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April 1, 2021 - Epoch Times
36:11
California Wine: The History, Culture, and Art of Wine Making | Jim & David Gianulias
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It's about 2% of the world enjoys that Mediterranean climate and Napa Valley happens to fall and that type of climate enables the cultivation of very fine and a wider array of grape varietals so wineries can enjoy that very many grapes they can grow there.
Cabernet and Chardonnay are by far the biggest crepes and really probably the most sold type of juice in, at least in California, if not in the world.
And you guys have a winemaker that's unique, right?
It's her personality in the bottle.
What makes a person like that so successful?
You do have to be very, very patient in making wine.
If you just absolutely love what you do, then the time frame is not going to stop at eight hours or whatever.
You're going to do whatever it takes to achieve, which hopefully will be the best wine I've ever made.
California is widely known for its wine country destination with over 4,000 wineries.
My guests today are Jim and David Giannullius.
They are the founders of LeBendi Winery in Napa Valley.
Today they discuss the history and culture of wine in California.
Welcome to California Insider.
Jim, David, welcome.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Appreciate it.
We want to talk to you about wine industry in California.
And California is number one in the nation when it comes to production of wine.
Tell us more about it.
What is unique about California that's allowing winemakers to come here and produce their wine?
Well, it's one of the most prominent wine industry, wine growing regions in the world, but also one of the smallest.
It's about one-sixth of the size of a planted area of Bordeaux, for instance, in France.
There's a lot of natural boundaries with hills and mountainside, of course, the ocean.
Uh, so it's very limited.
It's home to, uh, the Mediterranean climate.
It's about 2% of the world enjoys that Mediterranean climate and Napa Valley happens to fall in that type of climate where there's a series of microclimates throughout the valley.
Uh, and then very unique soils that, Between the microclimates and the soil enables the cultivation of very fine and a wider array of grape varietals.
So wineries can enjoy that, you know, the very many grapes they can grow there.
And is it a type of grape or is it just all grape?
Well, the grapes, I think what Napa's known for is Cabernet, Chardonnay, Merlot, and a little bit of Petit Merdeau and Syrah.
But those are the basic grapes.
But Cabernet and Chardonnay, by far, are the biggest grapes.
And really probably the most sold type of grapes.
At least in California, if not in the world.
The Cabernet is 55% of the crop value in Napa Valley, which is interesting.
Like he was saying, there's many varietals, Petit Syrah, it's the type of climate and soil, region of soils where You can enjoy blends, Bordeaux-type blends.
The winemakers from all over the world have come to Napa Valley because they can enjoy their artistic freedom to work on the various varietals.
And tell me about the process of winemaking.
A lot of people are fascinated.
They want to make their own wines.
I've had family members that tried that.
It didn't go really well.
But tell me more about the process.
Well, there's a couple key elements to it.
One is the winemaker.
Whether you're going to be the winemaker yourself or you hire a known winemaker.
We consider our winemaker, Alison Green Doran, she's an artist.
And she's also one of the first female winemakers in the region since she was a little girl.
A good wine starts in the vineyard.
And obviously you have to have a good artist to work with the product.
In the vineyard, the soil type matters.
Then there's the science meets art where when you turn the irrigation and the watering off and you have to dehydrate the grapes a little bit to get that ripening out.
Then there's canopy management.
When you de-leaf the vineyard, you can de-leaf it too much where your grapes can get sunburned.
And then if you don't de-leaf enough, they can fill with water and not ripen all the way.
So it's quite a science meets art.
And then knowing when to harvest.
It's just that right amount of time where the grapes are right, the sugar levels are at a certain point where you know it's good to go, you're going to make the type of wine that you want to make, and that's an individual decision based on the winemaker.
And how would you know that?
Would you do it by the winemaker tasting, or is there going to be some experiments?
How do you guys do that?
Our winemaker in particular is an individual artistic thing.
She will go through the different vineyards where we're producing our wines from, and she'll put the grapes in a plastic bag and crush them herself with her fingers.
And then she samples the insides of the grapes to make sure that she feels the sugars are the right amount, the highest amount.
And some years, if it hasn't been a real warm summer, then you have to leave them on the vines longer into October to make sure those sugars get up with just the right amount of sun.
But then you run into the concern when the rainy season starts, then that can harm your grapes.
