what it comes from the vineyard and the fruit and everything. So and then we have it in barrel for the whites around six months and for the reds, depending on which one of our reds, but between 10 and 18 months. But there's also other vats or other materials that you can ferment, like you can ferment in concrete. This year we've been experimenting uh with a concrete egg as a tank for one of our varieties. You can ferment in clay. Um so each material is gonna give you different aromatics and different texture to your final product. I would also like to to direct you our mycology episode on fungi and our zymology episode about beer brewing. And if you just cannot get enough of yeast and you'd like to break bread with your cabernet, you can enjoy the gastro-egyptology episode all about making sourdough with ancient Egyptian yeasts sourced from several thousand-year-old pots. That's a real thing. And the yeasts are in there. These are natural yeasts that are just environmental, right? And then they're just doing their thing, gobbling up the sugars. And do you know kind of what it's going to be like until you taste it? Or is it like this is a pretty de pendable yeast that likes this grape and it likes this area? So we're pretty sure what it's how do winemakers know what's gonna happen? So typically the way we do it, it's called P de Couve. So when we go out there and sample for each vineyard site, we sample each variety, we pull whole clusters of them, we bring it to the winery, recrush it, rerun the analysis on it. But that juice that we've collected, we save, and that's how we multiply and build up our yeast culture. And so by the time that the fruit is ready to come in to harvest, then that's what we use to pitch to the tanks. So it eliminates the lag time of going through the cold room, trying to warm the fruit back up, and then waiting for a fermentation to kick off. Like we've already got the fermentation already active and ready to go and kind of like migrate and have fun. And so um and so that helps a great deal with just eliminating, you know, just that lag face point. Oh, that's so cool. They interest ing thing to me of of working with natural yeast uh with wild yeast is that each vineyard it's different and each fruit and each year it's a little bit different, while with commercial yeast basically it's more knowing what you're gonna have. So say you want a wine that it's gonna have a lot of like fruity characteristics. There's other yeasts that are created to give you uh more mouthful of other yeast that it's created. So you can go to all these companies that sell yeast and say I want to ferment Pinot Noir and I want it to be more earthy or more fruity, and they will sell you a different kind of yeast, right? But that to me makes also wines more similar in between different wineries. So it's less interesting in some way. It's safer though, because you know you're not gonna have issues with your yeast, but I think it's less interesting, and we want to be sure that it's a little bit different every year. So that just adds to a little bit of the mystery of it, I guess. But yet it's fun for us. And remember from part one with Andre last week that in general old world wines mostly European are named after the region of origin because the climate and geography and soil contribute to the character and also what kinds of yeasts would be present. Now, New World wines like from the Americas and Australia tend to be named for the type of grape. New world wines also tend to grow in warmer climates, so they yield more sugar, which makes a higher alcohol content, while old world wines tend to be less sweet, more dry, and less fruity in taste. Now natural wines are sometimes called biodynamic or organic, depending on the farming of the grapes and the level of intervention after the harvest. Those tend to or can have a funkier flavor, sometimes a cloudier appearance, and they can vary greatly from harvest to harvest. Some wine drinkers have staunch preferences, and I suppose that's why they're our wine menus instead of everyone in the world having the same favorite bottle, which would be boring. And can you tell me a little bit about your preferences personal ? Because y'all knew each other for years before you went straight into business with each other, before you got married too. Did you have really different tastes in terms of where you wanted to go visit and travel and try things or when it comes to y'all are gonna go to a winery and check something out or when you were first getting to know each other, what were your different tastes that you guys had? Well ye,ah I, mean, Merea, of course, has more of a European, you know, attribute flavor profile to it. Whereas I have more of like a California flavor profile to it . So yeah, it was it was a little bit of variance in the beginning, but for me going to visit, I started developing and learning more about wine in general and you know the the history of it all and I feel like I'm the one that started changing my palate up and we started drinking more European wines and so my palate kind of adjusted more than I would say Medea's palette. But yeah, luckily, I mean we