The Vineyard and the Wine

There is absolutely no way to keep up with all the vineyards and wineries in this county. It seems as if every time we make our Monday trek to Kathy's a new vineyard is being put in, which is why I especially like to see these old head pruned vines.  I continue to be curious about the pricing of wine, how wineries arrive at the prices they charge for a bottle of wine and if a $100 bottle of wine can really taste that much better than a $15 bottle. Judging by what we see at the Farmers' Market there are small vegetable farms around here somewhere, I just don't know where. And it is so much work to keep a well maintained vineyard: prune the vines, weed the rows, plant cover crops, nurture the grapes, harvest the grapes, crush them,  age them,  bottle them, and deal with weather, climate change and its effects. Looked at it that way I'm surprised that anyone can make a bottle of wine for less than $100!

A lot of the labor in the vineyards...irrigating, pruning, picking, weeding, etc. is done by Hispanic workers who are incredibly skilled. If DT were to have his way and send all these workers back to Mexico, I think the wine industry would not be anywhere as robust as it appears to be. Undoubtedly this applies to many other crops in other parts of the country as well. This country has no real policy on immigration, and what there is is so understaffed that people are waiting 15-20 years (years!) for documentation and citizenship. There are young people here, who were born to undocumented parents, who have been living in limbo all their lives and we can't even seem to establish a path to citizenship for them. 

I don't understand why this is not a more important issue here. I really believe that without its Hispanic workers this part of the country would be brought to its knees....

And we can still buy a drinkable $15 bottle of wine at the grocery store...most workers are grateful to have a job and are not motivated to organize, but I think that is slowly starting to change in the wine industry at least....