Feature Article : Y2K: Millenium Mischief

Newsletter Archives > Wine Marketing/Lifestyle

Y2K: Millenium Mischief, or,
a winking, temporary goodbye to life before high-tech

Back to the dark ages? Wasn't Y2K the little Star Wars robot? Weren't we supposed to be smart? Isn't it appealing to embrace for a week or so no cell phones/no ATMs/no airline flights/interrupted car travel, shopping, TV and internet (the sidebar in the newsletter not withstanding)? The thought of being able to beat just one chip and to return to the beginning of the century just as we're leaving this one is perversely perfect. What better way to remember how far we've come, positively and negatively, than to be returned to yesterday with fewer conveniences, slower pace and more generalized rather than specialized skills? There are anti-technology types smirking (gladly not going as extreme as Kascinsky) at the irony. The Walden, old-growth timber, Greenpeace, 1000 Friends of Oregon, Sierra Club conservationists likely consider any interruption a breath of fresh air before we continue to race headlong into modernizing the world.

Our desire for a respite doesn't seem just institutional in nature, if you consider the simplification movement, the rush to gardening by concrete and business suit types, or the families that have killed TVs in recent years. I am not unsympathetic myself. We scientists are not necessarily technology-at-all-costs types. To know, the Latin root scio from which science comes, might lead us to think that if we know enough, we might just know not to continue down some paths or which paths we need to take to undo previous damage or accomplish real good (e.g., global warming, unbridled development, nuclear power, genetic manipulation, safe energy).

A system that's Y2K compliant: budbreak in mid-April, leaves unfurling Uh oh, this has become an editorial. Believe it or not, it started out conceptually as a humor piece. Y2K is a reality, but utterly laughable. People are in a fallout shelter frenzy or else there has been a widespread conversion a Salt Lake City faith. No, not bribing Olympic figures. Even we have had to assess how vulnerable we are, at the request of our bank, and have found the result humorous.

I realize NYSE traders and air traffic controllers don't share my chuckle, but you're reading someone who doesn't have to drive to work, uses gravity and pressure to transfer wine, doesn't filter pinot noir, still accepts cash and grows our primary raw material ourselves. Of course we would stumble if the power grid collapses - we'd have to open our doors or dust-off ornamental oil cellar lamps to see in the cellar. If gasoline supplies dwindled we'd have to get out backpack sprayers and hoes to work the vineyard, but it would get done, like our pruning and training. We'd have to control temperatures in fermentation by hand, not computer, and punchdown exclusively by hand or foot, but we do much of that already, so ain't no big thing. If this is the worst case, I'd submit it and it would get a 92 in Parker.

We'll not only survive, but thrive. Call it prescience. Call it science. Knowing. What's important.