Damson Rapture (Violet Visions)

I had tried in the past to actually grow Picolit and Verduzzo at our vineyard in Soledad. Picolit is said to possess very good natural acidity, and can have a very persistent complex fragrance — peaches, apricot, coconut and hazelnuts. Here was an opportunity to gain another data point. Maybe it had been stored badly? I was told that this had been the first vintage that Jermann had produced and that subsequent bottlings were a lot more vibrant.

But here is where I have to look very carefully at my own process. I like Picolit for its potential complexity good , for its acidity very good , 22 but what I also really like about it is that it is a female grape, and therefore very easy to breed no need to go through the tedium of the grape flower emasculation. I love the idea of Picolit, the Unknown Female, shrouded in mystery, somehow potentiated by the enchanted kiss of her Prince Charming. I went to Burgundy, and risking life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, brought back some special Samsonite clones of Pinot noir.

The presence of limestone in the soil is considered by many to be a sine qua non for great Pinot, so I schlepped in enormous truckloads of limestone into the vineyard I was planting in the eponymous hamlet of Bonny Doon. I found some Basque shepherds who hooked me up with sheep manure go figure, but sheep manure is actually really helpful for the expression of minerality , planted the vines on very close spacing, as is the custom in Burgundy. Despite these heroic efforts — I was really obsessed with Pinot at the time, more or less lived and breathed it — the resulting wine was really nothing to write home about.

I postulated that since it was warm and dry in southern France, warm and dry in the Central Coast of California, maybe the varieties of southern France would do well here. Long story short, they did well indeed, or at least the ones that I managed to find and grow, though in retrospect, they just as easily might not have. I was working with grape varieties that not so many people had heard of: How could I possibly make this work? I had never studied marketing in school, and in fact, the whole idea of actually trying to sell something made me and continues to make me more than a little queasy.

But when you have to rely on your wits to succeed, i. I thought to myself — these people are absolutely nuts, but what a great idea for a wine label! But the wine business at least in those days was oh so serious, and most everyone wanted to display a great degree of gravitas on their label. If you can send the meta-message that wine on whatever level can be fun and an adventure you can connect with customers in a special way. These wine-like beverages are the products of extremely cynical marketers and most of them are utterly execrable.

The market remains littered with the droppings of the menagerie of critter labels and other labels that are just unspeakably crass. I made one terrible mistake — actually many mistakes — but the one that turned out in the end to be almost fatal was in not properly segmenting or sequestering the various brands that we were producing, which may have ultimately led to something like brand dilution if not brand taint and a more metaphysical problem as well. Allow me to explain. As it turned out, Big House became a very hungry beast to feed and we never seemed to get around to truly polishing the precious jewel that was Cigare.

All along I suspected that I was becoming more and more of a hypocrite. I was writing articles and giving speeches about terroir — that quality in wine that somehow illuminates its place of origin. I was writing about how utterly precious this idea was and how much it enriched our world. But looking at myself in the mirror I asked myself if there was anything at all I was doing to bring myself any closer to the pursuit of a vin de terroir in this lifetime and the production of wines that truly mattered. A fairly serious medical condition and the birth of my daughter more or less brought my existential crisis to a resolution; I could no longer remain such an arrant hypocrite.

So, it was a little more than eight years ago that I sold off our large brands and radically Doon-sized the company by an order of magnitude. I was now going to pursue terroir. I believe that, in retrospect, our core premium brands were substantially weakened by association with the vin ordinaire, Big House. Big House, shall we say, was my one goat, and I fear that the overall brand may have been slightly corrupted by the association with it.

Even the first-growth Bordeaux wines have a second label and in some cases a third label. But it has not been without a significant degree of fear and trembling about the course forward. But the methodology of how I intend to produce a wine of place is quite interesting, and even if it fails to yield a true vin de terroir, I am certain it will make a positive contribution to the viticultural world. I have talked at great length and written incessantly in my blog,.

