I will be heading back to pastoral ministry at the start of the Advent season of the church year. Advent is made up of the four Sundays which precede Christmas. It is a time of waiting. It comes in the middle of winter when days are short and nature has taken a break. We imitate nature and try to catch our breath and experience renewal.Right now we're waiting for crush. I was headed up to Coeur de Terre this morning to help do some bottling, but Scott called to say that the glass company had sent the wrong bottles. (And this is not a few bottles, this is a couple thousand.) And so, we wait.
I'm not sure if you're better at waiting than I am. I'm getting better at it, but that is only in comparison to how I use to be. Patience and waiting are not in my gift set. I get anxious for results and want to see things happen right away. Working with nature is a good cure for that. When will the grapes get ripe this year? When they are good and ready, and not a day sooner.
I did head up to the vineyard, just to do some walking around. There is an eerie feeling to the place. Birds are everywhere. You don't so much see them flying around, as hear them gathering in the trees all around the vineyard. After seeing Hitchcock's "The Birds" as a kid, the sound of hundreds of birds roosting in trees gives me the creeps. It gives vineyard owners the blues. The birds don't seem to be eating a lot of grapes. They swoop through the vineyard and make noise, but as I walk through the rows I don't see a lot of evidence of eaten grapes.
You can see in the picture above where Pinot Noir gets it's name. Pinot means pine cone and you can see in the tightly packed where the name came from. That tight cluster is a part of what makes Pinot so hard to grow. There is no space for air to circulate around each grape, and that can give mold and mildew a place to grow. Scott and Lisa are currently planning to spray of an organic compound that will help combat those problems. The clusters all look healthy to me. Now if we could just get a couple of days of partly sunny weather.
The light and color saturation in the vineyard are spectacular in this weather. A cloudy mist drifts past the wooded hillsides on the far side of the valley. The grapes are glistening and shining. All of the leaves have been removed from both sides of the grapes and they now stand out at the bottom of each canopy. I have a feeling that crush is going to be a lot like getting a drink of water from a fire hose when it finally arrives. I'm trying to just sit back and relax while I still can, but it's hard. I'm working on just be-ing, but the society around me tells me I must be a human do-ing, constantly in motion and making strides towards something or other. Right now it's nice to be tied into the ebb and flow of nature, with some extra time to just be. It is a gift. I will try to enjoy it while I have it.