Winemaker's Journal catalogs the joys and sorrows of making your own, growing your own & drinking your own wine. Author of forthcoming novel "About That Wine I Gave You"
Parts of the vineyard were a jungle—unruly vines, leaves thick and moist, cloaking the grapes in a humid green veil. Perfect habitat for mildew to incubate and thrive. So, doing what any good farmer must, I spent hours thinning extra shoots and pulling excess leaves, and opening the canopy, allowing the grapes to breathe. Fresh air is a great organic antidote to powdery mildew, the mostly incurable cancer of grapes.
The green clusters looked happy in the aftermath—shiny, vibrant, newborns, inhaling the morning’s cool breath under a shroud of June Gloom.
Fog seeped down the hills, down the drain of the Pacific. The sun blazed.
By afternoon, many of thos e same grapes—had burned. No trip to the ER could help them now.
In farming, there’s always something. The sun giveth and the sun taketh away. Blessed be the rays of the sun.
Still, plenty of grapes were spared, nestled in just enough shade to avoid the scorch. We’re early in the season. And despite the casualties, the 2025 vintage still holds promise—like baseball on Opening Day, full of hope, potential, waiting to unfold.
(Singed Tempranillo: Teenage grapes caught off guard by a sudden sunburst—some charred, others dreaming in green.)
He
took machete, pickax, and shovel and began hacking through the jungle behind
the house. How could there be a rainforest in parched San Diego? The original
owners had planted a green belt of ivy around the house, the one crop they
watered, leaving the kiwis to die and the orange and avocado trees to fend for
themselves.
With
the thermometer topping one hundred degrees, hot by San Diego standards, even
for dry heat, he slashed, thrusted, jabbed, swung, and dug, clearing an opening
through ivy trunks thick as trees, hollowing one out, like an ancient Sequoia, through
which Merlot Mac drove his Gator.
A
muffled rolling thunder of bombs blasting in the background from Camp Pendleton
triggered the dog’s barking. “It’s OK, boy,” the man reassured him. “They’re on
our side."
Helicopters
whirled overhead thap-thap-thap-thap-thap returning to base from sorties. His
mission on the ground – to capture and hold a piece of flat land, then clear it
so choppers could land.
In
those days, combat continued in Iraq and Afghanistan and while the troops
overseas operated in 120-degree heat, the man and his neighbors enjoyed the
comforts of home, peace and prosperity. At the height of heat in the day, he kept
fighting for the sake of the troops and swung his pickax against imaginary mangrove
trunks. Half a world away, Taliban and al-Qaeda insurgents tunneled through
mountains and U.S. forces played a life-and-death version of whack-a-mole. Toiling
in the vineyard became his moral equivalent of war and the least he could do
was work in the yard as hard as the troops overseas. To stop meant surrender
and defeat. The troops couldn’t take a break at noon, go inside, have lunch,
drink a cold beer, take a nap, and take up the hunt for the enemy in the late
afternoon. If they couldn’t rest in the heat of the day, neither would he, so
he kept up the work.
The photo, nineteen years later ... the ivy is largely in retreat, but has yet to surrender, and resurges with winter rains. The vines planted among them struggle, some bearing good fruit. As for the troops, always remembered, always thanked.
The other morning, I found this snail on my S-car and plucked him off and carried him to a safe place. if you save a snail, do you save humanity?
That afternoon at the same spot where I rescued the snail, I saw this snake, inspecting closer, saw his tail was pointed, and concluded he was one of the good guys, a gopher snake. On hot pavement in May - not a good place to be should the neighbors return in their car and run him over, I picked him up with a hoe and brought him to the middle of our vineyard, to rest in the shade. At night as we slept, he woke from his slumber and slithered off. If you save a snake, do you save humanity?
Why did I call him a good snake? I found myself harboring misguided snakeist thoughts. They are just snakes. Some have rattles, some don't. They all eat varmints. They're all good, in nature's scheme. Snake lives matter.