Why do wines of place matter? For the same reason that distinct species of butterflies, birds or salamanders or the discovery of new stars and galaxies matter. They add richness and complexity to our lives. I truly believe this with all my heart. Presumably, you begin by selecting a grape variety and rootstock that is supremely appropriate or congruent to the site.

Another way of thinking about a great terroir is that it is one that is supremely congruent to the variety or clone, i. And yet… this begs the question of whether we can in a short lifetime ever find a degree of congruence of site and variety, rootstock, clone, sub-clone, cultural practice, etc. Will we ever find a site for a particular set of Pinot noir clones as perfect as DRC has found for say, La Tache, as perfect a match for Syrah as exists in Hermitage, or as brilliant a site for Nebbiolo as you find on certain hillsides in the Langhe? But more to the point, is there any utility in driving ourselves crazy trying to be this kind of wannabe?

Does that really create a sustainable model? Perfect congruence is undoubtedly too difficult to achieve in a single lifetime, and maybe even too abstract a notion to entertain, but perhaps there may be another approach that will lead to originality as well as the expression of place. This idea is based on a number of assumptions, many of them yet untested and unproven, but for me at least representing one possible solution to the question of how one might produce truly distinctive wine in California, as well as how one might grow grapes in a truly more sustainable fashion, especially in light of Global Climate Change.

To breed new grape varieties, customized to our individual climatic and geophysical circumstances, therefore more congruent, seamless, less needful of heroic levels of intervention. Apart from identifying unique vines optimally suited to a given location, the ancillary benefits of this program might be the discovery of varieties that have a broader utility in the warmer and dryer world that we seem to be creating, perhaps even having enhanced resistance against particularly pernicious disease pressure.

While it would be exceptionally cool to find individual plants that have unique characteristics that are particularly brilliant — this is a bit like winning the lottery — there are potentially other very interesting things to be shown by planting a vineyard comprised of a vast range of germplasm; every plant, in fact, is a little bit different from every other one, rather like fraternal twins. The question is whether considered as a suite, might this large set of slightly differing offspring of common parents produce a wine of new and startling complexity that might not be achievable through a more conventional plantation of a discreet, finite set of clones?

This is another way of asking from whence does complexity in wine arise. Or to think of it another way, might the intentional suppression of discernible varietal character create an opportunity for other aspects of the wine, to wit, soil characteristics or the sense of place to emerge?

This has been the strategy successfully taken up by Jean-Michel Deiss in Alsace, in his grand cru vineyards that are comprised of a thoroughly mixed varietal plantation. Will one have the wit, insight, or even just the dumb luck to identify a set of parents capable of siring offspring with desirable flavor characteristics? In addition to identifying individual plants that might have superior characteristics, the other part of the study is to focus on farming strategies that will enable one to produce wines in a truly more sustainable fashion.

One element of this would be the minimization of external inputs and constrained resources, chiefest among them being water. All of these strategies aim to create a greater degree of homeostasis, or vine balance, as well as to create Edenic living conditions for beneficial soil microflora, thus amplifying the signal of the sense of place.

I dream about an old-fangled vineyard — no trellising, no wire, no end-posts, no irrigation, i. This would be a low-input, and low output vineyard, but the quality should be exceptional. Popelouchum, my farm in San Juan, has, I believe, some pretty remarkable, sexy terroirs — clay limestone, granitic and volcanic soils. My plan is to systematically sequester the grapes from the individual terroirs, each planted to this very diverse field-blend. I became a winemaker and winery owner some thirty years before seemingly everyone else on the planet decided that they wanted to become one too.

In our current age, this seems like a belief system from antiquity. I had studied philosophy and literature and pre-med among other things at UC Santa Cruz, 6 with essentially no career game plan in mind, and took my very sweet time in ultimately securing a diploma; this just drove my parents absolutely nuts, which was, of course, a secondary gain. I worked for my dad for a year in his wholesale tool and merchandise business. The one certainty I had was that his business — the buying and selling of general merchandise — was absolutely not for me. How could one become at all passionate about selling widgets, or even simply care about the business deal qua deal, which was what seemed to get my dad up in the morning?