love the same wines and we love to make, you know, the same wines and we don't just focus on mainstream varieties. Uh we focus on the more of like the underrepresented varieties. So with like Gruner Weltliner and Cool Climate Syraz being our flagship wines. But yeah, we make like a wide variety. Maybe too much too much than we should because as Medea said , we're like little kids in a candy store that can't decide on what variety, oh I want to play with this variety or I want to play with that variety. And if you would like to see this variety with your own eyes or grapes, you can head to their website Camines to Dreams, C A M I N S to Dreams.com, which has more info about their Gruner Vaultliner, which is a light lower alcohol white wine with a little fizz, they have a Grenache Rose, a Cabernet Feffer made from this obscure grape, which has kind of a cherry, spicy, and peppery taste. They offer a medium-bodied caronien, which is a grape used mainly in Spain and France, but theirs is from Santa Barbara, and it's made via carbonic maceration, which we'll talk about in a minute. They also offer a red blend wine that's pride themed, which warms my heart well over cellar temperature. And all their bottles are in the $30 to $50 range and they have an order page on their site in case you want to take a gatter. Many of the wines I had never heard of and it's clear that they do enjoy doing something a little different. But we just love, you know, trying to teach the consumer that there are other varieties other than your mainstream varieties that they're so used to tasting. You guys, I'm sure, have seen sideways 5,000 times, right? I actually haven't. You haven't? I have to say that every time I try to watch it, I fall asleep. You're like been there, done that. Now I want to watch it it again because's been filmed here in Santa Barracal. So since I moved here, I want I've been wanting to watch it again, but I haven't yet. So it was it's one of my mom's favorite movies and I just remember like the Merlot versus Pinot Noir. If they want to drink Merlot, we're drinking Merlot. No, if anybody orders Merlot, I'm leaving. I am not drinking any fucking Merlot. Okay, okay. Relax, Miles. If you have seen this 2004 movie, this scene, and Paul Giamatti's very sentimental rambling monologue, which was an ode to Pinot Noir, is permanently stained in your memory. And you're not alone. Decades after it's released, people are still pondering on it. And a 2021 study titled Sideways Supply Response in California Wine Grapes, which was out of Cambridge University, found that the positive supply response for Pinot Noir is stronger than the negative response for Merlot after this movie. So yeah, it did have an effect, but it really just bumped up Pinot Noir. It didn't mess up Merlot's reputation too badly. But yeah, if you're ever just sitting around wondering about stuff like this, you can go gather data, crunch the numbers, and answer it for other people, including myself. So thank you. I feel like it really did a number on Merlot, but it really oversaturated Pinot Noir. And it's so interesting how much these pop cultural things can have influence but, I think it's more important to see if you like it or not. At the end, it's just like it doesn't matter which wine it is. It's if you like it, you like it. And then once you find a wine that you like it, try to remember it. And when you go to a store, say, hey, I like this wine, or it was just you know, you have something similar or you have and from there start trying different things. And when it comes to mouthfeel, some of them feel drier, the tannins in red wine are higher than in white wine. But what are these properties chemically that give a different kind of mouthfeel? Yeah, I mean tannins come mostly from the skins and the seeds, but also from the oak. So either barrels or you can add artificial powder oak or chips or whatever it's allowed in this country to add to. So basically for from oak and so in general, yes, red wine has more tannin, which is gives you this yeah, dryness on the palate. So that's just basically a sensation of like I don't know, like the proteins basically in the wine precipitate with your saliva. So that's what you feel like that precipitation it just puts like a cover in your tongue. So yeah, as we touched on with Andre last week, some wineries use oak chips or even sawdust tea bags. They've been doing it since the eighteen hundreds. And according to the history and the science behind it, which was discussed in the paper, review of quality factors on wine aging in oak barrels. The oak chips can create greater intensity of wood aromas, which are like coconut and vanilla, and a greater taste impact of bitterness and astringency than oak barrels. So those chips can create more of it. And individual winemakers can evaluate what their flavor and texture goals are when choosing between barrels and chips and dust and such. But how does Bradley Cooper feel about all this? I know we're wondering. My guess is resentful because the barrel maker is called a cooper, and people bearing that surname, Cooper, probably descended from people who craft barrels and would say