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 C

Chaptalization

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

Chaptalization is the addition of sugar to grape must before fermentation to increase alcohol content.

Detailed Definition
Chaptalization appears in poetry as artificial enhancement or forced improvement. It raises questions about authenticity, intervention, and the manipulation of nature. Poets use it to critique superficial fixes, the pressure to conform to standards, or the loss of natural integrity in pursuit of strength, symbolizing the tension between raw truth and polished presentation.
Example
Example in poetry:
Chaptalization was the winemaker's sugar-tithe, a legal addition the poet called "a sweet emergency"; He wrote of chaptalization as the winter supplement—adding beet sugar to lift the underripe sun; In her critique, it was the poet's borrowed rhyme, a fix for a vintage that lacked natural heat; The poet compared chaptalization to adding a drop of honey to sour tea, a well-intentioned correction; She called it the admission of a cool year, a sugar bandage over nature's low alcohol
Additional Notes
Chaptalization is the practice of adding sugar to grape must before or during fermentation to boost the final alcohol level, named after the French chemist Jean-Antoine Chaptal who advocated for it in the early 19th century, and it is legal in many cool-climate wine regions where grapes struggle to reach full ripeness; this addition is strictly regulated, with maximum allowed amounts varying by region and wine classification, and it is not intended to make the wine sweet, as the added sugar is fully fermented into alcohol, so it does not increase residual sugar; in poetry, chaptalization serves as a metaphor for artificial enhancement, the addition of external energy to compensate for nature's shortcomings, and it raises ethical questions about authenticity and terroir, often contrasted with natural or unmanipulated winemaking, making it a potent subject for poems about human intervention versus natural honesty.
Also Known As
sugar addition must enrichment alcohol boost
Skip to main content