So it matters a lot.
Your wine can be make or break in the vineyard.
So does she go every day during that time to check how the tastes are?
I would not say it's every day.
It might be every day right before she feels like she wants to harvest.
In the old days, even not that long ago, the vineyards were checked early on and checked on at the end and then harvested, and so much of the winemaking was handled in the production process.
But these days, a typical winemaker will visit a vineyard maybe a minimum 20 times throughout the season.
If it's a small vineyard and a small proprietor, they may be every day.
I think one of the things, if I might add to David's comment, is that the advantage that a smaller winery has is that you can change your picking days to do exactly what he's saying.
He says, oh, I need another three or four days at least.
Well, large wineries, when they say September the 30th, it is September the 30th, regardless of what she is feeling out of her little bag.
If she says, I need another week, they get another week.
And that's kind of the advantage.
So there's a corporate model where schedule is there and you go with the schedule.
And Jim, how has this process changed over the years?
I don't think it's changed that much, although the vineyards have changed.
We've become more automated also, and we used to have vineyards that were, what, six feet apart at least, and now they're like four feet apart because the land has become so valuable.
That we need to get as many vineyards as we can.
And we find that that also assists the wine itself because then there's competition among the roots themselves.
And like David said, the trimming is so important just to keep that going.
But we find that there is value in trimming.
Usually in June we drop leaves and so forth, depending on the weather obviously.
So that's an important part of all of that is a competition among the soils themselves and among the grapes, the vineyards themselves.
And now after you pick the grapes and perfect timing, then what happens from there?
Our grapes are still hand-picked manually.
There are a lot of larger wineries that are going to a mechanized type of harvesting.
But they come into the harvest facility.
There's a stainless steel de-stemmer.
So the first thing that happens is the grapes go through a de-stemming process where all the stems are removed.
And then a lot of wineries now have gone...
To another use of technology, it's a sorter, where it senses the grape and it has pre-programmed parameters of the size of the grape, they call it the berry, the size of the berry, maybe the plumpness, and it senses if it's a grape that's not up to standards and it rejects it.
So that's another process that a lot of wineries are going to.
To me, that's one area, another area that have changed.
So once the grapes are de-stemmed, they go through the crushing process, which is mechanical.
I think some maybe small wineries and sometimes for the romance of it will step on the grapes with their feet, like we've all seen in the old movies and such, but that's still done.
How about that?
The crushing, I've actually had people that would do that as a team building practice.
Oh, that's interesting.
It's fun, right?
It's very fun.
Yeah.
And it creates a lot of smiles and laughs, and it's neat.
It's a really neat thing.
We aim to get back to having harvest and crush parties.
We did for a while earlier on, and we want to get everybody out there with their feet and stomping on the grapes.
So how long does it take?
If somebody's doing it manually, does it take a lot of effort?
Is it tiring, that process?
It's over the course of several days.
It depends on the size of the vineyard and the size of that crop.
And they come in and they get crushed.
And then it depends if you have a white or a red.
So if you have a white, there's a real gentle pressing process that squeezes the juice and the meat of the grape.
And that goes into the stainless steel, begins the fermentation process.
Whereas the red grapes, they stay in their skins a while longer, quite a while longer, to get the flavors and the rich color from them.
So that's when the reds and the whites are treated a little differently going forward.
And does it matter if this crushing period, is there an art side to this as well, or is it just you just do the crushing and there's no...
That part, there's not too much of an art to it.
Sometimes contaminants can get in, or I've watched other wineries do their questioners, bees and hearts and wafts going down.
Oh, so you have to be very careful.
Other things can get in there, but other than that, it's pretty mechanical.
And then the winemaker is just waiting for her pressed grapes to get going.
And then what's going to happen next after that?
Well, usually you have the malolactic fermentation, which you say, wouldn't that be the next step in allowing what you have on there?
And, you know, there'll be some stirring, some leave it alone.
It depends on what they see.
And it's quite different.
The red grapes are quite different than the white, because white, you...
Don't nearly have any involvement in what you feel that you have to do in red grapes to extract naturally.
You don't press it.
You let the grapes and they just sit there and they kind of just settle just very, very gradually.
So you have to be there a few times.
You have to be there almost all the time just to sense it and they're constantly tasting the juice.
