Wine Sex, Beauty in the Bottle

The vineyards call to me this time of year and this afternoon I HAD to go check to see how they are doing. WOW! We've heard about slow food, man, the grapes are dawdling this year. I was up on Westside Rd. in Healdsburg tasting some merlot grapes - SOUR! This is a hotter area of the Russian River so I expected them to be 'cookin' - I'd guess they have another few weeks and they're earlier ripening reds than the rest.

This has been a most peculiar year weatherwise - is this evidence of global warming that we try so hard to ignore?

Yet it is so beautiful! I am ever grateful to be living up here to witness Nature's splendor.

Happy Harvest!

Celebrate this harvest by sending your friends an original wine postcard. The inner beauty and life of wine is captured through a microscope as are most of the wine portraits on this site. The set includes a cab (Ridge Monte Bello), chardonnay (Grgich), and merlot (Sterling).

PURCHASE a postcard series of 3 wine styles. Which expresses merlot best?

If you're really into the expression of taste, check out the 5 tastes postcards.

How do you remember a wine? How do you describe your tasting experience? This wine is a Chateau Lafite Rothschild.

I am intrigued with the words people use to convey their impressions of a wine, and their memory. One expert talks about what their nose knows while another speaks to mouth sensations. I have limited vocabulary to talk about wine other than textural. That's probably why I continue to take pictures through the microscope. The images serve as a symbolic vocabulary that may someday be useful to all of us to remember wine.

It always surprises me how wine expresses itself in pictures and taste. I enjoy it without words and still would like a larger lexicon, any suggestions how to create wine language?

Some wine 'impressionistic art' on my website SondraBarrett.com Drink in the beauty.

My latest 'wine gig' was to photograph two special chardonnays from Grgich Hills Cellars including their very first, the 1977 chardonnay. Naturally I taste everything.

Though the 1977 didn't have the vibrancy of younger wines, nor did it have any nose left, it still held its chardonnay structure intact. You knew you were sipping a chardonnay.

What a delightful surprise to see its exquisite inner views.

This was the oldest chardonnay I've ever tasted (or photographed). Would you expect California chardonnays to last 30 years, what about white Burgundies? What of the chardonnay character lasts?