Tap, tap-tap-tap, a single stick
rapping a snare drum, the first drops tiptoe from the sky announcing the rainy
season, the tap-tap-tapping crescendos to two sticks then double time, the
storm accompanied with gusts of wind, hanging fronds of palms levitate, point opposite
the sea, guiding rain where to land and a path for howling wind. Pellets hit
baked clay; drops gather into puddles; hardened earth softens; gravity pulls
drops down the slope, slowed by a sprouting weed here, a clump of leaves there.
Two and two makes four, four and four makes eight, eight squared makes
sixty-four, sixty-four squared makes a movement, drops band together into a
stream, strength in numbers, the people united will never be defeated. How does
a waterdrop split a boulder and rip apart a mountain? The same way a single voice
crying in the wilderness topples a corrupt regime. One drop at a time.
The drum roll increases, rain falls
faster, droplets flow into streams, streams carry dirt particles to the back of
a retaining wall, are slowed for a moment, but not deterred. History is on
their side. Gravity is on their side. Laws of nature are on their side. Never
give up. Downward proceeding never receding water hits the wall then veers in
the direction that is down, always heading down, down, down the slope of the
hill, some seeping underground, through topsoil, penetrating clay, a superwoman-superman-superperson
passing through a concrete wall, the power of water falling from the sky, magic
water, blessed water, holy water that has been prayed for, wished for, dreamed of.
Dogs dance like children in the rain; a child-like farmer looks up to the sky and
opens his mouth to catch a sip and spins circles celebrating the water of life;
dogs rollick and roll in the mud, precious mud, rare mud; I have missed you for
a year, glorious, red, ochre, paste of mud paint, finger paint, reddish rusty magnificent
mud squishing between fingers of a farmer turned kindergartener, drawing finger
trails of mud on the stuccoed retaining wall, then shoveling, shoveling the
mud, make the paths straight, raise the berms, cut into the mountain, shape the
earth while you have the chance, take the shovel, carve a flat trail into the
hill, ouch, watch your back, oww, threw out my back, you’ll be
visiting the chiropractor, you could have hired a guy to do this work for what
you’re going to pay the doctor to crack your back, don’t look back, you could
have hired two guys for a month but you tried to save some money and it ends up
costing more, because the rain fell and the earth was soft and you had to
shovel the mud and carve the path while you could.
Who knew pet snails would become a thing during the pandemic? Here's what happened when one winemaker found a snail gorging on a young grapevine's fresh green shoots, excerpted from About That Wine I Gave You.
Spring
rains paved the way for slugs to glide along paths and some ventured up the
trunks of vines to forge on fresh greenery. When Paul found a snail in a spot
where there should have been baby grapes, he plucked it from the leaves and
crushed it with his foot. Snails were everywhere, in birds of paradise, roses, and shoots, and when he found one, he either crushed it, threw it onto the road
with a splat, or sprinkled salt and watched it squirm, writhe, and melt. Paul
noticed Bluey the dog chew one of the salted snails and lick his lips.
Bluey
and Paul were hungry so he lit a fire to cook a leg of lamb and after the meat
met the flame, Paul remembered when Marie-France took him to an escargot
farm in France. He collected plump snails from the garden and placed them on the
barbeque. Paul admired the well-mannered dogs of France who behaved under
restaurant tables and wished Bluey would behave like a French dog instead of a
bull-in-the-china-shop Tasmanian devil. At least he’ll eat as well as French
dogs. He offered Bluey a flame-roasted escargot. As Bluey smacked his lips,
Paul heard his name.
“Who’s
there?”
“Paul,
why are you persecuting me?” he heard, and at that moment, comprehended his
cruelty. Ashamed and humbled, from that day, whenever he found a snail on a
flower, vine, or walkway, he picked it up and gently placed it out of harm’s
way. He was transformed from a killer of snails to their protector.