What have you.
So there's really an art form that exists here that most people who make wine at home are missing many, many steps that has to go through to try and sheave the juice that you want to go the entire time into malalactic fermentation.
And when you say, David, that's...
Pretty much.
The white grapes go into, like I mentioned, the stainless steel, and it's a cooling process where you cool it.
Whereas the reds, it gets more of a heating process and will not be, will go into the barrels readily soon.
Pinot Noir is an interesting grape where it's a red varietal, but it's a real delicate, light varietal.
So the skins will remain with the Pinot Noir for maybe Several days, up to four days, just to get a little bit of that color, a little more of the flavors, and then they'll remove the skin.
So, each varietal is treated a little differently.
And from there, it goes into the barrel and then it ages.
Is that...
It does age.
It's more than just having to sit in the barrel.
Maybe in the old days, the techniques were different.
Technology would just sit in the barrel and then you go revisit it when you feel like it's ready.
There's quite a bit of interaction with winemakers now with turning the wine over, racking the wine.
Sometimes the yeast will rise to the top, so you turn that over and mix that back up again and the skins will sort of drop a little.
There's a little bit of maintenance early on, and then once the skins are removed and its fermentation is well on its way, then the winemaker will spend a little less time on that because it's doing its thing.
It's just going to ferment.
It's going to take its time.
And the whole other subject is the barrels, the type of barrels you use, whether they're French oak, American oak, Hungarian.
It really matters, too, in the different flavors you can extract from those grapes.
So there's going to be a different flavor because of the barrels.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
If you produced a red varietal like a Cabernet in stainless steel for the life of it, it would come out a whole lot different and wouldn't have the complex flavors and aromas that you'd have when it meets the oak, the beautiful oak from the French region or, again, American region.
They've got some great oak, too.
Now, the question that comes is that how does it that certain bottles of wine, you can get a $10 bottle of wine, you can get a $100, you can get a $1,000 bottle of wine.
And how does the pricing come into this process?
How does the pricing get?
A lot of it has to do with really the quality of the grape.
A really good quality grape is going to be expensive, expensive to harvest.
For instance, mountainside, hillside fruit, very expensive to not only plant, but also to harvest and cultivate that.
Very difficult.
So there's a premium for that.
Not only does it cost more money, but there's a premium for that.
And it's mostly more natural, natural flavor, natural color.
Some of the lower end wines, more affordable wines, will have a lot of different additives in it.
You can add color to it to get the better color.
Maybe the grapes aren't from a really rich volcanic soil or something like that.
Napa Valley Again, due to the barriers to entry, high-value fruit, it's very hard to produce a Napa Valley wine at a very low cost.
Some people can do it, but...
And the other side of pricing is if you can catch on...
It's marketing.
If you can catch on a cult status or...
There are a lot of phenomenons that just happen.
Sometimes it's your packaging.
How you've designed your wine can be very different than someone else.
Sometimes it's timing.
And what about the age?
Do you guys keep a certain amount of your wine so that you age them and sell them later?
We do.
We have some of our original wines.
2001 was our first vintage, and we've maintained what we call a library of every vintage we've ever done.
And sometimes we'll put out a sale or a blast to let everybody know that we're going to release a 2005 Cabernet for a one-week period of time, some of our personal library wines, and that creates a buzz, and people enjoy being able to try a wine 15 years ago that we've made that they enjoy today as well.
You know, one area that I wanted to maybe go back a bit, and that is the yield of the grape itself has a significant factor in pricing.
And I'm just going to use it just broadly, like Merlot will have five tons per acre, whereas a cab, you're probably...
Three tons or less per acre.
And in certain areas of mountain fruit, especially the high as you go, and our premium wine is up on top of Stagecoach, which is...
Pritchard Hill?
Yeah, Pritchard Hill.
You're not really going to get a lot of yield up there, but what you do get is a lot of flavors and so forth in that wine because the plant itself has really struggled to get it to where it's drinkable, or it's going to be drinkable, I should say.
The yield factor is a huge factor in that.
And you have a lot of grapes that are growing on the valley floor up and down the state where you can get 10 tons of the acre.
Well, that makes wiring quite a bit less.
Pricing is a lot less, too, just having that.