that oak chips are cheating and that you should buy more barrels. Don't worry, I won't tell anybody . And if you decide to do which is something totally different, which is like carbonic maceration, that's putting the whole cluster intact into the tank and closing it off so in an anaerobic environment for however long it takes for the fermentation to take place. Generally speaking it's between like twenty to thirty days that we leave it on, you know, in the tank without opening it up. We just taste it from the tasting valve and see like how it's progressing and checking the sugar level in it. And that gives you a little bit more fruit forward, a little bit of spiciness to it um because it has uh stems intact there as well. Um it'll give you a little bit of that spiciness, but also just that lighter sensation . So those are considered chillible reds as well. Carbonic maceration who? I don't know her. But this is when I looked it up. A bunch of grapes, usually red, are put in a big tank, uncrushed. Okay, so they're whole. They're put in a tank. And then carbon dioxide is pumped in to fill all the airspace. So what happens is the grapes start to ferment on an intracellular level. And when they have about two percent alcohol, they're just balloony, ballooning. They burst. They release all that juice on their own, which develops into a lower acidity wine that's drinkable when it's really young, like a Boujolet Nouveau. Just exploding berries, popping away, making dinner juice. Just a side note, too, sulfites in wine are naturally occurring. It's part of the fermentation process. But most winemakers also add like a little more sulfur dioxide as a preservative, unless it's a wine labeled organic, which is not allowed to add sulfites in the bottling process. So organic wines, they have so many rules. I mean naturally. And we do add SO2 just to help because it's the first time it sees SO2 and that's just such a minimal amount um that I'm sure it just dissipates out by the time it gets over there. So we just do it as you know preservative to help get it to bottle safely. And for Mere and I, our stylistic preferences to make more um kind of going in the traditional way, but yet still natural with native yeast. So more on the cleaner side. But that's just the style that we like. Everybody else is different. Um, and everybody likes different styles. Yeah. But this is just in particular the style that we like to make. When it comes to wine trends, does it ever exhaust you to see , like, oh, this is the summer of Rose, and then next summer it's gonna be kava, and this time it's funky, and then it's gonna be, you know, like does it? I imagine when you get together with other winemakers too, you guys must talk such great petty shit the the tea that you guys spill oh my god is it i bet it's the best i mean it's interesting to see the trends in the market sometimes. Luckily they don't change from one summer to another one because like wine takes time to be made and to be released. So if not we would be like totally screwed here. And a lot of them are really just like head scratchers that you just can't figure out because it's like um nowadays people just don't go by, you know, the quality of the wine. They go by how cool the labels look and and if it's clear glass or if it's dark glass and everybody loves clear glass, but clear glass is obviously not as good for the wine. And so it's just like the trends that people go through. It's just it it's mind-boggling for me. I I don't get it. I imagine too, um, because I know that so many people pick based on labels and are there certain graphic designers that's just specialize in wine labels. And God, I bet there's gonna be so many AI wine labels. It's gonna be weird. There's a lot of designers that specialize in wine labels. There was a wine in Spain back in the time that actually a distributor, a really famous distributor in Spain released it was their own label and they call it Perro Verde. So like the green dog, and it has a green dog on the label. That wine was all over Spain and in all the restaurants by the glass and by the stores in like I don't know in like six months, like it took over. And I it to me, it was like the beginning of these labels like this, like Spain is more traditional, the same that friends and we had like this really all traditional chateau winery labels, and then this label came to the market, and everybody was buying that wine. And uh, it was for me the first time that I remember seeing like something happening like that. It didn't matter what was inside the ball, people would just buy it because there was a green dog on the label and the wine was called green dog. Like, how smart? I don't know what that has to do with the wine, but and if you're Spanish and you're screaming con ozco ese, which apparently I just looked it up means I know that one, you would easily recognize this green silhouette of a little leaping dog on the bottle. It's very cute. Anyone else just think back to the wine aisle all right you're going to a dinner party you don't know what to bring oh that one has a horse on it cool done is this a thing very much so enough so that scientists