His
new-found pacifism didn’t stop with snails. The next day when he lifted the top
off an irrigation lid, he found a family of mice, terrified at their discovery.
Normally, the shovel would have been called upon to do what shovels do. He let
them be. Next, he stopped setting gopher traps. Then, he became a vineyard
pacifist, saying kindness towards all people begins with kindness to all
creatures. The dog, however, having tasted the best of French gastronomy,
continued to chew raw snails in the shell, to the point of secretly following
Paul when he was on a rescue mission, devouring the snails Paul saved.
To the Scent Sommelier and Faithful who walk the Way of
the Vine,
And to all those who would learn more,
Greetings from the vineyard!
It’s time to prepare, to cut into the side of the mountain
to make the paths straight!
Don vestments of purple and violet in preparation for the season. Paint your nails and toes shades of dark grapes.
For the next six weeks, open one celebratory bottle per week, remember and honor:
·Prophets
·Shepherds
·Angels
·Mary & Joseph
·The Birth
·A New Beginning
·The Wise Women
Week One: Prophets live among us as our venerable
elderly, the Greatest Generation, and their offspring, the Lucky Few. Let us toast
them with a well-aged wine, our 2009 Merleatage. It’s like sinking into an old
leather couch, absorbing aromas of tobacco our elders smoked and many wisely gave
up, as they impart their wisdom to us. Prepare yourself for the season. Honor
the prophets. Be still - listen for the voice crying in the wilderness.
Week Two: Shepherds are the front-line employees in service
industries who keep us fed and going. They tend our flocks. They harvest fruits
and vegetables in the field. Pick grapes from the vines. They work in
slaughterhouses, preparing meat, defeathering and dismembering chickens. They
pick the white flesh from crabs; descale and debone fish at the market; labor
at grocery stores. They drive the buses and the trains and attend us on planes.
The salt of the earth. They were chosen to hear the good news first announced
by angels and faithfully proceeded to bear witness. To remember them, sip the 2017
Aglianico wine, which is endowed with the strongest structure of any of our
wines, the highest acids, the sturdiest backbone, the ripest, darkest of grapes.
And as the Aglianico will age beyond our earthly lives, so too will modern-day
shepherds inherit the earth.
Week Three: Angels are the nurses and doctors who
care for us, instruments of the Lord’s healing power on earth. An angel’s kiss
on the forehead is a blessing, as light and joyous as a sip of 2017 Tempranillo
– the elixir of angels in heaven and caregivers on earth.
Week Four: May our souls magnify the lord. Mary the Magnificent,
the Magnificat. The handmaiden, who with Joseph her betrothed, both, full of
faith, accepted their callings, accepted their duties. To honor their faithfulness
is Petite Sirah, the color of the Bishop’s ceremonial advent vestments, the
wine that magnifies the grape.
Christmas Eve: As the word becomes flesh and dwells among us,
celebrate the birth with blood extracted from a stone, grape juice extracted
from sun-stressed raisins clinging to vines gripping a craggy slope. King of kings. Queen of Queens. Wine
of wines. Port of ports. This is the treat Santa Clause, and you, will appreciate
after climbing down the chimney. The late harvest, fortified, 2016 Zinfandel
port, an oasis in a bottle vinted in the time of drought.
Week Six: They carried gifts of gold, frankincense,
and mir – three wise men from the east, bearing gifts for the Messiah, arriving
on the Twelfth Night, King’s Day, the epiphany. The most treasured gift may
have been a fragrance, frankincense. Today’s bearers of wisdom are the wise
women who bear us, nurture us, labor for us, and who lead us. Honor these women
with the most fragrant wine we know, the 2008 Petit Verdot. May its magic
continue to inspire and strengthen you this day, throughout the year, and beyond
the time when we meet again.
"Open Book" took on a new meaning today when the host of the same-titled program revealed his own personal struggles, like an open book.
