OLYWA

I've just been in Olympia visiting family and friends, eating razor clams at Ben Moores and drinking, admittedly, more beer than wine. When in Oly I always make a point of sampling some of fish tale's finest and this trip was no exception. I used the Fishbowl as both a lunch spot and as a mobile office (with great beer on tap and free wireless!). Of their beers I tried this time I gravitated towards their Organic IPA.

Outside of Fish Tale I was able to check on the '07 wahluke slope syrah and things are shaping up. It's a lighter bodied and colored syrah than your average new world - more cherry than plum. so far - i like it - still trying to figure out whether to leave it in the barrel for 6 more months or bottle in October.

BobblePunx

Just enjoy this...



And don't steal our idea of winemaker bobbleheads!

Anderson Valley Video

I was in AV this past weekend for a wedding and thought I'd check out how our "dream grapes" were doing. I hope the video I shot shows just how smoky the fires have left the valley.

Spent Saturday tasting. The wines and prices (including good wine maker discount) are nice at Handley. I was very impressed with the staff and Gewurtz at Toulouse. Calvin, my son, still talks about the Toulouse dogs Tess and ME. Didn't get a chance to talk with Josh Chandler at Lazy Creek because they are up to there eyeballs in dirt building a new cave.

The smoke was thick, the weather warm and the roads were dusty.

Will our Pinot be smokey?

Fire Fire Fire.

California is on fire and grapes are in danger. Some prime Pinot grapes in Santa Cruz got blazed a few weeks back. First the freeze, then the drought and now the fires? WTF!

There is a link to the fire closest to our grapes. MAP.

Hope you like your Pinots on the smokey side!

does punk rock age as well as wine?

Hell Yes!

Last night i went to hang w/my buddy Andy as he's in town playing bass w/the Melvins and Jello Biafra. This was the first of two nights at the Great American celebrating Jello's 50th bday. The show started with the Melvins play "Mangled Demos" (circa '83) in which they played songs from their "hardcore days" with original drummer Mike Dillard and Dale playing bass and ended with the Melvins and Jello Biafra playing a combination of music they'd collaborated on and small number of Dead Kennedys songs. All the bands were in fine form and the Melvins/Biafra combo kicked ass - both on their newer songs and on the Dead Kennedys songs. It was awesome to see Andy and it was great to see proof that punk rock can age well when left in the right hands.

On a personal note - the first time I can remember seeing the Melvins live was 1986 - it was this show:

April 25, 1986 Olympia, WA - GESSCO Hall w/ Malfunkshun, Metal Death Squad, 64 Spiders

And I remember the whole show vividly as it was one of the best (if not the best) shows I saw at GESSCO hall. As a tribute to those early times here's a great clip of the Melvins from public access tv circa 1984:



and someone already got videos up from the shows (got to love youtube!):

What's in My Cellar?

Not too much actually. I tend to buy and drink in the same day. However, the folks at CellarTracker have made it easy to keep up on want is down in the garage and when I should be drinking it.

The site layout is a bit cluttered, but it could be very cool if they put some time and money into it. The reviews range from simple to overly complex. But it's always nice to see what someone else thinks of a wine you own.

See if you can best my 147 bottles with a value of $3200. It won't be difficult.

Support them.

the garage (aka pinot crushpad 2008)

Punx Meet Randall Grahm

Not much happens in Glen Park. It's quiet, cozy and still in the City. We like it that way.

All that changed last Wednesday. Randall Grahm, yes the Big RG, came to our little village to pour some of his wines at the Canyon Market. I could compare this to Willie Mays visiting Bozman, Montana. Well, maybe not that special, but still very cool.

I dug into my cellar to find the two bottles of Cigare I am holding for a special meal, grabbed my camera and a Sharpie and headed over with Aaron (the other punk). No one was there! Can you believe that? I wasn't expecting lines around the block, but still, this is the Rhone Ranger.

I wasn't sure what to expect from him. Would he dismiss us as stupid punx? Would he have to call security to have us removed from the store? Or would he become an honorary punk? Well, it turns out RG is super cool and we got to bend his ear about winemaking for about 30 minutes. He shared lots of information, stories and techniques. He told us lots about barrels. This guy knows his stuff! He is a big fan of going native with the yeasts and told us how they do a starter yeast.

He had no problem signing my two bottles, shaking hands and posing for this photo.

The awesome folks at Cayon Market expressed interest in selling our wines down the road. To think that Deux Punx and Bonny Doon wine's could share a shelf...

Randall is now an Honorary Punk! Just don't ask him to stage dive.

Summer Wine

In the vineyards things are humming along while here in the city a couple small time wine makers are planning for our '08 wines and drinking plenty of summer wines:



So for you, the select few longandwineyroad readers, what are you drinking for your summer wines?

