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Texas Wine, Part 2

Part one here.

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After our first few stops, we then went to Lone Star Wine Cellars, which is a tasting room for several Texas winemakers. We liked the Lone Star's French Colombard, and I liked the Triple R Ranch's Blackbuck Antelope Merlot and their Shiraz, although Mrs. C. wasn't sold on either. The Triple R Ranch is an interesting story -- it's a ranch northwest of Dallas that combines corporate meeting space with a winery, and also with exotic game hunting. The wines are named after some of the animals they stock. I don't know about you, but I think you'd want to get the order of those three things correct. In my book, that would be: a) the corporate meeting, then b) the big game hunting where you can take out all the aggression the meeting inspires, and then c) the wine tasting. Putting it in a different order could lead to tragic consequences for man and beast alike.

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The last wine stop of the first day was the La Buena Vida/La Bodega tasting room. They have a location in Grapevine, as well as having one at the terminal in DFW airport. They offered a White Merlot which was interesting, as well as the Springtown Cab, both of which made the visit worthwhile.

We got caught in a huge Texas downpour while there, so we drank wine and ate wine crackers until it passed. We wondered if we were going to get to see the Texas Rangers game that night, but the sky suddenly cleared and we decided to drive to Arlington to see Texas play Houston.

From a fantasy baseball perspective, I didn't have a dog in the fight -- my only player on either roster is Rangers reliever Akinori Otsuka, who didn't play. But what an amazing ballpark. It has a massive footprint -- 270 acres, according to the site, and is built for convenience -- we sat in the Lexus Club seats behind (and well above) home plate, and had the experience of gatting our food delivered to us (they have waiters/waitresses who enter the order on a wireless device) as we watched the game.

I waxed philosophical while watching the game, thinking of Fenway. This park was nothing like Fenway, the lyric little bandbox of John Updike's overwrought prose. It was modern, huge, and well designed -- built for the fans, not for the players, who almost seemed an afterthought. And then it occurred to me what it was -- it was as if you had taken a seed called Fenway and grew a stadium out of it. It was the concept of "baseball park" wrought big, taken to its logical conclusion, the oak tree contained within the acorn of an idea of a sport called baseball. Now I love Fenway, but compared to this it is cramped, narrow, uncomfortable -- and a bitch to find parking at, too. Rangers Ballpark at Arlington is what you get if you have a huge canvas to work with -- miles of open spaces in which to dream.

America, in some sense, is an idea made in Boston. But people from Boston sometimes confuse the seed with the tree -- the cramped urban sprawl of the Northeast is not all of America, though people there sometimes think it is. The American experience is like the Rangers Ballpark -- if you want to see it done right, you need a lot of space to build it. It can then be a truly remarkable thing. I don't think there would have ever been a Texas if there had never been a revolt in Boston. But Texas is like the idea of America come to full fruition.

Well, the wine still needs work. But as for the rest of it, I'm sold.

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