Can the winemaking life become a sort of spiritual path or even an avenue for personal development? This was certainly not how I thought of it when I first began. We were all going to have to eventually find jobs, of course, but we also had to find jobs that had Meaning, ideally ones that would nurture us well beyond fulfilling our material needs. While working on my undergraduate senior thesis on the Heidegerian notion of Dasein alas, never to be completed , I wandered into a rather swanky wine shop a few blocks from my parents home in Beverly Hills, where I was staying.

I was not yet even of drinking age. It was almost as if a most intriguing wormhole into a different dimension of experience was being offered. The charge account led soon to temporary employment at the shop the thesis was bogging down by then , and then to full-time employment, if not complete vinous immersion, that is to say, some pretty impressive opportunities to taste the greatest wines of the world, essentially on a daily basis.

In a relatively short time I found myself grown into a full-fledged, insufferable wine person. What I remember telling myself: Learning to be a winemaker will help you knit together some of these very disparate elements of yourself and give your life a kind of focus, which, frankly, just between us, seems to be slightly lacking. I failed spectacularly at making T. Blending the relevant ones together was an accidental masterstroke from a winemaking as well as marketing perspective; 13 it seemed that I was able to intuit a basic winemaking truism that if you are working with grape varieties that are themselves less than perfect in and of themselves, you can perhaps find or create complexity in a skillful blend, thus effectively disguising the shortcomings of the individual combinants.

I have been dancing around the theme that I really wished to explore in this essay: I am not entirely convinced that winemaking in and of itself makes most of its practitioners more creative, but its work — the alchemical transformation of a baser material into something perhaps sublime — carries with it a potent metaphorical message: If you can transform grape juice, perhaps you can indeed transform yourself. Winemakers are often in the position of having to do many disparate things for their job, calling on very different sets of skills, if not exactly at the same moment, then certainly in the course of a given hour or day; we must become bricoleurs par excellence ; 17 I think that this may make us in all better problem solvers and sparks creativity in other realms.

At least it seems it did for me. If contemplating the gallows concentrates the mind, as Dr. Having no background at all in marketing and a positive allergy to hard-core sales, I realized that like a Paleolithic hominid it would fall to me to fashion my own unique tools de novo to bring down the wooly mammoth that was the burgeoning wine business. I worked intuitively on first principles: Amazingly and rather fortunately I discovered a truly bizarre ordinance adopted in by the town council of C.

I had somehow intuitively grasped some of the basic principles of marketing. So, I accidentally discovered that wine drinkers who also happened to be readers could appreciate a wry and slightly subversive attitude toward the presentation of wine. I found to my surprise that I was, with a little practice, able to write literary pastiches — these were stylistic wind sprints — in my quarterly newsletters, proffering a vinous take on the prose of such figures as Garcia Marquez, Kafka, Shakespeare, Poe, Pynchon, Salinger and others.

As literary parody it was not exactly weapons-grade satire, but it gave me a sense of swimming in blue water, away from most of the competitors, and emboldened me to take further creative risks. Together we created a number of memorable labels, having great fun in the process. When I am fortunate enough to collaborate with a real artist, some sort of aesthetic completeness and magic can occasionally occur.

The winemaking path has not made me a true artist though provided numerous opportunities to cultivate something like an artistic or at least aesthetic sensibility , nor maybe even yet a real craftsman, though I have hope that that may yet come to pass. But, analogous to the dissatisfaction I once experienced in being a mere wine consumer, which compelled me to become a winemaker and to engage on a deeper level, likewise I have in recent years grown unhappy with being a simple winemaker who is still largely a technician with a few marketing skills but not yet a craftsman in any meaningful sense.

