Corks and Caftans

Check out these beautiful glasses from Uncorked Glass Company out of Atlanta, GA. A lovely friend (and author of delightful blog, I heart mountains) turned me on to them after seeing them in an issue of Garden & Gun. Simple, elegant, but with a twist.

[Brett wearing this startling awesome and functional hat.] Do you watch Viral Video Film School? Geniusness. Especially this episode: Oddly enough, I completely endorse that brand of chardonnay. Within the context of the hat. -Carey

It’s hard to know where to start wrapping something like this up—and it certainly can’t be done in one post. My life was changed, this I know, and I have what feels like a years’ worth of personal, mental debriefing to do. [A post-fermentation pH testing.]

When I arrived at Walnut City Wineworks over a month ago, my eyes immediately fell on WF1 (white fermenter 1, we assume), a 2000+ gallon oak fermenter whose age is unknown, 25+ years maybe. She was one of the most recent additions to the facility after Michael Lundeen, the winemaker, took his post at WCW [...]

  The twelve hour days are stacking up as a flood of fruit has arrived at the winery’s doorstep over the last week. Six early fermenters of Pinot Noir that I fussed over and cared for in the weeks prior has swelled to almost sixty—a sea of fermenters, maneuvered about like a yeasty game of [...]

A stretch of perfect weather over the last week and a half basically brought harvest to a halt—the panicky need to pick fruit ahead of detrimental weather models evaporated as warm days and sun blessed the vineyards and the grapes could be left to hang. We were able to use some of the slightly less [...]

This was a day of firsts. I sat in the back of Michael’s car—4 of us heading toward the coast with no less than 5 Apple devices and 3 DSLR cameras ready to capture and communicate the day—when it occurred to me that I’ve never looked out over the Pacific Ocean. San Francisco Bay doesn’t [...]

UPS? For me? Are you 21, sir? Oregon is quite a place—it’s beautiful, of course, but the secret is the people (and the drive-through coffee huts). I haven’t opened any of the wines yet, but I wanted to thank Christine and the folks at Troon Vineyard for the king-of-all care packages. I may have gotten [...]

We’re still more than a week away from receiving any grapes from our outlying vineyards, but for my own sake, I consider my early arrival as indispensable, akin to an SAT prep course.

Nothing too exciting on the photo-front yet, but that will all change when the grapes start rolling in. Rain and cold weather early in the season has harvest running about a month behind—not a good thing when the weather typically starts to get dicey in October. If the rains starts, the grapes dilute, stress surrounds [...]

Don’t worry, I’m not actually going to do ‘marooned on an island’ numerical postings! I understand that despite my excitement, readers may grow tired of vine pictures. Me scrubbing the inside of a 3000-gallon oak barrel in my new rubber suit, on the other hand, I won’t fail to document. I met the good folks at [...]