On today, the 4^th of July 2007, I find myself wondering what it means to be American. Combing the web for some answers I didn’t find too much, everyone seemed to use the word ‘free.’ But a lot of people are free, or have freedom without being American. Being American is not encapsulated in being free because as a society the Dutch are actually far freer. What’s more, the Dutch are free from war; there have been no terrorist attacks against them, and thus they’re free from fear, which is perhaps the greatest freedom of all.
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‘This is some good Yellowtail’ he said, sloshing out a near half pint’s worth of juice into a dirty whisky tumbler. ‘You know, I’ve heard that every bottle of Yellowtail is a little different, and that the stuff we get up here is especially good because of the altitude.’ I stood, looking on in complete disbelief at the character before me. It was Christmas two years ago in Vail Colorado that I met Darren who had rather peculiarly given himself the nickname M.O.D which stood for ‘man on duty.’

“You know what Ruarri?”

“What M.O.D?”

“That’s why I like wine, because it’s different, you know? Like this Yellowtail stuff here. It’s made in Australia, but I’m drinking it in Colorado, and you know, because of the altitude and all, it’s completely different. I bet you those folks in Australia had no idea how good there juice would taste at this height, I aint even sure if they have mountains over there, being on the other side of the world and all. Wine at altitude dude! WOO HOO!”

This snippet of conversation is but one of many I’ve had in my life where people learn of my wine background and then go on to show that they have no what wine background at all. That’s not a bad thing by the way. In fact the thought that there are people out there who think that Yellowtail tastes different at different altitudes is so crazy that it may even be part of a bizarrely genius underground buzz-marketing campaign. Let me fast-forward a year though, where I had chosen to not spend Christmas in Vail, but had been invited to a small farm in the Netherlands to have Christmas with my wife and some of our friends on a farm.

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