In Santa Cruz, where I live, we never quite completely grow up. As a winemaker, this has meant the opportunity to create a lot of interesting wine labels, to make some clever blends, to experiment with new and exotic grape varieties and some unusual wine styles; at best one might think of all of this as a form of performance art, at worst, the occupation of a dilettante.

Further, I have developed a deep commitment to meaningful sustainability in farming, to farm with minimal inputs and the lofty ambition of farming grapes without irrigation, for example in an area — San Juan Bautista — that is very, very dry. Maybe the holiest sacrament of this church is a clod of dirt — one imbued with life, microbial life, at the very least.

As a true craftsman in the highest sense, one might be given the rare privilege of becoming a translator of the humblest materiality — dirt and some bunches of grapes — into a great elixir that can move human beings to poetry and other unexpected deeds of great moment. The presumption is that soil characteristics might therefore emerge, and perhaps one might seek to express that very elusive creature, the vin de terroir.

But, it feels to me as if I am at the very beginning of my career, connected at least I imagine I am to something much larger than myself. Wine is largely made in service of the ego — you want people to know just how clever you are. Artists or craftsmen are or can often be egomaniacs; their art is the drug that gets them high, but it also allows them a sort of transcendence of their own baser impulses; it is transformative of everyone it touches. Broadly speaking, you were either a Cab guy or a Zin guy or a Pinot guy.

I was a Pinot guy. After all, I loved Burgundy deeply and truly as any proper wine snob did and does. Further, the Great American Pinot Noir had proved to be incredibly elusive at the time. As it still does! So, therefore, loving Pinot as I did, and the fact that making a great one was something really, really, really, monstrously difficult to achieve… I just jumped in.

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Does a guy need much more justification than that to throw in all of his psychic, financial and emotional resources to this quixotic end? Well, yes, he does, as I hope to explain in a minute. It turns out that I had greatly underestimated the degree of difficulty of producing the Great American Pinot Noir — despite a lot of thought and effort, the results were disappointingly lackluster — but this in fact was a blessing in disguise, as it persuaded me of the wisdom to stop trying to square the circle, beat my head against the wall, fight City Hall, stub my toe on the Great Chain of Being.

These metaphors all express the notion that if you are growing certain grapes, not just chosen varieties but also clones and rootstock that are not utterly congruent to the site and the cultural practice appropriate to the site, you will always be playing catch-up or be in the role of vinous wannabe winous vannabe? Will we ever find a site for a particular set of Pinot noir clones as perfect as DRC has found for, say, La Tache, as perfect a match for Syrah as exists in Hermitage, as brilliant a site for Nebbiolo as you find on certain hillsides in the Langhe?

How might one achieve this kind of complexity, depth and soulfulness? The fact that a wine can also represent a place adds an incalculable dimension of depth and meaning to a wine. I have a radical notion that might represent a route for vineyards in California who are seeking to find their own unique path and grow grapes to make wines that are utterly differentiated in style.

This idea is based on a number of assumptions, many of them yet untested and unproven, but for me at least representing one possible solution to the question of how one might produce truly distinctive wine in California, as well as how one might grow grapes in a more sustainable fashion in this part of the world, especially in light of Global Climate Change.

Apart from identifying unique vines that are optimally suited to a given site this might take some time , the ancillary benefits of this program might be the discovery of varieties that have a broader utility in the warmer and dryer world that we seem to be creating, perhaps even having enhanced resistance against particularly pernicious disease pressure.

Or perhaps another way of thinking about this might be that we have to get over the idea that it is the choice of variety that is the most important determinant of wine quality. I would humbly suggest that it is the brilliance of the site itself — its ability to enable the vine to achieve a state of homeostasis — that is the great determinant of ultimate wine quality — and the varietal choice is likely of secondary importance. In a breeding program, by the sheer volume of iteration and genetic re-assortment that takes place, you create a few offspring of the total number that are very different, outliers, if you will — some interesting and others maybe clearly inferior infertile at the very least , but mostly you are creating a lot of members of a vinous family that have minute but very real differences between them; they are really siblings.