It all started at the beginning of the pandemic when he broadcast a live video stream each day at 5:15 pm Chicago time choosing to read a paragraph or a page or two from a book, often dusty, from his library then expound on it, inviting authors, historians, and others for Q&A to a live audience of 100 or so people online, an intimate setting for a man with over a million followers, inviting questions, calling us by name.
You know his voice. If you listen to NPR on Saturday mornings, he is the host of Weekend Edition. He is a voice of reason in an age of insanity.
To express our thanks, one of the regular viewers, Peggy Shannon (author of the forthcoming book Churches of Paris) contacted other regulars and invited them to answer what does Open Book mean to you? She collected the answers, bound them, then delivered the present.
So it was we gave thanks, letters of gratitude, today to Scott, and Open Book, and to his family. And to all those who feed us, transport us, shelter us, and comfort us. Caroline called for the tissues. At least a box was needed to soak up the tears of those who read from the opened book, not to mention those who watched in real time on Twitter and Periscope.
For the family who gives so much, Happy Thanksgiving, and thank you for your gifts to us.
______________________________________
Dear Scott,
In the early days of Twitter in 2009, I heard your touching
essay on the radio about a close family friend of yours who passed away. I
tweeted you about the afterlife. You responded. Who does that? You made me a
fan for life.
When the Covid-19 pandemic started, I said to myself, “I
hope Scott never retires. We need his voice of reason and reassurance on Saturday
mornings.”
And then,
One day,
My phone sent me a message: “Scott Simon is live….”
I clicked…
It was Open Book.
What it means to me is new ideas, learning new things,
things I should have learned in school, for example, the writings of James
Baldwin.
After your session with a historian about Robert E. Lee, I
called my dad who had attended Robert E. Lee Elementary School in Richmond, Virginia
in the 1930s. “Dad, there’s this program you should watch. It’s with Scott
Simon, you know, the NPR radio host on Saturday mornings….” This is an example why truth matters, because
dad grew up with the theology Lee was a great man, a loyal statesman to his
country, Virginia.
How Open Book inspired me is like this:
On Valentine’s Day this year I completed a manuscript that
took one year to write and four years to finish, because of wine, or the effects
thereof, having a daytime job, a thousand vines, and a wife to care for…
The book was finished, but my godmother’s eyes had failed,
and mom’s eyes weren’t as good as they once were, so I had an idea, inspired by
you. I would read them my book, a chapter at a time, and this became my project
during the lockdown, during the pandemic, that at happy hour, I would open a
bottle of wine, talk about how it was made, and read a chapter of the book. And
when it was June 6th, I’d talk about what that date meant to me, and
read the chapter that featured D-Day events and characters, and then when you
and Caroline talked about your experiences during Open Book about
Normandy and D-Day, I realized we were connected by more than Twitter and
Internet signals but by life events.
The last chapter of my book reading recording experiment
acknowledged all those who had inspired the work with a huge shoutout to you,
who gave me the idea to read it aloud, record it, so those whose eyes were bad
could listen, and with their ears, see. Here’s a link to it on YouTube: https://youtu.be/2EXK_nVfyCY?t=57
I don’t have your address, so I can’t send you wine. But if
I could, this is the note I’d send to accompany the bottles. Since Peggy has
given me an impossible deadline of writing this tonight, when the wine bottle
is now half-full, I could think of no better essay to send than what I wrote to
another pair of Chicagoans ten years ago:
Dear
First Lady and Mr. President,
For
months, there has been nothing but dreary news in the media about the economy.
No city or town has been passed over by the damage and pain. Even in our
semi-rural, gentlewomen and gentlemen farmer community, we have seen neighbors’
homes foreclosed, families uprooted, shops on Main Street abandoned. I am
reminded of what scripture tells us about the biblical patriarch Joseph and his
dreams; he foresaw seven years of famine followed by seven years of abundance.
In ancient Egypt, after seven years of drought, the rains returned and so did the
crops. And from the depths of the 1932 Depression, the United States emerged to
become the world’s greatest economic power. The lessons from the past speak to
our time. We will rise again.