Down here we're all over the german varietal whites and the pinot rosés.

girl, i wanna take you to a wine bar

wine bars are popping up like starbucks these days. they are in the fanciest and sleaziest neighborhoods. i know you, our 4 readers, want to know what do the punx think of wine bars?

well, we don't think of them. we are married and don't need to show off our big fat bordeauxs. we don't like white zin (or most red zins either). we have no need for down-temp beats. we aren't looking to chill.

if, and only if, the deux punx go to a wine bar, the adolecents will be cranked to 11, the toilet will be broken, the staff surly and the wine better than you could imagine. the bar would have a kick-ass name like "the squat" or "club me." think of CBGBs meets Randall Grahm.

so there. shoot me!

misc rambling on taste and progress

taste...

I've been thinking a lot about wine tastes recently as we've been focusing more on what we're drinking in terms of it's relation to what we like to drink and what we'd like to make. There are a lot of opinions out there (of course - the internet does a great job of acting as an exemplifier of the old adage "opinions are like assholes...") about what wines should taste like, how much alcohol they should have in them, how much fruit, what they should smell like, what they should look like in the glass, etc, etc, etc... And to that point there are plenty examples of writings out there from critics, for critics and against critics on the value of one person's opinion on a wine, wine variety and/or wine region. Of late we've even seen writings that go so far as to suggest that a whole wine region should get busy pouring their wines down their drains. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that when someone says that they liked wine 'A' over wine 'B' that chances are they liked wine 'A' over wine 'B' and it may or may not have anything to do with the pleasure you'd receive from wine 'A' or the relative value to you it would have in comparison to wine 'B'.

Where am I going with this???

Great question! And I'm not sure.

As we've been tasting wines with our own wine goals in mind we've noticed some huge similarities in our tastes as well as some real differences. This has caused me to think a lot about what I actually like in a wine and whether I can actually qualify it in some meaningful or interpretable manner let alone reproduce it. I believe for the most part the answer is "NO", I can not honestly describe what I like in a wine because it has very little to do with my vocabulary and everything to do with my senses or taste and smell at any given time. For me this can be affected by weather, food, time of day, mood, the current state of my own pH and quite possibly history. By history I mean I have a preconceived notion of what I do and don't like and this will most certainly have an impact on how I feel about a wine when I am drinking it. To any of you that think this is not true for yourselves I'd say (in the most considerate and respectful way possible) "bullshit". If this wasn't true we wouldn't have such a thing as a blind tasting.

Where does this leave us; the novice winemakers?

Well... Optimistic!

Optimistic because chances are good that we will make a wine that one person will like just as much as another does not. Our hope, of course, is that we are the former and not the latter "someones". Towards this I'm relatively confident that we'll enjoy the wine that we create even if for nothing else than the fact that our history with this wine, like all cases of propinquity, will have much to do with the enjoyment we receive from it. This does, of course, mean that when we eventually tell you how great our wine is you should assume that we are full of shit, buy it anyways 'cause you like us and, well..., decide for yourselves.

progress...

Not a lot has changed in the last week other than the fact that I think we are leaning towards forgoing the whole custom crush idea and doing the whole thing by ourselves. There are number of reasons for this but the biggest one we keep coming back to is the ability to be hands-on during the whole process. This hands-on approach really is one primary reasons that both of us have taken the transition from just drinking to making wine and to give this up to someone else (regardless of their being forced to follow your protocol) takes a good deal of the fun, challenge, risk and learning away from us. We haven't given up completely on the idea of doing this "out-of-house" but chances are good that this will be a truly diy effort from beginning to end.

What this means - you'll see a lot more photos like this:

and a lot less like this:

wine for steak and eggs

being friday, i am wondering what i am doing this weekend. more importantly i am wondering what i am going to drink and eat this weekend. last night's wine has me a bit under the weather and i need some steak and eggs.

so here's a question for you (all 2 of you who read this blog): what is the perfect wine to go with steak and eggs? best answer gets to have breakfast with me somewhere down the road.


good luck!

bottles and barrels and wine

Wednesday morning I went and picked up 59 cases of burgundy bottles from Saintsbury up in Sonoma. There were supposed to be 100 cases available but two of the flats were bordeaux bottles so... Yes, you are right, if you are saying "it's a little early for bottles" what with grapes still a twinkle in their bud's eyes but at $4 per case we needed to jump on them. The other great thing about this is it saves us from having to decide what kind of bottles we want! Of course we'll need more bottles for the syrahs and depending on what comes out of the Anderson Valley vineyard, at that point I think we'll jump right back onto the wine classifieds and if we end up w/multiple bottle types we'll be all the better for it.

