Some of my viticulturalist friends are getting savvier all the time about when to harvest their grapes (they tell me one should harvest grapes for red wine at least two weeks after the grapes themselves are ripe, so that the seeds inside them have time to ripen—who would have thunk it?) and are becoming more and more selective about which grapes make it into the barrel, winnowing, not just the rafle (peduncles, stems, and pedicels—I’ll teach you French yet!), but the less ripe and frankly unripe grapes by hand. And although some of them still haven’t figured out what vinification entails, many of them have gotten the two necessary fermentations down pat (don’t think of old jokes about Nixon here).