How geography and wine parallel

that experience, when your feet are on the ground and you are taking in the views and smells of a place and the particular feel of the sun or air there, it can be hard to imagine its position in the larger world of wine.

One dark night, away from the city, many years ago, I looked through a powerful telescope and saw Saturn as I had never seen it before or since. It was pure white, a solid circle and ring so crisply defined it looked fake, as if someone had inserted an illustrated slide into the scope. This is what distance can do for you. It can give you perspective and help you see something in a new, more manageable way.

That ring, which is actually several rings, is not much more than a bunch of floating ice and rocks, and that fake-looking image, while technically Saturn, is only what Saturn looks like from roughly a billion miles away through a very powerful optical device. If you were actually “inside” any of those rings, it would be impossible to discern any larger shape. Obviously. Pulling away and surveying everything at once can help us think in new ways. This is why a detective plasters her office wall with a map, timeline of events and headshots, so that she can draw lines between them and see the bigger picture more clearly. Deputy Solverson of “Fargo” knows all about this.

In our case, the bands can also remind us how special wine really is and what a beautiful miracle it is that such a thing comes to life only once a year and in so (relatively) few spots on Earth. Suddenly, the slope beyond the ridge does not seem so far away.

Incidentally, there is another band on Earth. Stretching from the Tropic of Cancer down to the Tropic of Capricorn, both at 23.5 degrees latitude, this middle band is thicker than the wine bands. If the three of them were colored in, they’d look like the stripes on vintage tube socks. The middle band is where another famous beverage grows. It is studied and debated far less than wine, but its devotees are no less fervent. It goes by many different names around the world, but in English we call it coffee.

The sun sets over Chateau Chantal winery on Old Mission Peninsula in Traverse City, Mich. Much of the winegrowing region of the state straddles the 45th parallel, halfway between the North Pole and the equator.