Amina and I spent last weekend in San Francisco; I was heading to Macworld '08, four solid days of breakfast meetings, midmorning meetings, late morning meetings, lunch meetings, afternoon meetings, dinner parties, answering email and voicemail, passing out ... then starting all over again.
We took Saturday for Napa. We spent part of our honeymoon there, and we always ask ourselves "Why aren't we living here?" whenever we visit. This time, though, the usual wanderlust and charm were absent -- at least until I got home and discovered those sub-arctic temps everyone's heard about.
The first highlight of Napa was Palmaz Vineyards, a computer nerd's idea of the perfect winery. Dr. Julio Palmaz invented the heart stent. No, not a heart stent, but the mother-frigging first-ever heart stent. As you can imagine, that made him a slightly well-to-do man. He invested part of his vast fortune into a winery on the east side of Napa, just off the Sliverado Trail.
But not just any winery -- Palmaz dug* a cave the equivalent of an 18-storey building, and designed the vineyard around two extremely opposite technologies: gravity and computer software. All wine flows from level to level inside the cave via gravity. But the tanks the wine flows into is completely controled by complicated software that measures temperature, density, alcohol content and the number of rodents that fell in when the staff was off "sampling" products.**
Above is a photo of some of the fermentation tanks; there are two levels of tanks, both of which line the outside of the circular cave. The computer system can rotate the tracks on which the tanks sit -- think of a giant wristwatch, with each tank representing a number of the face of the clock. It's just amazing to see, and probably was the coolest vineyard I've ever seen.
* I doubt he actually dug the thing himself, but it's cool to imagine that one man could.
** That's what I'd do if I worked there.
