“Relax with Sheep” is actually a single, shorter documentary that loops around six times. The original video was shot in March and edited by Tim Kennedy, a filmmaker who is often commissioned by Napa Valley wineries, breweries and restaurants. Mr. Kennedy handed in his edit at a relatively taut one hour and change. Turning that into an epic longer than Matthew Barney’s “River of Fundament” was the idea of Douglas Shafer, the vineyard’s proprietor. Mr. Shafer said the goal was to create something like those never-ending yule-log videos, but with sheep.
When the longer version was complete, he asked Andy Demsky, who handles public relations for the winery, to put it on YouTube “to share the pastoral beauty” with viewers “during the upheaval and uncertainty in the world right now,” as the introductory text puts it. Uploading the file took three days.
Credit for wrangling the hundred or so sheep goes to a local firm called Wooly Weeders, which drove them to the 50-acre hillside property, packed inside a multilevel trailer, then set them loose to control the unwanted vegetation that grows in early spring, before the dry season sets in and Napa’s hills turn brown.
“You’d usually go in with tractors and mow,” Mr. Shafer said. “With the sheep we have to do that a lot less, so it’s less gas. On the hillsides we’ve got these terraces — that’s always a challenge. You have to use a machete or that type of thing, it’s tough. But the sheep can stand on any incline at all and munch away.”
It’s true. Nothing gets between the sheep and their grass. I’ve never given much thought to the mental capacity of sheep. I suppose if I had, I would have said they were not among the leading intellectual lights of the animal kingdom.
After watching “Relax with Sheep,” though, I am in awe of their attention spans. In awe, and a little jealous. The truth is I haven’t made any headway on Fassbinder or Proust or any of the other stuff because I can’t seem to concentrate lately. I spend my days talking to restaurant people who don’t have restaurants to go to. It’s been a month since they’ve seen a paycheck.
At night, when I could be reading a fat novel, I have the attention span of one of the bumblebees that you can hear on the soundtrack of “Relax with Sheep,” the pitch of their buzz Doppler-shifting down the way the ambulance sirens outside my windows do every few minutes.