Archive for the ‘Mike’ Category

Jus Soli Zin - Touched By Angels?

Wednesday, January 20th, 2010

Returned home from Las Vegas yesterday after pouring wines at the annual portfolio tasting of our Vegas distributor Red Rock Wines.  Now that I’m older, I’ve learned to head off trouble preemptively and so brought along my wife and kids since the event was held at the family friendly Mandalay Bay Resort.  And throughout our stay, whenever the kids encountered sights that struck them as particularly outlandish, they would ask  “why would anyone do that?”, to which my answer was usually “because no one else was stupid enough to beat them to it at a different spot in Vegas”.

A prime example of Vegasian excess is the 42 foot high wine tower at Charlie Palmer’s Aureole.  It’s encased in lucite so you can watch the “wine angels”  gracefully climb up and then rappel back down with your trophy bottle of wine.  I have to admit the concept became considerably more intriguing when we learned that our 2006 Madder Lake Zinfandel is on their wine list and therefore housed somewhere within the amazing tower of wine.  Could it possibly be that an athletic/angelic young beauty has scaled to the top of the tower to retrieve a bottle of Jus Soli as part of a happy couple’s first romantic night of their honeymoon?  We don’t think we have to worry about an older sugar daddy wining and dining his high class hooker with our vino since he would clearly buy something showier, right?  And should you happen to visit and find out that our wine is situated down near the bottom within easy reach of any staff member, please don’t ruin the fantasy for us.  We like to think that the angels are responsible for bringing our wine down from the heavens for the enjoyment of mortals before they head off for their night of depraved adult entertainment.

Sorry, the angels were taking a smoke break.
Our view from Mandalay.


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It’s Not Easy Being Green

Saturday, September 5th, 2009


Our latest project in greening our business was switching our label printing to a certified green business in our home county, Paragon Label.  Check the link to read about their impressive conservation efforts, including innovative recycling projects and carbon neutral manufacturing facility.  But having battled the painful label printing process many times before, we knew that we were subjecting ourselves to all kinds of potential headaches by starting again with someone new.  And all went swimmingly except for a little confusion over one very important part of the job, our bottling date.  Alright, it was very close to a huge disaster requiring us to bottle all our wine without labels to run them all back through the line at some later date at considerable extra expense but let’s skip over the part about assigning blame and head straight for the problem solving part, which thankfully Paragon embraced along with us.

The main issue was that our labelstock didn’t arrive until the day before bottling so I was on call to race over to press check as soon as they unpacked the boxes and fired up the press.  Thankfully, the main colors were very close from the start but the digital background needed considerable work.  We tweaked and tweaked and finally dialed it in at 5:30 pm.  Then they printed and cut the big rolls overnight in time for me to pick up at 6:30 am the next morning to bring to the bottling line for an 8am start.  All my partners and everyone else at our facility seemed shocked and impressed to see me arrive with the label boxes before the bottling line labor crew had even arrived for duty.

It certainly could have been smoother, and I still have a giant box of pressure sensitive backing paper to bring back to Paragon for recycling to complete the process, but thankfully all turned out well in the end.  Our new vintage is labeled and looking the way we like it, and we took another important step in reshaping our business.  But if there was a soundtrack to the whole situation, it would undoubtedly be the Kermit the Frog classic.

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How I Spent Bastille Day

Wednesday, July 15th, 2009

Usually Bastille Day comes and goes without much of a thought for me, but this year my mom chose Chloe’s French Cafe in Santa Rosa as our lunch spot without being aware of the Bastille Day significance.  Chloe’s is the finest little French Cafe ever housed within a medical building, looking as if it should be just another boring cafeteria serving uninspired lunches to a captive audience in need of quick bite.  But the food is wonderful from grille sandwiches to salads, crepes and pastries, all best enjoyed from the sizable back patio (and so what if it’s practically tucked up against the freeway).  I went with the Jambon Brie sandwich with their honey dijon dipping sauce and house-made pickles served on the side.  Delicious as always.

Our lunch inspired a quick stop at nearby Bottle Barn for a wine to bring along to the Tuesday night farmer’s market in the Sonoma square.  I selected a 2008 Le Clos du Caillou Cotes du Rhone Rose (North Berkeley Imports) to go with our typical market meal of bread, cheese, and salami supplemented by fresh produce from the market.  And in case you’re picturing wine surreptitiously poured into dixie cups, the square in Sonoma is one of the few places left where you are actually allowed to publicly consume alcoholic beverages.  On market night, some tables have staggering amounts of open wine bottles and a wide selection of microbrews can be spotted as well, particularly near our blanket.  Our 2007 Jus Soli Sauvignon Blanc, the Rose and cold beers all cut beautifully through the still 90 plus degree heat.

Back home and kids in bed, we topped the day off by watching the recap of the day’s Tour de France action.

The only way to have been more French for the day would have been to wear berets and smoke cigarettes while debating whether Godard or Truffault was our favorite Nouvelle Vague film director.  With the benefit of hindsight, I’m thinking we hit it just right.

Our Rose selection
Chloe the "truckette"


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California Wine History Lesson

Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009

While on a quick trip to Southern California for Grandpa Benny’s 95th birthday party, we stopped by Mission San Juan Capistrano for a tour since my son Henry just finished studying the missions in school.

Besides simply enjoying the beautiful grounds and impressive ruins of the original church, we were also excited to pay homage to the site of the first vineyard and winery in Alta California.  The vines were planted in 1779 and first wine produced in 1783.  The audio tour mentioned that opinions on the wines produced at the mission ranged from “wonderful” to “awful”, which confirms that as soon as there were wines in California, there were wine critics.  I’m guessing even they asked for a second glass as there were obviously no alternatives available.

Here’s a picture of the exterior fermentation vat.  Think Junipero Serra ever lost a bet and had to swim in it?

exterior wine vat

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