Sunday Musings

The world of the happy is a different one from that of the unhappy.

--Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, excerpt from proposition 6.43, by Ludwig Wittgenstein

I have stumbled across this idea myself a few times, describing it as the difference between standing in a swimming pool with your nose just above the water versus standing in a swimming pool with your nose just below the water. There is also an old quote by an English writer to the effect that if your income is three and sixpence and your expenses three and tuppence you are happy, but if your income is three and sixpence and your expenses four pounds, you are unhappy. The Wittgenstein quote is more about one's attitude toward the world. This also relates to questions of aesthetics. Beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder, but the causes must lie in the aesthetic object.

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I thought of a musical analogy to a Wittgenstein remark about samples. Back when we used a reference standard meter kept in Paris the nature of its role meant that we cannot say that it is one meter long because there is nothing we can compare it to: it is the standard. Similarly, you can't tune a tuning fork as it is the standard. I suppose if you had a number of tuning forks, you could determine if one of them, for instance, were defective. But in that case it would not be a "tuning fork" because it could no longer be the standard. Another peculiar thing I ran across in Wittgenstein is that if there were an island somewhere with a plant that was poisonous to humans and animals, and if there were no humans or animals on the island then the plant would not be poisonous. These odd things come up when you are examining the nature of language and how it reflects or pictures the world. When I have finished my study of Wittgenstein then I am going to take a close look at how music notation reflects or pictures music itself.

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A terrible thing has come to pass in British Columbia: B.C.'s 2024 vintage faces wipeout, as wine report predicts up to 99% loss due to cold

Across B.C., the 2024 vintage is facing a near-total wipeout, according to a report into the January cold snap commissioned by industry group Wine Growers British Columbia.

It says the province faces "catastrophic crop losses" of 97 to 99 per cent of typical grape production. 

Environment Canada data show Kelowna's daily low temperature breached -20 C from Jan. 12 to 14, hitting -26.9 C on Jan. 13.

Daily lows were around -20 C on Jan. 11 and Jan. 15, and did not return above -10 C until Jan. 20.

Wine growers say the loss in grape and wine production triggered by the deep freeze — described by the report as "an almost complete writeoff of the 2024 vintage" — is expected to result in revenue losses of up to $346 million for vineyards and wineries in B.C.

The industry is also anticipating an additional revenue loss for suppliers, logistic providers and distributors of up to $99 million.

British Columbia is my home province in Canada, though I haven't lived there for thirty-some years. When I was attending premieres there of my String Quartet No. 2 in May of last year, I took the opportunity to pick up some fine BC wines including an outstanding Bordeaux blend, a BC port and a couple of bottles of BC ice wine. Here is one I opened a little while ago:

Ice wine, for those who don't know it, is a very rare and special wine. It is made from ripe grapes that have experienced an early frost and are completely frozen. The Inniskillin label states that they harvest at precisely -10° Celsius. Crushing frozen grapes means that part of the water is retained as ice crystals so the juice is richer and sweeter making for a wonderful dessert wine. It tastes rather like honey, if honey were a wine. Ice wine was discovered in the 18th century by wine-makers in the Mosel valley in Germany. Only three countries produce it, to my knowledge: Germany, Austria and Canada and the latter is the largest producer. When I left for my flight back to Mexico I noticed stacks of BC ice wine in the duty-free shops. You really never see ice wine outside the producing countries as very little of it is exported.

So the whole BC wine industry has been wiped out, certainly for this year and perhaps for longer. How long will the vines take to recover? The wine industry has been developed over the last few decades and during this time the main region, the Okanagan, has not experienced catastrophic cold as it did this year. But, as we can see, it is still a very northern area for grape vines and the possibility was always there. Did investors and growers proceed with their plans partly based on the projections of higher temperatures due to anthropogenic climate change? And were the models projecting these changes flawed? These are probably good questions to ask.

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Here is a suitable envoi from an UB40 album I used to have: