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15 Though all wine caves share a common function and are similar in many ways, each is unique. The wine caves portrayed in this book are bored tunnels that range from purely utilitarian to amazingly elaborate. Photographing in a finished cave can be sheer visual pleasure with cool air scented by wine and oak and sometimes tinged with curing cement. Stillness, followed by echoes of the shutter, captures the scene. During construction, photographing is much more demanding yet presents unique opportunity. It's boots-and-hardhat work—wetness, dust, noise, moving equipment and spraying shotcrete are constant hazards. There have been a few special moments when I have been privileged to witness rare and beautiful geological formations—works of art in themselves—slices of the earth visible only until shotcrete is applied and the drilling continues. Over the course of many visits an understanding of the creation process becomes clear. Successive trips to photograph Quintessa's cave during the mining phase, for example, clarified my understanding that a tunnel is created from the top down. Photographing a roadheader at work required walking in a level tunnel for about 100 feet to a place where the tunnel's exposed earth floor inclined steeply. There the roadheader could be seen further up, clawing away. I hiked up and set my tripod with one leg fully extended and the other two short as I was squished under curving arches of reinforcing steel on a steep incline of loose earth in close proximity to a 30-ton, 25-foot machine grinding away the exposed rock. About a month later I went back to continue my documentary and first looked around to find the spot where I had been scrunched up with a tripod and camera alongside that enormous machine. I finally located the place, about 16 feet in the air, under the domed ceiling of a cavernous room. In this journey of photographing wine caves I gained more than photographic insight. I discovered a core of pioneers—visionaries, really—that led this renaissance, along with a huge supporting cast of workers, professionals and artisans. I met people whose passionate stewardship of the earth not only led them into it but shines in their stellar agricultural practices upon it. I even discovered cave doors made from staves of barrels once full of my family's wine. A clear chronology of this wine-cave phenomenon could not be found in any one place. A book to hold this story was needed. Of course with new caves continually being created the story will still unfold. These words and images provide a portal for learning about what has transpired from the first modern wine caves to those created by midwinter 2009. Daniel D'Agostini

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