G. D. Vajra Vineyard, Piedmont, Italy

Sometimes it is better to have dumb luck than to be good. We had been studying Italian for about three months prior to our recent trip, and while the studying was rough going, we happily discovered when we got to Italy that we could communicate far better than we anticipated. But it turns out not quite as well as we thought. Our sommelier in Alba recommended we taste wine here, and we sent them an email and they invited us. We showed up at the day we thought we were to arrive, and were surprised by all the fan fare. So many other people were coming at the same time on the same day! We checked in at the desk and while the woman struggled with our names, she quickly waved us toward the glasses and we were in! Well, it turns out we crashed an industry event--at some point it might have dawned on us that we were the only non-Italians in the room, but it didn't happen until we had tried quite a few wines, palette cleansed with bread and Dolce Gorgonzola from an enormous wheel and taken in the spectacular views that we did not belong there. How did we tumble to this? Because it was very clear that they were not set up to sell us wine that day. But they did, and they did it all graciously. We sent an apology email confessing our mistake and they couldn't have been lovelier about it. This is a wonderful wine made by customer friendly people.

The Book of Records by Madeliene Thien

I picked this up because it was on Obama's Summer 2025 reading list and of the ten books, I had read three of them (admittedly, one of them I got out of the library by mistake and then read because I had taken it on a weekend vacation with me and felt committed rather than interested--but I read it none-the-less), I had two of them out of the library already and so while I had heard of none of the remaining five, the goal of reading them all seemed within my grasp so I put them all on my hold list. That is how I ended up with a slightly science fiction-y book that at the end of the day I am not sure waht happened. It takes place in the The Sea, which is the name given to a gargantuan migrant compound on the shoreline a decade or two in the future, and yet seemingly spanning into the past as well. Lina and her ailing father, Wui Shin, occupy an apartment where they can watch the refugee boats pull in and depart. The pair have fled the flooded Pearl River Delta in China, leaving behind Lina’s mother, brother and aunt but carrying three volumes from an epic biographical series entitled The Great Lives of Voyagers. These cover the respective histories of the German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt, the Chinese poet Du Fu and the Portuguese-Jewish scholar Baruch Spinoza. They provide both a link to the past and a sextant to navigate by. The world exists in endless flux, Lina is told, and yet here in the Sea nothing ever goes missing. Its chambers fill and empty like locks on a canal. Different portions of the compound appear to correspond with different decades. As near as I can tell it is a novel of ideas--those from the past and how to apply them to the future--but like I said, I am not sure I followed this and so may be completely wrong about that!