After Saintsbury and dropping off the uhaul Dan and I made our way up to Petaluma to talk shop with the first, and most likely choice, of the two custom crush places that have considered working with us. It was a great meeting, we discussed the space, the tools, the protocol, the wine process, their vineyard and we sampled a couple of their latest workings from the barrel. Two very clean classic California pinots and a big spicy cab that I'm eager to see bottled. After that we headed up to Sebastopol to visit crush facility # two. This was a much larger full-facility custom crush with a number of highly respectable clients. This was also a great visit, getting the rundown on the facility, the process, the way they work, some history and some general bullshitting about winemaking, this year's historic frosts and the industry in general. As great of a visit as it was we walked away realizing that it probably isn't optimal for the small scale of what we are trying to do this year.
All-in-all a productive and enjoyable day. A couple steps closer!

deux punx

So we bought deuxpunx.com.

Does this mean we are going to name our wines deux punx? Do you have a better idea? No really. Look at these two and tell me if you can think of a more fitting name?

It's saturday, it's sunny and I'm feeling, well, optimistic

I received wine from the Humboldt vineyard yesterday; 2002,2003,2004(two) and 2005 releases. Not being able to wait for Dan (my bad) I had to bring home one of the two 2004's. Instead of rambling on about a complex pinot with a brambly raspberry, almost green peppery nose and a great balanced mouth-fill that hit you with nice acids, under-ripe berries, a little earth, a little mineral/stone and just a hair of vanilla I'll cut to the chase and say, well, it was good and it all came in at 13.0% Alc. This is, of course, significant to us as it's from the vineyard we are getting our grapes from and it tells us the best way it could (by tasting) that you can produce good pinot from this vineyard. Now, of course, it means that it's up to us to not screw it up!

So where does this leave us?

We've got grapes, they should be good and we're still looking for somewhere to produce our wine.

On the crush front after many supportive but rejecting replies (per Dan's post below) we've found a couple folks that have expressed willingness to work with us, both deciding to make exception to their normal minimum requirements in order to give the little guys a shot. This is a bigger deal than it might sound like as the sheer lack of any real scale means we are going to be more work per dollar for these guys than another, less-macro sized, customer would be. One in Petaluma and one in Sebastopol. On Wednesday we are going to press palms, check out the facilities and discuss a few more of the details such as:

1) what kind of day-to-day involvement can we have
2) what kind of consulting (if any) will be available to us
3) when things are all added up, what kinds of per case costs are we really looking at
4) what kinds of flexibilities are there in scale, style, approach, etc...

Once we gathered all of this it's then time for Dan and I to go back, crunch numbers, discuss logistics, risks, pros and cons and decide whether we are going to work with one of these to facilities or if we do indeed take over a chunk of Dan and Terry and Calvin's basement/garage and go for it ourselves.

So for those of you scoring (uh, I mean keeping score) at home:

Wahluke Slope Syrah
We have grapes
We have a willing basement
We've got the minimal equipment necessary to pull it off
We have one 1 year old barrel

Humboldt Pinot Noir
We have grapes
We have the promise of a crush facility
We are nuts enough to even ponder taking this on in a garage in Glen Park
We have one new barrel reserved and will secure the additional neutral/s later this summer

It's starting to look like our plans aren't out to pasture after all.

The Garage

Our goal is still to find a crush facility and winemaker who is willing to let us get dirty, learn a lot, but still step in and help us out. No easy task.

After constant rejection from almost every custom crush facility within a 2-hour drive we are seriously considering moving our operation to Dan's garage. Why not? Aaron is making top notch Syrah at his parents pad in Olympia, WA. It's not just a numbers game, it's about having control. Giving up our parking spot for a few weeks wouldn't be so bad. Neighbors and friends could supply sorting labor. We could build an insulated room that could keep our wine cool during the cold soak and heat up during fermentation. Right?

Here's hoping/praying that a crush facility reads this blog and takes pity on us.

The WineStation

I had my first experience with modern wine pouring apparatus over the weekend, trying out Napa Technology's WineStation at Copia. After a lunch at Taylor's and some tomato plant purchases from the Copia spring plant sale Jenne and I wandered inside to do some window shopping and look around. We had a free $5 pour card that I just HAD to use (I then quickly had to purchase another $10 card to meet my needs) and they had a Pinot on "tap" from Central Otago. Beyond being the southernmost wine growing region in the world Central Otago has also created a reputation for itself as one of (if not the) best places to grow pinot in the southern hemisphere. I've been kind of fascinated by the region of late, perhaps because is so far on the fringes, but this was my first time actually tasting anything from there. I sampled the 2005 Wild Earth Pinot Noir and I was very pleased with it. A nice brambly pinot with a great slightly earthy nose and just the right amount of fruit. I tried a few other Pinots too but I won't go into that.

