It All Comes Down To Joy

Reflections on the joy I derive from both wine and Baseball

Joy. Simple joy. That’s what it comes down to.

I’m excited because the 2025 Major League Baseball season has begun. Yesterday was Opening Day. I was struggling to come up with a nice comparison between my feelings toward the game of baseball and toward wine. I was searching for something clever.

The first thing that came to mind was “complexity”.

The other day, I wrote here about wine being complex and that this won’t change and that this complexity is actually an asset that should not be discarded by the industry in the name of making wine “accessible”. I thought I could compare the complexity of wine to the complexity of baseball with its arcane language, long history, and such

Then I thought about patience. Both the game of baseball and the production of wine require patience from those who love these things. One hundred sixty-two games is a long season. And the normal three years it takes to get a vintage in the bottle and ready to go to market is even longer. I waited patiently for just over 45 years for my San Francisco Giants to win a World Series.

Then I thought I could go with the numbers. Each vintage is different for each of the hundreds of growing regions around the world. That's a lot of numbers. And of course, without numbers, the history of baseball is so much less interesting.

Or, I could have gone with Spring. Both baseball and the winegrowing season begin in the spring. And wouldn’t you know it, they both end in the fall. That would have been a good angle on which to proceed with a newsletter about the beginning of the baseball season.