Not Now.

or, how you know you're getting old...

There are two parcels directly in front of the winery that I’ve been wanting to avoid.

I know what they need. Or at least I know what I see when I’m there, which is close enough to the same thing. The soils. The aspect. They could go on making red, when what they really ought to be making is white, and no one would notice. That’s what makes this annoying.

If they were obvious failures, the decision would be easy.

But they’re not failures.

So I walk them. I do the math. I think about what grafting costs, then I consider the years after that, the years where all you have is the decision and no proof yet that it was the right one. There are so many excuses not to invest, from shipping costs to the weak dollar. Oh and tariffs, if I want a really respectable excuse. It becomes easy to call waiting discipline.

The vineyard gives you plenty of practice in that kind of thinking. There is always a reason to wait. A reason to leave things as they are another year. A reason not to push too hard.

And that thinking has infiltrated the wine industry at exactly the moment it should be pressing harder, not flinching.

And it’s not collapse, per se, but more like recoil. Everyone speaking in hushed tones about contraction and softness and uncertainty, as if the only intelligent thing left to do is protect what you have and hope the weather changes.

I went to Chicago last week for Third Coast Soif.

I hadn’t poured wine in the US in a while and I showed up infected by that same mood. You absorb it after a while. Even if you don’t believe it entirely, you start expecting half-empty rooms. Polite interest. Fatigue.

Instead, the rooms were packed.

Not just busy. Packed. People shoulder to shoulder at the satellite events, at the after parties, the Sunday tasting, which felt like a detail that should have made it slower and didn’t. Young people too, not just drinking, but actually interested. Tasting with the kind of attention that still has some hunger in it.

What I saw in Chicago felt more alive than what’s being written. More open. Less exhausted. It sent me home thinking about belief.

Because the appetite is still there, at least more of it than we keep being told. What seems missing to me is belief from the people who used to act like the future belonged to them. Some of the younger winegrowers and distributors I met felt wide open right now, like they understood that this is still a moment to build. Meanwhile a lot of the old vanguard sounds like it is waiting for permission. Waiting for clearer signals. Waiting for the old map to start working again.

I understand the instinct. Institutions do that. People with something to protect usually do.

But grape growing has never really allowed for that kind of safety. You pick your parcel and plant what you think might work and then wait five years. And then, every year you place your bet. On the season. On the fruit. On whether the storm misses you or doesn’t. You lose sleep. Sometimes you lose crop. Then you go back out and do it again.

Which is why I have so little patience, in the end, for the voice that keeps offering me better reasons to wait on these two parcels.

It’s not dramatic, that voice. That’s the problem. It sounds adult and experienced, like someone who understands markets, timing and exposure.

It says:
“not now”
“you can always do it next year”
“don’t make yourself more vulnerable than you already are.”

That voice can be right, but so often it is just fear hiding behind a spreadsheet. And I know the difference, or at least I know enough not to pretend I don’t.

So the grafts go in.