What happens when you have a higher yield per ton, like Jim's talking about, the grapes will, there's a struggle for the nutrients.
You have a lot of grape clusters sharing the same nutrients.
On these hillsides where primarily they've blasted using dynamite to plant, they're spaced out further.
So each individual plant has its own share of nutrients from the soil that they're not sharing with.
So you'll get a more vibrant, sometimes smaller, but a more vibrant grape where you get those deep, some of the deep blackberries you get from Cabernet and the deep plums and all the different flavors that come out of it.
It's from the intense, the soil and the nutrients they're getting.
And I see that you guys have a lot of passion for this business.
You have multiple businesses.
Why did you guys choose to get into this business?
Well, it probably was David's fault.
I mean, it was in the family.
I mean, there are four boys in the family, and we would assist my father in making wine.
And so there's at least the three of the four that have a passion for the wine.
And of course, they buy a lot of wine from us, but they buy wine from others also, just to compare it and comment on it and whatever, which is fun.
It is fun to do that.
And wines do vary from year to year and it's just one of those things that you're not expecting sometimes a certain year to be great and all of a sudden it just ends up being something very special.
So there's that aspect of it that there's kind of what we call the mystery, the mystery that comes in out of nowhere to induce a wine that's very special.
So that's, but anyway, to go back to your question, from that time, then we started making a wine that just, we would buy juice from others that was just, there was some extra juice, and we called it Chateau Postolene, which in Greek is chateau, how do you call it?
And postolene in Greek means, how do you say it?
So it's a chateau, how do you say it?
And so we would do that just for charity, about every two years.
We would do what they call a custom crush.
That was back in the 1980s.
Yeah, back in the 80s.
And so David came to me and said, Dad, we're going to do this.
Why don't we do it right?
So that's how it all started.
The Lavendi wines rather than the custom crush.
Well, I went to college at UC Santa Barbara, which is real close to the Santa Barbara wine country.
So I started spending more time up there, which was just a 20-minute drive from school or maybe a 30-minute drive.
And Jim and his brothers and some other partners had some vineyards up in Napa Valley.
So I'd get a chance to, at a relatively young age, get to visit some of these vineyards.
And it was my idea.
Sometimes I'm one of the crazy ideas.
But I've always been fascinated.
I became to love wine.
I've always been fascinated with producing a product, something special for a consumer.
Historically, three generations of home building.
That's something that we have done as we've delivered a home to a consumer as well.
I love that space.
It was my big idea to come in and discuss making a wine.
He was thinking, are you sure you want to do that?
We're growing the graves.
We can sell them.
It's working.
It's much simpler.
Putting the wine together, you're adding a whole set of new elements to it all.
But the time was right.
It was something that we wanted to do together and sort of create a legacy.
And is that unpredictable?
It's tough, right?
It's a tough business because you have to figure out when to pick.
And you guys have a winemaker that's unique, right?
That was the best decision we ever made.
And it was one of the first decisions we made before we even took another step further and looking at the different vineyards we wanted to work with.
There was a very, very well-known winemaker that was recommended we speak with.
But that particular winemaker had projects all around the world, and he was building his own winery.
So we thought, how often will he be on our project?
We want to make sure we're going to do this.
Somebody's going to be there and overseeing it.
And Allison, it was a perfect timing where she had the capacity to bring on a winery project that we wanted to start.
And her personality is off the charts.
That was another reason why, before we even tasted a wine that she made, it was her personality.
It's in the bottle.
Our wines are very vibrant.
They speak large, and it's her personality in the bottle.
What makes a person like that so successful?
Well, I think a lot of it is the love of what you do.
If you just absolutely love what you do, then the time frame is not going to stop at eight hours or whatever.
You're going to do whatever it takes to achieve, which hopefully will be the best wine I've ever made.
And she goes by that type of mantra that every year is going to be the best wine I've ever made.
And just to give her a little bit of background, I mean, she went to Davis, which is a very special, first viniculture school in the state of California.
Now there are several.
But she also traveled around with Andrei Celachev, who was probably one of the most influential people to ever come to Napa.
And really, not only, well, Cabernet was his biggest thing, but also with Chardonnay and other grapes.
So she followed him around both in Italy and France for a couple years.
And he just taught her everything.
