The Waiting Game

Been sitting out on the patio this afternoon, one of the hottest weeks of the summer so far, but it got a little hazy this afternoon which helped keep the high temperature here at Bluebird Hill from topping 92 F today. We hit 100.0F at one point over the weekend, that was our local high temperature during this last heat wave… Also, sitting on the east side of the house in the afternoon helps, it keeps you in the shade and if there’s any breeze out, that’s frosting on the cake.

And today, I’ve been listening to the ‘Big 80’s’ on Pandora, and has been trying to come up with a good song to tie to the title of this blog post, ‘The Waiting Game’… And I’ve come close, there’s a Todd Rundgren song from 1989, but it seems Todd is writing about a lover who he’s planning to wait out to return to him:

“I'll play your waiting game - I'm gonna win the win the waiting game - I'll play your waiting game - I'm gonna win this game, my friend… “

Neil confesses, he barely remembers this song, if at all… much preferring ‘Hello, It’s Me’; ‘Can We Still Be Friends’; and that just for fun head banger: “Bang The Drum All Day” (“I don’t want to work, just want to bang on the drum all day!!”).

And never mind Todd, there’s now also “Banks”, a current generation artist who wrote and sang another version of ‘The Waiting Game’, in 2013 (and don’t expect Neil to know much about her, pretty much his knowledge of the music world hit a dead end when U2, REO Speedwagon, Dire Straits, and The Police were spitting out winners…) Honestly, neither Todd Rundgren nor Banks really seem to understand, or sing about what we are experiencing here at the Bluebird Hill Farm Vineyard at the end of July here in 2022: waiting for grapes, waiting for them to swell, to change color from green to red, and then to magically fill with sugar and tannic acid, allowing us to make our estate wines, Chardonnay, Pinot Gris, Rosé, and Pinot noir.