Per the WineStation, the geek in me liked it, there was something very "adult-amusement park" about wandering around with a little cash card and sampling wines at will. I'm not sure if you've seen or used these before (they are turning up in more and more places) but this one had 3 different pour sizes for each wine (taste, half-glass, full-glass) and you just insert you card and with glass up to the appropriate spout press the pour you want. It seems to work well, maintains freshness by inserting a layer of argon gas after each pour and gives the wine drinker more of a free reign to wander through the selection at their pace. On the downside, you lose the interaction with a human that is a)generally nice and b)a source of more information/education on the wines they are pouring. I also managed to hit two empty bottles, thus regaining the "human interaction" while she had to re-load the machine. I'm guessing from her point of view, in this case, the machine was equal parts assistant in pouring lots of little samples and nuisance in requiring a bit more work than simply opening the next bottle.
napa, fall 2007:

If you ever find yourself wandering in Napa and can stop by Copia I'd recommend checking this out. See Napa Technology for more info on the WineStation on their website.

Also: Thanks to Peter for correcting me on the manufacturer of the wine dispensers at Copia - I'd previously noted Enomatic. Though they look cool too they are not the units used at Copia.

Crushed?

We hope so.

We've just been hit by the backlash of the same frost that many in the industry have felt first hand, the vineyard in AV we were to be sourcing from has had 75% crop damage. As much as this has pained us it has been an absolute disaster for those who's livelihoods are tied to yields. With yields expected to be way below normal folks won't be able to make per acre nearly what they would have made if our spring had been more, well, spring-like.

In the last week we'd seen this coming and as the proverbial low guys on the grape totem pole had started working on securing grapes from other, equally exciting, sources. What we had not seen coming in all of this was the possibility of losing our crush facility to the doubled output of a much larger competing crush client. Ouch!!

What does this tell one about starting out in winemaking (or perhaps winemaking in general)? That the most important part of the wine plan is the backside of the paper it was written on. Believe you me when dealing w/weather, competing clients, etc, etc... the little guy has to be agile, agile, agile.

So as well as scouring all of the obvious spots for premium coastal CA pinot grapes we've started looking in some not so obvious places. This looking has steered us towards Humboldt County and a small vineyard that has a short history of producing the grapes behind some outstanding wines. Tonight we shared an '06 pinot from the neighboring vineyard and were both blown away by the balance of fruit, acid, funk and bramble that we are both such great fans of. We came to the conclusion that this was one of the better CA Pinots either of us have had in a long time, it was that great burgundy with the perfect addition of CA fruit. This has helped to fuel our excitement in the location and what one can produce from it.

And as such we have to say: "until we meet again Guntly Road."

Do We Have Grapes?

Right now we are nervous. A huge frost swept through Northern CA last weekend and damaged a lot of the wine crop. Early reports are 10-15% of the vines in Sonoma are damaged. Our Pinot supplier sent an email saying "I guess I've got a lot of frost damage!" Not good. Not good at all.

We are scrambling to find out what the damage is and if it means we are SOL with our AV fruit. What's our backup plan? Do we look farther North (Humboldt)? Do we look South (Santa Cruz)? How much are we willing to pay? Does anyone even read this blog? Yes, those are all important questions. Answers are coming...



'

What's in a Name?

Too much! Aaron and I are bouncing names for our labels and wines back and forth. This is like naming a rock band. The good thing is that only the two of us need to agree.

At some point we'll get it down to about 5 we like and maybe post them and find out what you guys like. We want something that captures our DIY spirit, our punk rock backgrounds, our sarcastic humor and our addiction to good wines. 1-2-Press You!

Why sweat this task? Wellllllllll. You can't start a website without a name/label. Everyone we meet in the business wants to know our wine name. We want a name people will say "cool name" when they hear it.

I used the term "inkling" on my past wines. We don't think this name works with Pinot Noir. We want our wines to be lighter and classic; not dark and inky.


More to come!

Mendocino on 4.20.2008

We were up in Anderson Valley on 4.20 for their other highly sought after export (wine, and more specifically Pinot Noir). We were able to meet up with the winery proprietors and taste a little of their released wines as well as a barrel sample from an '07 pinot from our vineyard source. During the visit we were also able to begin the conversation on planning, approach, logistics and our wines target profile. It was great to be able to press palms and get the ball rolling in person.

The other exciting part of this visit for us was to be able to "meet" the vineyard. This meeting was not unlike other first dates in which we drove back and forth nervously in front of the vineyard before finally getting up the nerve to step out of the car and introduce ourselves (take some pictures). More like we came to the realization that nothing in Anderson Valley is clearly marked; this meant we drove back up forth and up and down the same dusty stretch until we finally honed in on what we are certain has to be the vineyard that holds our grapes to be.




As there isn't much that can be told about two dudes driving up and down some dusty roads in Northern California I think I'll let a couple photos speak the story. The one thing I will say is that this is absolutely beautiful country and I am more than appreciative of being able to take part in a project that will require my attendance up here.

And to give you a better idea of what your working with: