A Thing of Beauty: Remembering Sam Neill

In 1993, a working actor planted five acres of pinot noir at the bottom of the world, in a region most people said was too cold to grow anything serious. His neighbors thought it was ahobby.Sam Neill died last month, and two completely different sets of obituaries ran for the same man — one for the movie star, one in the wine trade press. This week’s essay is about the secondone, and about the strange arithmetic of a grapevine: plant it today, get nothing for years, and the best fruit arrives long after you might. Which means nobody plants a vine for themselves. Then a story out of southern Ukraine — a winegrower tending vines with a rocket buried in a row of chardonnay — makesthe point unavoidable. Wheat feeds you this winter. A vine is a bet that there will be winters worth surviving for.New episodes Tuesday mornings.