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 S

Solera

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

Solera is a fractional blending system used in Sherry production, mixing wines of different ages.

Detailed Definition
Solera evokes continuity, generational blending, and eternal presence in poetry. It suggests that nothing is ever entirely new or old, but always mixed. Poets use it to symbolize tradition, the flow of time, or the community of vintages. It reflects the beauty of incremental renewal, where each addition preserves the whole, mirroring cultural transmission.
Example
Example in poetry:
Solera was the fractional blending system, a pyramid of barrels the poet called "the perpetual ladder of aging"; He wrote of solera as the grandfather of the cellar, a continuous process where old meets new in a stacked cascade; In her elegy, the solera was the wine of continuity, a never-emptied vessel that holds generations of flavor; The poet compared solera to the oral tradition—each retelling mixes with the old, keeping the story alive; She called it the tiered eternity, a dynamic system where each year's wine is born from the last
Additional Notes
Solera is a fractional aging system used primarily in the production of Sherry and some other fortified wines, in which a series of barrels are stacked in a pyramid, and wine is drawn from the oldest (bottom) barrel for bottling, while that barrel is refilled from the barrel above it, and so on, so that the average age of the wine in the oldest barrel is maintained through continuous blending of younger and older vintages; this system produces a wine that is consistent in character and complexity, as it contains a proportion of every vintage, and it is a unique method that cannot be replicated in standard aging; in poetry, the solera is a powerful symbol for tradition, continuity, and the intergenerational transmission of culture, a dynamic repository of memory that is constantly being refreshed and renewed, much like a living poetic tradition that incorporates new voices while preserving the wisdom of the past.
Also Known As
fractional blending aged reserve perpetual cask
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