And she just, after having graduated from UC Davis, been a culture school, she just ate it all up with one of the, just one of the great masters of wine.
So I think we were As David says, we're very, very fortunate to really just have her from day one.
And she's been with us ever since.
And her family had a winery also.
And so it's just all work for us.
So the heart that goes into it from her, she really cares about what?
She started as a young girl, getting to understand the winemaking business.
Andrei Chilichov, Allison's father convinced him to come to her father's winery.
He owned Simi at the time, Allison's father.
Andrei came over, and he's a legend already, even back in the 1950s and 60s.
Allison would be asleep and Andrei Chelchoff would wake her up.
If there was a concern of a frost and he would get her out of bed as a young girl, we're going, it's a real thick accent, and we're going to the vineyards and we've got to protect our crops.
So from a very young age, she understood the harvesting, the cultivation process.
So she's a true vine-to-wine, what they call a winemaker.
Some winemakers are not as much.
They're the pure artists with the wine.
The grapes come in.
But that was so fortunate that she had that tutelage from Andrei Celichov for the better part of 20 years.
So that was one of the best decisions we made, was our artist.
So tell us about the history of how you guys started.
Well, I think it was really my dad and relatives of the family that they would all share, again, sharing into this ability to make wines.
They would go up to the Napa area, sometimes Napa, sometimes it was just Calistoga, we'll say, and they would buy whatever grapes were available that they felt they would eat them all.
So they would eat the grapes and decide, okay, this is going to make a good wine.
So they'd bring the grapes back.
And of course we would all have rubber boots ready to go so we would be squashing the grapes and we would take turns in squashing the grapes and of course my dad would do it too.
And that's how the juices started flowing down in and Then we would take them down into the basement, the juices.
And as David had indicated earlier, they'd start fermenting.
And of course, the fermenting would come up to the house and here we are in Sacramento in October with the windows wide open because you had to breathe.
And so it was one of those things.
But we had all these big barrels done in our basement.
And we would have relatives that would come over and take their share.
They would They would assist also in the work place and so that's how we really got started in making wine was through my dad and relatives of our family and they shared in all the wine so that was probably the start of the whole thing that goes back into the 40s and but it is amazing that that thought carries on and And you decide that you're going to go back
to making wines.
And that's how that all started.
If my dad and Myriltons hadn't done that, I don't know whether we would be in the wine booth.
So it was a family tradition?
Yes, it was a family tradition.
So how was it back then with the community around you guys?
Was there a lot of farmers and people that were involved in helping out?
Well, I think there are more relatives that were helping out.
Of course, we had a large lot next to us that my dad had the foresight to.
Well, he probably thought about making the wine because we had this big lot next to us.
It was probably maybe even a half acre, if not more.
So you have to have the area to make that kind of wine because you're going to have trucks coming in.
And dropping off grapes and so forth.
And my dad was in a produce business also.
Besides being a farmer, they had a produce company.
So we had the ability to have trucks and go get the grapes and bring them back to the house.
And we would have some of our neighbor kids come over and try the grapes and whatever.
So there was always kind of a A thing you would even see today, I mean, it's just this whole thing vanished as far as in the city, and there are still people making...
Very tight community.
Very tight community, but back then it was kind of a happening, and I knew it was going to happen around October, September, October, and so then we would just do the crushing and start making our grapes, and then of course, you know, getting the barrels, where do you get the barrels, and You know, you're buying used barrels, but then what you do is you remount some of the inside of the barrel, as they still do.
They all still do that today.
But they did it just so that you can impart some of the oak into the wine.
And so you had that going on also.
So some of that just hasn't changed very much through the years.
As I indicated earlier, it goes back thousands of years, really, in certain areas of Mediterranean and what have you.
But I think that's probably one of the more interesting things is that Every year, you know, my brothers and I would, I will hear it comes again, you know, because there was a lot of work.
But we did it because we knew how much, how important it was to the family.
My dad and all my uncles and what have you, they all chipped in and did their share.
So...
It's quite interesting.
You don't see that today, but in those days you just got together to do something that benefited many people, many families.
You never sold any of the wine.
We just always made sure that everybody had enough wine to drink until the following, the next year.
Farming was a tight-knit community and of many racial backgrounds.
There were Portuguese and Italians and Greeks and even, well, Japanese, of course, and I'm trying to think what other.