are like, let's fire up the spreadsheets. So one study titled Wine and Wildlife, an exploratory study of the depiction of animals on wine labels available in the United States, found that quote, animals were depicted on sixteen point seven percent of wine labels overall, with birds and mammals being the most commonly depicted animals. I I can't imagine like a wine with a like slug on it. It probably not gonna happen. But they say as, predicted , the depiction of animals was less common on wine labels from Europe than other regions. They say likely because a lot of European wines use traditional imagery. They say, like chateaus and heraldic images and fonts and that attracts consumers that value the wine's heritage. So in a word, stuffier. Fewer goats and dogs and cats and stuff. Now do the animals actually sell wine though , or are they just cute? Let's ask the 2026 paper, Influence of Wine Label Imagery, Eye Tracking Evidence, and Regulatory Implications in the journal Drug and Alcohol Review. And it explains that 20 years ago, wine labels mostly featured typefaces and fonts, but they conducted an experiment with the use of eye tracking. They write, we demonstrated that wine labels featuring images of animals draw attention more rapidly and sustain attention for longer than labels with inanimate objects. And it all started, a lot of these papers say with the explosion of the Australian wine yellowtail, which features this little hopping wallaby. Honestly, I never even considered that yellowtail was about a wallaby with that tail. I always just thought it was named after the tuna. I never even thought about it. And that's my bad for not turning on even one of my brain cells to consider it. But yeah, the so-called critter wine sells more and faster than old style labels. Up to twice as many bottles, some sources say. So next time you're at the store, even if you don't drink wine, just cruise the aisle and report back on what critters you sp ot. I searched wine in my photos on my phone, and I found so many pictures that I had just taken of bottles I didn't buy that. I was like, oh, look at that bat. Oh, that one's got a rhino on it. Just that I thought were cute . Uh we post a discussion thread on Patreon where we can all chat and I want to hear uh what you see. Oh, speaking of y'all. So much of it is perception and expectation and I did get some great questions from listeners. Can I ask you a few? Yeah. Sure, yeah. Oh my gosh. Okay. Okay. But before we open those up, let's donate to a related charity for Tara and Mireia. And it's going to House of Pride and Equality in Santa Maria, California, which works to create visibility and awareness for LGBTQIA plus people and provide safe environments of inclusion and educate through advocacy efforts and community outreach events. And they say due to the lack of Latinix focused queer spaces, they've been working toward that and a more equitable central coast for all since 2016. So you can find out more about them in the show notes or you can head to house of pride and equality.org. So thanks to sponsors of the show for making that donation possible. This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. If you haven't heard me gushing about Squarespace for years, it's an all-in-one website platform. Whether you're trying to grow a business you have or if you're just a baby business getting started it has everything you need that's where I secured my domain name it helped me build a professional site I can update it so easily I've been using squarespace since before ology's existed. After procrastinating for years, I literally built my website in one evening. They have templates, they have flexible editing tools. Squarespace also makes it easy to share your work. You can book clients, you can get paid . They have built-in tools for scheduling and invoicing and email all in one place. Whenever someone I know needs a website, whether they're a scientist that needs to put their work up or someone who's just starting a business, I'm like, dude, square face. So head to squarespace.com slash ologies for a free trial and when you're ready to launch use offer code ologies to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. You can do it. 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And I've had to call and be like, help me reset my modem. And they've been very helpful. So it's working for me. Visit spectrum.com slash business to learn more. That's spectrum.com slash business. Restriction supply, services not available in all areas. You know what I love? I love a mystery. Some events from history still don't have answers, and Dr. Harini Bott is a clinical pharmacist obsessed with the ones nobody can explain. Every Monday on the podcast Hidden History, she investigates medical oddities, vanished civilizations, mass hysterias, which are some of my favorite, and phenomena that keep repeating across centuries. So she digs into the evidence, she tells you exactly what she thinks So follow Hidden History with Dr. Har iniBot wherever you listen to podcasts so you never miss a mystery. It's summer. How are you feeling? Are you too hot? Are you feeling itchy? This is where Quin ce comes in. It's getting warmer. 