Of course, it would be disingenuous not to note that grapes grown from seedlings, while having some wondrous aspects, i. As brilliant as it might be, this sort of very eclectic vineyard would likely need to be replanted with Version 2. Forward into the past! Not wishing to cast aspersions on how we typically farm grapes in the New World, but what we do often works against the expression of terroir, and thus defeats the most interesting part of the value proposition.

Over-ripe fruit, high yields, drip irrigation, big vines, new oak, the use of cultured yeast, enzymes, MegaPurple, etc. Low-yielding, perhaps head-trained where appropriate especially for upright growing varieties and relatively widely spaced, dry-farmed grapes, farmed organically or biodynamically, given an opportunity to express soil characteristics. This model is predicated on the idea of considering the cost of land as a sunk cost maybe this is another breathtaking leap of logic , but could at the same time be achieved with minimal inputs — an old-fangled vineyard with no trellising, no wires, no end-posts, no drippers.

Call me a tenderhearted aesthete, but vines that are arrayed in this sort of organic form I believe convey a greater sense of the intention of the wine-grower and possibly connect with the consumer on a more visceral level. The greatest thing we have going for us in the New World is the relative lack of restriction on our practice — we can generally grow grapes anywhere that we want, any way that we want with a much broader range of permissible cultural, winemaking and wine labeling options open to us. The crazy planting scheme of growing grapes from seeds is only one possible solution set to the conundrum of how one might produce an utterly distinctive product; there are an infinite number of possibilities.

Lure your customers out to your vineyard: The French are different than we are in that way, very private; the walls are quite high. So, it was a bit of a shock to me, a slap really, to realize that my Estate pinot noir vineyard in Bonny Doon was likely never going to make great wine. There are still plenty of worthwhile things to do with your life; you just have to figure out what they are.

But I am getting ahead of myself. But in Oregon seemed to get a fair bit of rain just before the vintage, and the two-day voyage par camion from the Willamette Valley to Santa Cruz made no one happy but the acetobacter and the sundry Oregonian fungal stowaways. I was not yet an ideological locavore but I did realize that after the successful vintage I had really been pushing my luck schlepping grapes all the way down from Oregon and that this was not really what anyone could call a sustainable practice.

It was time to put aside my youthful and likely permanent crush on the heartbreak Pinot Noir grape and begin to give the winery a greater degree of focus. However, I sometimes tend to forget that I had actually purchased Grenache grapes two years prior in from George Besson, Sr. It was often just Kermit in the store, and he was a lot less busy then than he is now, so we had a great opportunity to chat about the world of wine, specifically as it was grown in southern France.

Estrella River Winery, down in Paso Robles, was playing around a bit with it, mostly turning it into an off-dry blush wine, which did OK for them. Joseph Phelps was also producing a Syrah from their Estate vineyard in Rutherford, and those wines were seriously weird — very high in pH, soapy, in fact, with a strange unnatural color. There were also alleged to be some older Syrah vines in Napa Valley, but these were also believed to be heavily virused, so the prospects for Syrah at this point were somewhat less than stellar.

The vines were maybe forty-five years old at the time we started working with them, head-trained and not irrigated. Maybe it was not the greatest Grenache vineyard in the world, but it did serve us well for many years and was always the backbone of Cigare. Josh Jensen was kind enough to lease me some space at the Calera Winery in the Cienega Valley of San Benito County, 17 where I crushed the first Grenache in , as well as a smattering of Bordelais varieties from the B.

Carney Ranch in Boonville 18 , 19 was a cool vintage in California, and that really was a wonderful thing for Hecker Pass Grenache, which almost always seemed to do better in the more temperate vintages. I commuted every day from Bonny Doon to Calera — it took about an hour and a half each way. The one Grenache tank I had crushed came out wonderfully, 21 but the Cabernet was a bit problematic — maybe a little too herbal and weedy.

