Hey Man, Got Totally Bombed on Wine Today...

Purchased 3 of these today:

Carefully packed along with a Dago Red and two Tuscan style blends into a cardboard box, with a hand-written receipt proudly given by wine maker John Balagna. Good background reading in a National Geographic article from 2001, which means John is now well over 85 years old.

John Balagna helped build the first atomic bomb. He was part of the Manhattan Project. Now long retired from the Los Alamos lab, he spends his days making drinkable if simple table wines, heavily influenced by his Italian heritage. Grapes are grown a few hundred miles away, but he oversees the wine-making process, unafraid to throw a little dark humour into his labels and brands.

A gracious host, he poured samples of whatever was in stock. Was happy for the company, since peak tourist season still a few weeks away. Upon hearing that we were Canadian, related his stories of Chalk River in the 1960s. Didn't specifically ask what he was doing, but one can surmise.

The tasting room, adjacent to his home and workshop overlooks the most stunning view of raw natural beauty seen by these eyes in a very long time. Back deck overlooking a steep canyon carved out by the relentless Rio Grande.

Sheena wondered if perhaps his retirement obsession with wine and homage to his Italian roots was a counterweight to the dark secrets he held during his research career. Perhaps a return to nature and her bounty was an unspoken way to return to simplicity, goodness, fruits of the earth.

As we tasted, joked, conversed, I watched him constantly being distracted by a bubbling beaker in the corner. Always nosy about wine, Sheena asked what it was. It was a sample of the most recent Zinfandel, he explained. The brix level was too high for his liking, stuck at 29. He had the beaker full of probes and monitors, and was tweaking the sample with little spritzes of tartaric acid to bring down the PH levels to his liking. He would not rest until he had achieved a perfect .2 residual sugar.

It then dawned on Sheena, like the bright sun of a nuclear blast, that this man had tinkered with nature his entire life. Retirement had not changed that view. And letting the Zin rest where it was intended was not in the cards.