Between blossoming vine and bottled wine, how many decisions would you guess a winemaker is confronted with? Where would you set the over/under? Dan Berger, writing in The Press Democrat, recalls, “The late Prof. Maynard Amerine at the University of California at Davis once estimated that a winemaker must make roughly 200 decisions from the time the plant begins to produce blossoms until the wine is finally bottled.”

Berger mentions he floated the 200 number by a few winemakers and they would have increased it by 50%. And, in a moment of zen, one winemaker told him, “Doing nothing has to be a conscious choice, so in and of itself, that is a decision.”