A Cautionary Tale
This is a brief story of how Jo and I started That Wine. As a story it is pretty disorganised, with a lot of digressions and a fair amount of stuff that might seem to be unrelated to wine farming. Essentially it is a cautionary tale that should send a warning that once you start with wine it is likely to become an obsession. Wine is a bug that bites and once you have been bitten you can forget all thoughts of “dabbling”, all thoughts of “doing it for fun.” Not that it can’t be fun – it just tends to become something considerably more important to you than you had planned. You are likely to forget all the things you used to do for recreation and entertainment (I speak for myself here – Jo is more balanced, I think) and to see the hours you spend in the vines as the high points of your days and weeks. You come to resent anything that drags you away from the neat, long rows of plants. They have an almost infinite variety of wants and needs and they respond so well to the right treatment and so badly to the wrong treatment that you develop a relationship with each block, each lane, even each plant.