We continued to purchase from him until the Bien Nacido Syrah came into production and became our default source for Syrah. Not a lot was understood about Syrah in the day; these vines were terribly over-irrigated, and over-cropped; the blistering hot climate of the east side of Paso tended to really efface varietal character and led to grape musts the acidity and pHs levels of which were totally out of whack.

I was just a young pup with no credentials at all, so why should he listen to me? Somehow, I persuaded him to let me thin a section of the vineyard, and to my amazement and delight, this actually did appear to improve the character of the fruit. I produced a varietal Syrah from Estrella for the next five or six years, and of course used the fruit in the Cigare Volant, being careful not to use too much in the blend.

Parker was quite charitable to this latter effort; I think that he was doing his best to encourage me and by extension, to encourage the entire category to grow and improve in California, which indeed it has. I may have mentioned once or twice that it was during my tenure at the Wine Merchant in Beverly Hills that I had became obsessed with pinot noir, and this mania achieved full-flower when I was a student at UC Davis. But the fact that there were so many ordinary ones though still expensive made the rare extraordinary ones all the more special.

When I was a student at Davis I had actually begun to scout for land and on holiday breaks and weekends would spend a fair bit of time driving around coastal California as well as further afield. But the real reason I was loathe to look too closely at sites in the area was that Santa Barbara County was just a bit too close to Los Angeles, and I was determined to try to get out of the orbit of my familial system if I could.

I looked for land up and down the coast of California and into Oregon. I remember particularly well the visit with David Lett, founder of Eyrie Vineyard and the godfather of Oregon viticulture. The grapes really struggle to ripen, the yields are terrible. I was pretty shocked and politely declined. I was still holding out hope that I would fine limestone soils somewhere in an area that was relatively cool. I landed in Bonny Doon, owing to the confluence of a number of factors. The little hamlet its boundaries were magically a bit amorphous was mentioned in rather hushed tones, possibly correlative to the unmentionable goings-on that one imagined were occurring there.

If Santa Cruz had its own magic as it certainly did for me in the day , Bonny Doon might have represented an even deeper more mysterious, virtually Druidic enchantment, replete with mysterious woodland creatures. Maybe it was Brigadoon, or perhaps Avalon; I always imagined it was someplace that might mysteriously come into view through the fog-enshrouded mist. Ken seemed to have a pretty good gig; you came to visit him at his mountain retreat up on Jarvis Rd. I sought out what I imagined was a superior clone of Pinot noir from a research station in Espiguette, France.

I would plant the vines to an exceptionally close spacing, which all the literature suggested was absolutely crucial. How could I possibly miss? I sincerely thought that I was doing most everything right. But, of course, I had greatly underestimated the degree of difficulty in finding or creating the right conditions to produce a truly great pinot. The theory being that by the time my own vineyard would come into bearing, I would have learned more about this fickle grape, and would have gotten the major winemaking mistakes well behind me.

It was getting a bit close to harvest time in when I was able to get in touch with Warren Dutton, the famous grower in Sebastopol. Chuck, Bill Arnold and several other members of the Santa Cruzoisie wine circle were in a tasting group with me; this was a way for me to continue to expand my wine knowledge, and also pretty much represented the metes and bounds of my social network at that time.

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It was my first harvest on my own, and this was before the days of sorting tables. So, as the bins were being dumped by fork-lift into the crusher, I was manually pulling out individual bunches that I felt were not quite up to snuff. This became an incredibly tedious process, taking much, much longer than it normally would and I think that we did not really finish till well after midnight.

Warren was just fuming — partially because I was throwing away perfectly good fruit but mostly because he still had to drive back to Sebastopol that night, and be up at the crack of dawn the next morning to harvest another field. I still feel terrible to have put him out so much. The first grapes came in from the vineyard in Bonny Doon in They were fairly large bunches — that was quite discouraging — and somewhat devoid of much pinot noir character. I met the wonderful Casteel brothers, Terry and Ted, and was quite impressed by the fastidious of their Bethel Heights Vineyard.

