entombed in the shrine of zeroes and ones

Oh, definitely. I think that i would have benefitted more had i been in an actual class, running real experiments. A lot of what the class wanted us to do was to keep a meticulous image of the process of winemaking, in order to identify what can go wrong at each step. It felt tedious to me, because i more effectively learn stuff like that by doing. In this sense, it's not that different from systems administration, really.