“Damn, Sam–what happened to Napa?”

Water should not be a source of agita to me, but it is.  When I was a kid, getting a drink of water was a pain-free proposition: I got a glass out of the dish rack next to the sink, filled it up from the tap in the sink, rinsed it in the sink, then put it back in the rack by the sink.

For my children, life is not so basic.  Them getting a drink of water requires me to drive to Costco, buy a $6 case of Ice Mountain, lug it to my truck and drive home.  When they’re done, I have to toss the empty into my blue Yuppie guilt box, take it to the curb, wait for the Recycling pogues to arrive in their special diesel truck that uses more energy in an hour than all the plastic I recycle is worth in a year.

Agita and water mixed is aguata.

Bobby Sands would have loved Ray’s and Stark Bar

Water has become too complicated.  I remember another time, as a teenager, going into a restaurant and ordering ‘a glass of water’ and the waitress asking, ‘Do you want to see a menu?’ and me replying, ‘Why? Do you have different kinds of water?’

See, back then, that was epically funny shit.  Today, she’d have said ‘Yes’ and the place would have had twenty different kinds of designer water like upscale Ray’s and Stark Bar in L.A. with a 45-page menu dedicated entirely to bottled water.

Speaking of L.A., water is even more complicated there, because California is in the midst of the worst drought in a century, with half a million acres of farmland idle and the reservoirs dry.  In wine country, the pain is obvious and people are sitting around waiting for this winter’s El Niño like los niños wait for this winter’s Santa Claus.

In Michigan, we have no such concerns.  We’re waterlogged, over-indulged with Adam’s ale, surrounded by 84% of North America’s surface water, 21% of the world’s fresh water, 6 quadrillion gallons worth of cool, clean, pure dihydrogen oxide; only Santa Claus land contains more.  We are like Aquaman and Richie Rich combined into one cartoon superstar—Aquarich—and so spoiled and spoon-fed are we that we have been known to urinate in Lake Michigan.

We piss in our water supply, Californians:  How about them apples?

The real Natasha is in living color.

I bring this up because I saw a press release from Natasha Swords—who I assure you is precisely the stone-cold stunner that her name suggests she’d be—talking about a new technology called GOfermentor, set to ( quote) ‘revolutionize the winemaking process in the areas of oxygen control and water waste’.

The GOfermentor is the result of four years of development by one Dr. Vijay Singh, who owns multiple patents and has published hundreds of papers; the invention is intended to advance wine technology to a point where  no wash water is involved.

This is not the same Vijay Singh as the Masters Champion who, on April 7, 2009, skipped his golf ball over a water trap on the 16^th hole, onto the green and into the cup.

Watch:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLzX62nXPTo

Dr. Vijay Singh

Not to take anything away from Dr. Singh the poindexter biotech whiz-kid, but that golf water trick is far cooler than either the GOfermentor or the Wave Bioreactor, another Singh thing which (quote)  ‘revolutionized the production of biopharmaceuticals by using a disposable cultivation bag supported on a rocking platform’.

So, knowing nothing about the science of commercial wineology, I am, with the permission of the lovely Ms. Swords, printing a schematic of the GOfermentor in order to solicit input from my fellows in the winemaking trade:

I will require response before I start singing Singh’s song, so in the meantime, if any bored—but stunning—public relations professionals would care to go skinny-dipping in Lake Michigan, I’m all growed up now and way past, like, lake leaks; although if I do say so, I am myself considered something of a whiz-kid and a bonafide Number One, I promise you that a real man can hold his squeege.