It was a bit of an adventure in figuring out how to bring a truckload of grapes from the Willamette Valley to Santa Cruz, but I did in , and the wine that I made from those grapes was really exceptional. The pinot grapes that I was buying from the Casteels and then a few years later from Temperance Hill, were infinitely better than the ones that I was growing myself, which gave me no end of existential angst. They, sly dogs, are also sniffing.

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So, while a number of folks have left the wine business after just a few years after discovering that, for example, carrying a bag wine sales was just not for them, or freshly recruited to the cellar crew, learning that cleaning out tanks at 7: But, it seems that if you have managed to stick out the first few years of the wine biz, it was quite likely you would more or less stick around this way of life forever.

So, when a recently discovered acquaintance asked me how many years it was for me, I did a brief calculation and concluded that it appeared to have been thirty-five years.

What to not do: Try to find some other outside interests. Rather, try to figure out how to put yourself in relation to circumstances such that the Universe might possibly teach you something, 4 or alternately, try to make wine in such a way that you are allowing Nature to do all the real heavy lifting. Bill was a singular character, a personage seemingly from another century — tall, lanky, slightly stooped, with sharp Yankee features, vaguely Ichabod Crane-like in appearance — misanthropic, cynical, anguished, embittered, but arguably one of the funniest humans I had ever met, with a great love of ornamental language and the exquisite mot.

His issues with authority were even knottier than mine. And of course the stainless steel tanks would have to be thoroughly scrubbed before they would receive any juice or wine. This was before the days of relatively easy cleaning presses and the ubiquity of automatic tank washers. You can certainly use your time more productively than manually cleaning a tank, but you were never going to make great wine without attending to the infinite details. I vividly remember my first press-load of Riesling.

The cellar hand usually stands on the press in some non-OSHA-prescribed fashion, raking the must into one vacant corner of the press or another. You have to suffer for your art? Wasps of the buzzy variety know the good stuff? Stop complaining; you will always get stung in life, whether by bees, yellow jackets or by the reviews of misguided wine critics, who might erroneously mistake elegance for wispiness.

I was incredibly fortunate to have persuaded my parents to purchase some beautiful land in the magical hamlet of Bonny Doon in the Santa Cruz Mountains, which is where I lived for almost twenty years, and for me was really a kind of paradise. There was endless repetition to the work — mostly suckering, shoot-positioning and tying — but I felt an enormous sense of accomplishment; I was gently guiding my charges in the right direction and making what I imagined was a positive, if incremental contribution to wine quality.

There was one season, when the vines were still getting established, that I undertook to do all of the hoeing of the vineyard — approximately twenty-eight acres, to be precise — myself. Granted, hoeing weeds is not precisely rocket science, maybe even its exact opposite, and I certainly could have found some minimum-wage workers to do the job, but this had become a sort of obsession. The hamlet of Bonny Doon, at an elevation of ft.

The tasks are enormously repetitive and at a certain point, at least for me, life began to merge into a kind of dream-like state. To remain happy, you have to give yourself over to this repetition, exult in it, in a sense, almost as a deepening of your spiritual practice. This is Part 1 of a longer article. Maybe not enough time has gone by to really breathe the deep sigh of relief that I am longing to breathe.

I almost lost the Doon. Not because the wines were no damn good. Really, rather quite the contrary. I learned a lot about people, viz. But mostly I learned that it is a very cold world; you have to look out for yourself and cannot necessarily count on having an angel at your back simply because your cause is virtuous or your wines have much improved. Our new lender 7 has us on a relatively short leash, which is not entirely a bad thing, 8 as the very last thing we wish for is to be caught in a cash crunch, unable to promptly fulfill our obligations to our sometime long-suffering vendors.

And yet there are a number of projects that I am extremely keen to move forward and prontissimo of course, it goes without saying. These projects largely focus around getting the very ambitious Popelouchum germplasm-diversity plantation back to full-speed ahead, as this project has a non-trivial temporal horizon, which, to my great consternation, already seems to have begun to recede into the mid-distance.