And then, of course, when Governor Warren of California decided to Send them away to, you know, there's a big history why he did this or whatever.
During World War II. But I think the big thing is that they decided that rather than let the farm just sit there.
So this was the Japanese people, right?
Japanese people that had the adjoining farms or in the vicinity.
The immediate vicinity of the farm and that was how they took care of their farm for their neighbors until they came back.
And of course they came back right after the war, just before the end of the war.
But they were gone for a period of three to four years.
So people in that community took care of the farmers that were Japanese that were not there for three, four years?
Yes.
And so that, you know, it did a lot of things.
It kept a lot of the people away.
Nothing like today.
Today, if you did that, there'd be people living in that house from everywhere.
But in those days, they didn't.
And they just kept everything going, and they did what they felt they had to do.
And of course, they weren't paid for it, but whatever they got, They obviously paid for all of the labor costs and what have you.
So they did the farming and they actually paid, they shared with them.
Yeah.
And so until they came back and that was a part of the, I think the whole history of that era.
There are not many stories told about that.
There's a few here and there that if you dig into it, you'll read about that.
It did happen in a lot of places in California, but in this farming area that we were blessed to be a part of, my father was.
His main crop was sugar beets.
And asparagus.
That was his main crop.
And he was right around Aylton, which really isn't very far from Napa, but he was the island there.
I'm trying to think of the island.
But anyway, Aylton and Rio Vista are the two, not that they're huge cities, but they're major areas.
That's where they'd go to export their goods.
And you named your wine Levendi.
Why did you guys name it?
Well, everything we did when we were developing Levendi, coming up with the whole effort, was a team effort.
When we were working on the packaging, the logo, the label that you see today, we have an entourage of friends and family who would go up to Napa Valley with us, and we would sit in the design room and talk about different Prototypes and design.
So when it came time to name LaVendi, it was the same thing where we were at a dinner up in Northern California with my uncles and cousins.
We had a big table, big Greek dinner going on up in Lake Tahoe.
And I had issued pieces of paper and pens to everybody and wanted them to write down.
I said, give me two or three names that sound like it'd be a good winery name.
Let's kind of make this a think tank dinner.
So everybody was writing their names down and we started to go through them.
And it all sounded like it had been done before.
You know, this oak this, something creek, you know, and just nothing was hitting.
We're all kind of looking at each other.
And then dinner was being served.
And my one uncle, Andy, his brother, said, you know what?
Why don't we do this after dinner?
He raised a glass.
He said, yaselavende.
To me.
And it's a term towards more of a younger person striving for achievement.
It's a very nice thing to say to a younger person.
I was much younger back then when we started this.
And it's...
It all hit.
We all looked at each other and the name, Levendi.
It came out of a toast.
So it was perfect.
It wasn't hard thought.
It was so special to us.
In the old days, when I think the farms were being worked by the family and the sons and daughters would come in for dinner and clean up, the fathers raised a glass to say, Yasu Levendi, to young helpers that are out there, the next generation.
And so it was born from that moment.
And it's pretty neat.
And for those people that are passionate about making their own wine, whether they're at home or whether they have a vineyard in their backyard, tell us what you recommend them.
Well, I think, well, number one, they do have these packages that assist people in making their own wine so that you're not just starting from underground zero.
At least you're coming up with an area, so then you've got to go out and buy the grapes.
And that's where it gets kind of tricky.
And you're going to have to go from here to here to here.
But eventually you're going to end up with some very, you know, I think good grapes, quality of grapes, And then it becomes, where do you go from here?
Because you have to take your steps and be patient.
You do have to be very, very patient in making wine, as you do in a lot of farming areas.
It's just one thing that it requires is patience.
And so...
You know, I've had friends that made it for a hobby and actually they've done very well and actually fairly local here.
It's amazing out of what they've gotten out of just two, three acres and it's very drinkable and it does happen.
But again, there's got to be passion because that passion, there's a lot of work that goes into it and so that passion has to be there.
Without the passion, you're not going to accomplish much.
So, if you really, really have that passion and want to do an excellent type of wine, then you're going to have to spend time at it and do what you need to do every step of the way.
There's no shortcuts in making wines.
That doesn't exist.
Well, thank you.
Thank you.
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