How's that for three languages used in the title.
This notion, le terroir, that the totality of the environment is concentrated into each glass of wine of the region it comes from.
It's the dirt and what made that dirt.
It's the fog and the rain and the temperature.
The Sun and The Moon.
In the flora.
This is the first time I can actually see and feel the land that the wood came from. I can feel Paso in it. I can see Paso in the air when I work the wood. Haven't seen dust like that come off of any other wood.
It’s pure Paso.
Not that I really have that much heft in Paso Robles but I've been photographing vineyards down there since 2006. I wasn't born there, I don't live there. But I think when you have spent 15 years photographing a region it starts to implant in your DNA. It's a lot time standing in pre dawn, in the morning, afternoon. It's a lot of sunrises and sunsets. It's a lot of feeling the heat and the cool and the dust in the air. I sometimes sleep out in the vineyards during shoots just to get as close as I can to their essence.
So when I first opened up the wood it was like seeing the whole terroir of Paso right there. It's visceral.
At this point I'm waiting to hear back on the sketches before doing any more.
Some process photos here.
12'x24"x 3" I screwed together as a base to run the slabs through the planer
The stack of base and slab had some weight for sure. One of the nice things about this planer is it has (as an option) the ability to reverse the direction of the drive. Normally on a planer you have to take the piece out the back and transport to the front to run it through again. Here, I would turn off the blade and reverse it back through the machine without needing to muscle anything. On this machine, the cutting and drive are two separate mechanisms. And the drive is infinitely adjustable in speed. On a particularly knotty area I can slow down the drive right there to increase the cuts per inch on the knot.
I didn't like the factory's in and out arrangement tables on the planer so I got rid of them and put on these rollers. My method of keeping them level with the planer bed.
A laser pointer on the bed.
Pointing at a level mark on a stick at the end of the rollers. I'm showing you the dot in the middle but I use it by pointing at each corner of the roller.
Alright folks. That's it for the moment.
Oh. Talk about how history and terroir have coexisted making wines in one region for 6000 years. I'm almost though with a fascinating book (at least to me it is) of wines from Mount Etna in Sicily. You can really get a sense of how everything, the active volcanoes, it's soil, the altitude, the distance from the sea all come together in a unique wine.
The New Wines of Mount Etna by Benjamin North Spencer (a transported Californian by the way)
No comments:
Post a Comment