Wine: It’s ALL about the stories!
Welcome to the very first post for the new D’Aquila-Phillips Wine Cellar, more commonly known as DP Wine Cellar, which you can find and bookmark at http://www.dpwinecellar.com website! While we have been online on Facebook and Instagram for a couple years now, we are now adding to our online presence in the form of this website.
We will be bringing you a broad array of all things wine with an emphasis on our focus areas. This means a lot of wine stories, vintners, and of course wines, from our primary focus area of Napa Valley, California. These will be accompanied by a smaller, but no less interesting, set of additional wines stories, vintners, and wines from Italy, France, and Chile. Certainly at times our stories will take us farther afield than these aforementioned locations, but most likely not all that often. We simply cannot do it all, nor can we afford to buy all the wines we’d like! Then again, who can? 🙂
You might ask “why those areas of focus?” The reason is twofold. First, as we said, we have limited resources for adding wines to our Cellars and second we only tell stories, bring you vintner interviews, and review wines we have in our own Cellars.
Over the years of collecting wines for our Cellars I discovered one basic truth when it came to our cellared wines and our family. It wasn’t the soil, the points, the pomposity of the reviews, or the tasting notes, which drove us to a wine. It was the people behind the wine! It was, and continues to be, the people and their stories. The soil, light, etc., terroir as they say, might be wonderful and we certainly hear an awful lot about how this is the thing we should be cognizant of when we pick and taste a wine, but we quickly discovered we had never picked a wine based on some description of the soil the grapes grew in. After all if the grapes just hang on the vines they will never turn into wine, but just become raisins! Rather, we were drawn to and most often chose a wine based on the people of the wine. Those artists who turned those terroir-infused grapes into fine wine! We became interested in the farmer, the vineyard crews, the manager, the winemaker, and the owners, the individuals behind the team, who manage the whole enterprise to their mission and vision of what they wish to accomplish with their wine or wines. In short we believe people make wine and therefore before we invest in a wine we want to know those people who made it possible! And it is the people who turn the juice of a grape into something magical for us to enjoy!
You can add to this the fact we are unpretentious and believe drinking a wine is a highly individualize experience (as explained in Neuroenology: How the Brain Creates the Taste of Wine researched and penned by Gordon M. Shepherd). We also adhere to the view, as so eloquently stated by vintner Ralph Hertelendy, of Hertelendy Vineyards, “Wine is essentially liquid art.”
Finally as a writer myself you will find our favorite descriptive form here will be through stories. After all, it is the stories of our lives, which bring light and substance to everything we experience. Most of us learn better through stories, retain more, and best of all find them entertaining. We prize being entertaining, by the way!
So we welcome each of you to the DP Wine Cellar! Pick a comfortable chair, uncork one of your favorites, sit back, relax, and enjoy our coming journey through the stories of wine!
Cheers!