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So that's quince qin ce .com slash ologies for free shipping and three hundred sixty-five day returns. Quince.com With the all new Audi Q3, the answer is always yes. Yes to adventure. Yes to escape. Yes to right now. The all-new Audi Q3 , made for the Yes Life . Okay, you had wonderful, full-bodied questions. So let's start with one from Anthony Cherubino, Anna Dylan, Jennifer R. Alia Myers, Josh Waldman, Hester Ding le, Carrie Overall, Mark McPhillips, and Sonoma County raised Carlene D.H. And Agnes, live in the U.S. Hi Allie. My name is Agnes. I live in the U.S. And within the past year, I visited some vineyards in Delonega, Georgia. And I was wondering what qualifications does land or an area have to have to make high quality wine? Is it the soil? What about the weather? What kind of grapes? What makes an area like there's gonna be a lot of vineyards? Yeah, I mean there's definitely it's that combination that we're talking earlier about terroirs. There's areas that yeah, because of the orientation that it's uh towards the ocean sometimes or like because uh the microclimates that it has, or because they yeah, the soil characteristic, the climate, like all that interference, and there's sometimes an area that has all the best of the best, so it's gonna make great wine. And it's also the variety, it's the soil , it's the climate. I think finding the variety when you go to plant a vineyard, normally you don't plant um it's really rare to see Pinot Noir and Cabernet Signon planted in the same vineyard, for example. So you need to find the right variety for the right place too, and that's important. So that makes sense. Yeah, Napa is known for caps because caps thrives there. It's warmer climate. Yeah. If they were a planted San Jovese, maybe it wouldn't thrive that much there. But not in all of them. Nap a caps are good because the weather, the soil, it's it's just perfect for it. So you know, uh especially with so many fires in California, do they have to keep testing the soil to make sure that the soil is kind of like the same quality, same components as so much I'm thinking, you know, as a Californian mostly too. Yeah. I mean we do test if you have sandy soil or clay soil or it's been here for years and years, so it's not gonna change that much. So we do sample and do analysis of the soil uh normally yearly in all the vineyards to be sure that you're not missing the micronutrients basically . And then you depending on the way you farm, uh, you can add compost of different kinds. So in 2017, the Atlas and the Tubbs wildfires killed dozens of people. They raged near Napa and Sonoma County, which pardon the pun is a global hotspot for winemaking. And I always wondered how the local agriculture and the viticulture was affected. And according to the 2021 paper, science and Culture, wildfires pose a burning problem for wines and winemakers. Wildfire smoke can contaminate entire crops and it's called smoke taint. And the resulting wines have an ashtray And there was a 2017 Wired article titled After the Nap a Fires: A Disaster in Waiting, Toxic Ash. And it explains that wild fires of organic matter like grass and trees have very different implications from house fires. And as we saw in the twenty twenty five LA fires, thousands of houses burned and heavy metals and other toxins can leach into the soil and the waterways. Hey, what if you want to make wine from a doomsday bunker? A few people, Annie G, first time question asker, Josh Waldman, and Carlos Denori Whitehead wanted to know Hello Ellie, it is Denoa from Florida, and my question for the assumingly lovely couple is I have been making wine for quite some years and I was curious if you' donll have any tips or tricks to make not just wine, but good wine. Correct. You are lovely. Um so if you are messing around trying to make some wine at home, how do you make it so that it's not bad. Well I think chemistry plays a big part in it. And so as Mare had mentioned earlier, like having a a lower pH, a higher acidity, and also too like keeping whatever you're fermenting in, whether it's a barrel or a tank, free of headspace 'cause the headspace could impart, you know, microbial growth and so you wanna keep everything topped off. Oh. Yeah, I was gonna say there was like if you're making wine at home and you are not able to really run analysis because you don't want to or you don't know how to, yeah, the two tips to me would be like sanitation. Just be sure that everything is super sanitized and clean, and second, no oxygen anywhere. You don't want oxygen. So if there's a space a steroid headspace, that's gonna grow bacteria there. So have all your vessels always super super full. Except when it's the middle of fermentation wet, you need some space because of the CO2. But after that everything's super full. And temperature plays a big part as well, especially if you're doing it in the garage, just make sure, you know, it doesn't get too hot in there because that's how you tend to evaporate more of the wine and so you're having to top more often to keep, you know, that headspace