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Dollar Dazed

I just finished two days of in-store tastings at different retailers offering "dollar over cost" sales. Both stores were crowded and customers were loading their carts full of wines, beer and spirits. It was an alarmingly illuminating glimpse into what people are actually putting into their bodies these days when it comes to beverage alcohol. All Manner of Cakes and Jams, Chocolates, Barefeet, Flip Flops, Neon Colors (not on the lables, in the juice people), Honey this, Sweet that... and that was just in the wine department! Our pancreas is a complex and delicate organ. We do it no justice when we bombard it with high levels of refined carbs, alcohol and sugar. Just such behavior is what is responsible for the epidemic levels of Type 2 diabetes we currently have in this country. No wonder we continue have raging debates on health-care.

I can't help but think that the conventional wisdom on the part of "Big Alcohol" goes something like this "Well the consumer is choosing to buy something alcoholic which isn't the exactly a healthy choice anyway, so why not go all out and add all matter of sugars, artificial creams, flavors, unnatural colors and whatever other wacked out stuff we can add to push the stuff. Heck, we don't need to list the ingredients, so pretty much anything goes." This is where we now are.
To find out how it all began, we can learn a great deal from an extraordinary grape farmer toiling in relative obscurity in Slovenia. Ales Kristancic of Movia, one of the pillars in boidynamic viticulture, makes a wine in much the same way that wine was likely discovered when humans were savage hunter/gatherers. The wine is called Lunar. To "make" Lunar individual grapes (named Ribolla) are placed into a barrel and allowed to ferment using the naturally occurring yeasts on their skins and relying solely on the moon's gravitational pull for batonage. After 8 moons, the wine is carefully drained from the barrel and bottled...that's it. It's a magnificent wine redolent of peaches, spice and minerals. In the case of Ancient Man, perhaps he kept his gathered grapes in a gourd or hole in the ground or other vessel but, beyond that, the process remains the same. As Ales puts it, this coming together of man and plant was a divine gift which changed the course of humanity. It's occurence has equally changed the course of evolution in the plant kingdom as well. All of which goes a long way to explaining man's intimate relationship with the plant kingdom.
In light of the alarming point we now find ourselves in this civilization, we can take comfort in the fact that for $33.00 a bottle wholesale, we can be transformed to the innocence of where it all began at the dawn of our civilization. For this is how it was meant to be.

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