Some of our distributors have been enormously successful in selling our wines; others significantly less so. What inferences might be drawn as to why the wines work some places and not in others? Dealing with wholesalers properly requires a significant amount of care and feeding. The point of all of this discussion of the vagaries of the wholesale system is that while I am personally quite fond of a number of our distributors, the reality is that excessive reliance on this channel makes us somewhat subject to the whims of fashion — are we hot or not this decade?

And more significantly, it makes us subject to any number of forces well beyond our control. Will the brilliant, sensitive and responsive fine-wine distributor with a soft spot for Rudolf Steiner, suddenly get acquired by an Evil Mega-Wholesaler from, say, a major Southern state? But, most significantly, I am just tired of all of the schlepping; I would like a simpler life, and not have to work so hard, spending so much time on airplanes and air-conditioned hotel rooms. The project is not obviously monetizable — it will take a very long time before it yields any real tangible results — but it is a supremely interesting project and one that has potentially real value to the viticultural community as well as to the larger world.

I am turning over in my head the opportunities we might be able to proffer to a potential investor. For an investment of X, perhaps you might have a grape variety named after yourself, and achieve some sort of immortality. Maybe the Bruno Koslowski grape, for example, might become the next Pinot noir? The Wanda Berkowitz grape the next Nebbiolo? To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about Violet Visions , please sign up.

Lists with This Book. This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Grape and Gravity makes me smile. Carole-Ann rated it it was ok Apr 27, Missy Martine rated it it was amazing Mar 19, Natp79 rated it it was amazing Nov 29, Amiji rated it liked it Jun 13, Krig1m rated it really liked it Feb 26, Sarah rated it it was amazing Dec 21, Gabbi rated it really liked it Jul 08, Liz Cranage rated it liked it Apr 15, Aubrey rated it it was ok Jun 15, Sandra Mraz rated it really liked it Sep 18, April rated it it was amazing Dec 06, Lynn Crain rated it it was amazing May 31, Danielle rated it liked it Jan 21, Sandy rated it really liked it Jun 15, Josie Klares rated it really liked it Nov 08, Dolce Amore rated it really liked it Aug 01, Nancy rated it really liked it Jan 22, Virginie rated it it was amazing Jun 12, Summer rated it liked it Feb 19, Angelina rated it liked it Jan 07, Will he let her leave him behind or will she choose to stay with him on Earth?

She could not enter the tower with anything holding electrical current. The paranoia quotient for this assignation was one hundred percent. On her way to Araelus Prime, Aeryn first has to complete a temporary private dance assignment on Janus But it turns into a hellish nightmare and she is trapped on Janus--until she and her dancer friend Diana become violently ill. She finds a lot more on the moon than just the competition. Beneath the violet costume, the purple lipstick, and the lilac tinted powder, Jonni Marlow is all male.

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Vylet rules by pleasure and when Gold is presented to her, she sees that he has a soul as dark as her own; but in their confrontation, who is captor and who is captive? The naked human body is the truest form of art. Gareth thinks he has blown a tire or ran over something with his truck. As he gets out to investigate, he is approached by a grubby young man who accuses Gareth of near killing him. The young man blackmails Gareth into giving him a ride to the next truck stop. Little does Gareth know what the gods have in store for him and his new companion.

When Nittya embarks on a boring mission to an unexplored galaxy, she runs into trouble. Buy Now 5 Stars Author: A human body is presented to the succubus queen who wants to know who killed him. The instant the queen sees De Vargas she has a yearning to enjoy his sexual pleasures. This story is a little disjointed. Bishop fixes her hair with her necklace in mind.

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Bob does not like her necklace. This is an intriguing story with an interesting concept as its story line. After crash landing Tara was captured and put on the auction block. Galeno finally found her, but he had to beat all the other gladiators to be able to choose Tara as his prize.