kind of like topped off. And a few people, Eric Bloomer, Heather Crane, Laura Atkins and Katie Bearty on that note wanted to ask. Heather Crane asked which came first, wine or vinegar. Katie wanted to know what is the difference between wine and vinegar. Uh I know wine turns to vinegar when it goes bad, but is vinegar just bad wine? Yeah . So basically I don't know if it's first wine or vinegar. You can go straight to vinegar already actually before having wine. But what happened is that there's oxygen in contact with your wine or with your fruit. Uh it could be with your juice directly. It doesn't need to be already like that you have alcohol. And to make wine, you don't want oxygen and yeast is able to ferment with no oxygen. And that's the great thing about making wine. You don't need oc or you don't want oxygen and you don't need it to transform the sugar into alcohol. Um with vinegar, what happens is that you have bacteria is there, not yeast. So we're talking about totally different species there. And uh bacteria creates vinegar or acetaldehyde and volatile acidity, and that's what smells we call it volatile acidity, because it's really volatile and it smells a lot of vinegar, right? It's really easy to smell it from far. And that's what bacteria produces. So we're talking about different species like in contact with the wine and bacteria only grows if there's oxygen. But if there's no oxygen, bacteria cannot uh grow. Ah so yeah. I think I made a little bit of balsamic vinegar once . It's all part of the learning process. Yeah It happens sometimes, yeah. It does happen. Well, in preventing that, Flasitron, Jeffrey Bradshaw, Chloe Fammy, Elizabeth Becker, Lindsay Bartholomew, and Chrissy, first time question asker, wanted to know: is there a difference in how long different wines can last after opening? How good is wine really? And if you wanted it not to spoil, what's the best way to sort of preserve your wine? Drink it. Drink it . Vacuum . No. I mean, obviously if you drink it, it's not gonna spoil, so that's the important part. Uh how long can a ball stay open? If that's the question, it really depends on the wine , but if you wanna try to preserve it the most, again the same, no oxygen, so water acid, vacuuming. So there's these like little vacuum things that you can put on top of your bottle and vacuum off the oxygen or most of the oxygen. You can try to add nitrogen to the bottle too. And if you put it in the fridge, it's always gonna preserve it more. Because everything goes slower in cold temperatures. So any problem with yeast bacteria oxidation, it's gonna uh go a little slower. Another thing that is slower is figuring out a corkscrew. So Dave Miller, PhD, Travis and Master Ohm, Alison Gusek, Tom Brody, and first time question asker Chrissy asked screw it. Well, you mentioned corks and corks drying out, and so many people wanted to know Elaine Lamironde, Aliyah Myers, Camellia B. Carol Young, Choi Kothheimer. Elaine says corks versus screw cap s, which is better for the wine, which is better for the environment. Everyone wants to know twist tops, corks, what's going on there? I guess it depends what you want for your wine. So yeah, I like to have cork because our wine is gonna change a little bit through the years, and I think that's kind of like a romantic part of wine making too. And every bottle is gonna be a little bit different, and once we bottle it, it's young and it has a lot of fruit, but the wine is alive still and it's gonna change and um the oxygen that goes through the the corp helps with these changes of aromatics. So to me that's the beauty of the cork. Screw cup, it's perfect for a wine that's normally gonna be drinking faster, younger. That doesn't mean that you cannot age it. You can age it, it's just not gonna change the same way that change with cork. You have to be maybe a little bit less careful with screw cup in terms of like storing your bottles, because there's not that exchange of oxygen and the obviously the screw cup doesn't get dry or nothing. So you can have your bottles, for example, standing while uh with a cork you need to have them laying down because you want the wine always touching the cork for you know, like so it stays in contact with the wine and it gets wet. So yeah, I don't know. It's just the preference of the winemaker, I guess, and what they are looking for in their wines. What about thinking outside the box? Wondered Felipe Jimenez and Mark Rubin. What about boxed wine? What are your thoughts? Are they eco-friendly? Is it even boxed if it's really in a bag? Uh yeah, how do we feel about it? I mean it is eco friendly 'cause you use less material so they box wines normally could be like I don't know like five liters or so a gallon or a gallon and a half, and you're using just cartoon and like a bag inside. An eco friendly bag, yeah. It's like less weight, so if you have to ship, it's less CO, there's less footprint. So that's important . I mean if you put good wine inside a bag, the wine is gonna be good. Is it gonna change? Are you gonna put a wine to last thirty years there? No. Why? Like why would you do that? Like it's not gonna happen anything. It's