Terroir in Napa Valley Wine: Fantasy vs Reality

By nature, my mind has always rebelled against being force-fed facts like a goose whose ultimate destiny is foie gras.  But comes a time.....Comes a time when you need to prove you know the difference between your Charmat, Crémant and Charente...your Brouilly, Rully and brouillis...your Guyot, Grolleau and Grillo.  And evidently, for me, the time was now.

So.  30 hours of class, 105 hours of studying and 325 flash cards later, I've taken my first certification exam.  Those numbers strike me as being humorous, heroic and outrageous all at the same time -- which pretty much sums up my life since I moved to Napa Valley five months ago, so why should a certification exam be any exception?

I'll find out the results in a couple of months.  People ask, "Why will it take a couple of months?"  I personally no longer ask questions like that.  Because I'm getting certified.  And I'm no longer playing by the rules of my own game.  Not by any stretch of the imagination.  I don't even begin to ask why I need to know the answer to questions like, "What is the Bulgarian equivalent of the French quality classification "Appellation Contrôlée?"  The reason I need to know the answer to questions like that is clear.  It's because.  Just because.