During this past year, On the Wine Trail in Italy has been a pretty good trip. Many wonderful encounters with our Italian wine colleagues. A few ventures off the Italian trail into France, Napa, Sonoma, New York and all across Texas. I’ve met some relatives I didn’t know I had, made some new friends, kept up with some old ones, said farewell to some others. Life is taking us on this spaceship earth to new experiences everyday. Getting older, maybe a little wiser, sometimes a little more tired, but when a new day breaks through it’s a whole new ballgame.Just a short thanks to those of you reading who have been coming back to these pages, reading about whatever has been on my mind, every Sunday, Wednesday and Friday now for over a year and a half. I have a friend or two who tell me they don’t have time to read everything I write, it’s just too much. Believe me, I know what they mean. It’s like something has gotten ahold of me and is sifting itself through these transmitters, as if there is a race for time and it just has to happen. I don’t really know where it is taking me and not sure for how long, but as long as the energy is there, we’ll keep transmitting.
Next year there will be some changes. Sometime I’d like to clean up this site and make it purtier. Somewhere inside, I imagine, a book is making its way to a shore somewhere. There may only be one, but I imagine it’ll need to be dealt with. Lord knows, I’ve written enough in a year for a book, so the discipline has been forged. Now if I can just make sense of all these ideas, thoughts, emotions and hopes I've got inside well enough to express something that would justify tearing down trees in order to make the paper. We’ll see, we’ll see.
I ride around all day with my sidekick, the one that I’ve been riding with all my life and I'm a little surprised when I look in the mirror and see that aging fellow that looks like my father. Inside I’m still a 25 year old young'un with a lot of hopes and some fears, some innocence, and some fire. I’m not going to let them snuff the fire as long as I can help it. It seems sometimes, that all I’ve got. But I look around and I see my peers getting older and older and giving in or giving up and I just am not going to go quietly. So I better find something to say.All this to say to those of you who have read some of what I have written in the last year or so, thank you for coming by and staying a while, I really appreciate it. There are more of you reading and writing back with kind words of encouragement. I only have one thing to say: send money. Nah, just kidding.
So where will the Italian wine trail take us next year? Who in God’s name knows? As we say in Texas, I reckon we’ll just have to set back and see where it takes us. It’s a process, it’s a goal, it’s a circus. That’s what it really is, a circus. And we're all sitting in the seats, under the big tent, waiting for the elephants and the tigers and the clowns.
Ladies and Gentlemen, children of all ages, see you all next year.