gonna be the same today than tomorrow, except like you're gonna lose like precipitation of compounds and things, right? But if it's for a wine that's to be meant to drink sooner, the same that the screw cup, it's it's just great. And it's definitely echo-friendly. Okay, so it's not gonna age, so just live in the moment, all right. I don't even know how things age in a bottle, and neither does Camille Gamino, Storm, Heather Crane, Leana Schuster, Kayla Meyer, Brooklyn Baron, Dave Brewer, Nean, and Lisa Gorman. Well, several people wanted to know how does aging play into it when it comes to being stored? Because you know how there's always that trope of like someone's like, I've got a 55-year-old b ottle of cab and I've been saving it for this. And is that necessarily going to be better than if you would have had that 35 years ago when it was at its peak? Or where is the trope of like I have an exceptionally old bottle of wine and I'm going to seduce you with it or I'm going to impress you or I've waited a really long time to open it. What happens in the bottle? Well, I mean it's really difficult to say. Again, I think like a lot of it it 's like through the years we learn which uh wines and which varieties can last longer, but also like how the wine, the chemistry part of the wine interferes with it. If you have a wine that's a lot more protected, it's been filtered and stuff. You know that it's not gonna have problems of precipitation. That doesn't mean that it's not gonna, you know, change aromatically. But there's different things that take part on the aging. But it's just depends on the wine. You can never say, Oh, I have this wine bottle that I had it 30 years and it's gonna be better. Most of the times it's not gonna be better, and that unless you have an exceptional wine vintage and it's been stor ed really, really good . So my recommendation normally is drink the bottle of wine and if you like it, buy another one. And then if you wanna save it a few years, save it a new year, but unless you already know how it was . I mean, there are wines that are meant to age for some years, but there's a point that wines stabilizes and wine starts going down. And the general consumer that doesn't have a way to age and store the Enjoy it. Enjoy it, yeah. And also a lot of connections to the indigenous wine-making space too. I'm wondering, Tara, if there's anything you want to tell us kind of about that in terms of like connection to the land that you're where the grapes are grown or how that culture plays into how you make wine. Yeah. So balance, I always talk a lot about balance and it was something that that I learned at such an early age. So balance within myself and my surroundings and living in harmony and just really like every vineyard that we go and and seek out , just really trying to find that connection to the land and to the vines and yeah, just all about connections and balance. And as we do everything natur ally, you know, without using commercial yeast or commercial additives. Feel that that's really uh important as well. And um yeah. You're both so hands-on in terms of what you're doing. And I think that that definitely shows in in all of the laurels you've gotten and the enthusiasm about your wine too. Is you're both so passionate and so hands-on. Yeah, I feel like you have to be for all the blood , sweat and tears that we go through yearly. Um I mean, I've we've been in this industry for well over twenty years and so we've experienced a lot of it and there's so much more than romance that goes into winemaking. Um there's so much chemistry, so much labor and and we say it's a labor of love and passion, being passionate about it because that's what gets you through the 20 hour day shifts and stuff like that of lack of sleep. And for me, it's just like a natural adrenaline rush. Like I I've been off of coffee for um I think it's like been like five years now. And it's funny that I just barely started drinking coffee again after harvest after five years . But it's just that natural adrenaline rush that just keeps me going and you know, I always say that that once you stop, you know, learning about wine, uh maybe it's just maybe it's time to get out of the industry and I feel like I'm still learning, learning, learning. And I enjoy it. And I still get those butterflies in my stomach for every pick that we go out for. It's just it's so fun and just being out in nature and being able to see the sunrises and sunsets and connecting with all of that. It's just so beautiful. There's so much beauty there. And every year it's different. So that makes it also really interesting because you are always thinking like, oh, this harvest is gonna be like this or like that. So I think it's what keeps it like also really interesting, and you never know. And that's the beauty of each vintage, is that every vintage is different and it just keeps you thinking and it keeps you on your toes. Yeah. So the hardest things would you say were the the long days or if is there something that is just all winemakers know like this is the hardest. Is it uh to me the hardest is to sell the wine Yeah I think every winemaker agrees that