A quiet notice V2Melody closes at midnight on , Spanish time.

Closes

A note from Richard

V2Melody will close at midnight on 20 January 2028

This site has been a retirement project in musical poetry: poems chosen with care and set to music, offered freely for as long as it felt right to keep the garden open.

The work no longer holds the place it once did in my life. I have gone as far with it as I wish to go. Like a sand mandala, it was made to be completed and then released. I am not attached to its permanence, and I do not believe any of it needs to last beyond the time it was given. The poems were already here before I arrived and began to experiment with them. They will still be here when these musical experiments, and indeed myself, have been swept away, like the sand of a mandala. Nothing has been lost.

I want a simpler end to my life, days of simple love and enjoyment with my wonderful wife of 20 years. The work of maintaining a server, the monitoring, and the residual obligations that come with keeping a site alive no longer fit that life.

From 4 November 2026 I will not be adding new poems or musical poems to the site.

The experimental music I am making now is on my Suno profile. Those pieces stay there, and are not added to this site.

Until midnight on 20 January 2028, Spanish time, everything remains available exactly as it is. That is when my VPS server contract comes to an end, and it will not be renewed. After that, the server will be switched off and the site will disappear.

The Mandala Is Finished explains this more fully.

Thank you to anyone who found a poem, a track, or a quiet moment here.

The pleasure was in the making.

Richard

Home › Glossary › Letter A

Angel's Share

Viniculture
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

Angel's Share is the portion of wine or spirits lost to evaporation during aging in wooden barrels.

Detailed Definition
The Angel's Share is a poignant poetic image representing sacrifice, loss, and the invisible passage of time. As wine disappears into the air, it suggests a spiritual offering or the ephemeral nature of material pleasures. Poets use this term to meditate on mortality, memory, and what remains after life’s essence has evaporated, leaving behind only concentrated flavor and lingering scent.
Example
Example in poetry:
The angel's share rose from the barrel as a ghostly tithe, a fragrance the poet called "the monastery's breath"; He wrote that the angel's share was the price of patience—two percent of the wine ascending as vapor-prayer; In her nocturne, the angel's share was the spirit of the cellar, a misty chorus singing alcohol to heaven; The poet imagined the angel's share as the unwritten lines of a poem, evaporating before they could be caught; Each barrel lost a little to the dark rafters, and he called that loss the angel's salary
Additional Notes
The Angel's Share refers to the portion of wine or distilled spirits that evaporates through the porous wood of aging barrels, typically averaging 2 to 5 percent per year, which over decades can amount to a substantial loss; this evaporation is responsible for the concentration of flavors, the gradual increase in alcohol, and the absorption of oxygen, all contributing to the wine's maturation process, and in the context of spirits like whiskey, the Angel's Share is often accounted for in pricing and aging calculations; for poets, this term is a gift—it evokes the idea of sacrifice, blessing, and the invisible passage of time, where the liquid inside the cask gives up a part of itself to the air, making the remaining wine more profound, much as a poem sheds its draft lines to become its final, truer self.
Also Known As
evaporation loss celestial portion barrel whisper
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