Archive for the 'Wine News' Category

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We are experimenting with a new concept for netting. Instead of using large nets which cover several rows at a time, are difficult to install and remove, we are using netting which covers only the fruit area and is applied to both sides of the vine. It installs very quickly using a three man crew and an ATV.

Removing should be just as easy since the net doesn’t cover the vine it won’t get entangled with growing canes. There is one dark cloud, however, since it fits tightly against the vine some of the fruit is pressed against the mesh. The question then is, will the birds realize this and pick off the available fruit or, is the netting sufficient deterence, and fly off elsewhere.

SFMOMA PROBES THE CONTEMPORARY CULTURE OF WINE AND PRESENTS HOW WINE BECAME MODERN

From November 20, 2010, to April 17, 2011, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) will present How Wine Became Modern: Design + Wine 1976 to Now. This exhibition explores transformations in the visual and material culture of wine over the past three decades, offering a fresh way of understanding the contemporary culture of wine and the role that design has played in its transformation. Organized by Henry Urbach, SFMOMA’s Helen Hilton Raiser Curator of Architecture and Design, How Wine Became Modern marks the first exhibition to consider modern, global wine culture as an integrated yet expansive and richly textured set of cultural phenomena.

The story begins in 1976, the year of the now-famous Judgment of Paris. There, in a blind taste test, nine French wine experts pronounced a number of northern California wines superior to esteemed French vintages. However apt the decision, later criticized and repeatedly restaged, the event released shock waves across the globe as it gave the nascent California wine industry, as well as winemakers in many other parts of the world, new confidence, credibility, and visibility. This, in turn, had multiple effects including the expansion of wine markets, growing popular awareness of wine, the birth of wine criticism, vineyard tourism, and a host of other manifestations. From this moment forward, the culture of wine began to accommodate and valorize new priorities such as innovation, diversification, globalization, marketing, and accessibility.

“In many ways,” Urbach claims, “wine has become ‘modern’ as it re-imagined its own representation and joined itself to other forms of culture,” including architecture, graphic and industrial design, visual arts, performing arts, and film. And it is here, he adds, “at this particular intersection between nature and contemporary culture, that the social meanings of wine reveal key issues of our moment, including the status of place and authenticity in a world increasingly structured by dematerialized, virtual experience.”

The exhibition, designed by the renowned architecture studio Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R), combines original artifacts such as architectural models and photographs with works of art, some newly commissioned, as well as multimedia presentations and interpretive text. Viewers will encounter artworks, objects, and information within immersive environments that engage multiple senses including smell.

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