We
come and go – but the land is always here, always serene. You should visit this
area sometime and experience it – to park your burdens at the entrance for a
day and reconnect with Nature and the Earth. In the vineyard among the vines, there
are answers to all dilemmas. All things have their seasons. After midnight’s
darkness, the sun will rise again. After winter’s cold, spring’s thaw will
follow. We spent the cold, dark winter pruning vines, cutting back, cutting expenses
as well. In winter, the vineyard is barren. Just as the sun must rise and the
swallows return to Capistrano – this Recession, it too shall pass.
Yesterday
in the vineyard, I came across a shoot – a green shoot – with fragile green leaves
– signaling the start of spring. Then I saw another, and another. Green shoots,
everywhere. Mr. President, just as there are green shoots in the vineyard,
there are green shoots sprouting in the economy. The recession is ending. Growth
is on the way. Stay the course and keep the faith. We are keeping hope alive.
As leaves fall from vines, canes protrude
as skeleton bones. At year’s end, only a few leaves cling, except for two green
rows at the block above the leach field, fueled by organic matter powering
perpetual growth that faithfully produce a second crop picked December 31st,
a dozen grapes eaten during the twelve strokes of midnight to usher in luck for
the new year.
“It’s
OK to let go,” Paul told the last leaves gripping vines for their lives. “Your work
is finished. Have faith spring will come again as surely as a rainbow after a
storm.”
With
last rites read, the leaves took a deep breath, exhaled, and when the next
circling air current arose, released their grip and were borne skywards by a wind
funnel, and the vines closed their eyes and fell asleep, their songs silent for
a long winter siesta, the vineyard, a cemetery of stick figures, crosses, and memories.
On Thanksgiving Day, he bottled the
blush wine bucketed away in a fire brigade from the Tempranillo juice immediately
after crush with no added sulfites. The pink wine had notes of apples, light
citrus, brambles – a descriptor Jayne would appreciate – and was as delightful and
addictive as wine could ever be. Once opened, a bottle never survived until dawn,
and often not the next hour, an obstacle to productivity and gateway to
Saturday afternoon siestas. It was fresh, fun, and good.
Paul thought of Jayne as he bottled and
admired the photo of her in Central Park surrounded by flowers inspiring the name
for this batch. Upon a bottle he affixed a print of the photo and wrote with metallic
ink in flowing cursive letters:
Jayne’s
Roses
As for a second bottle to fill the two-shipper
case, he searched his cellar and found a case of Petit Verdot hidden in a corner
– the fragrant wine that brought them together. He wrote on that bottle:
To the one
who understands Petit Verdot
To the one
who understands me
Enjoy the
wine that changed our lives forever
He opened a bottle of Petit Verdot to
taste how it had aged. The initial aroma was musty, perhaps a bit of mildew from
the South in summer, with barnyard overtones, so uncharacteristic of the aromatic,
floral wine this was supposed to be. Then, he tasted, and, oh, the taste was
there. If you get by the smell, you’ve
got it licked.I hope she likes a bit
of earthiness in her wine. She’s a wholesome, earthy woman. She’ll get it.
He wrote her a note and slipped it into
the box:
Dear Jayne,
I found a
case of Petit Verdot! From the same vintage as the first bottle I gave you you described
as fragrant as dew on a honeysuckle midsummer morning. The wine has changed in
the years since our first encounter and I suppose we have too. A little
earthier now, a bit more mature, a bit mellower, and the taste is still
delicious.
About the
blush wine … it’s made from the ripest Tempranillo grapes separated from the
dark skins leaving behind a light, pink elixir, the color of the unicorn of
your dreams. I call it Jayne’s Roses, as fresh and as vibrant and as innocent and
as fun as the first time we met. After you sip it, I think you’ll want more.
This is how I felt the first time I met you and every time we meet… I want more
…to see you again, more. Again and again. Merry Christmas!
Jayne replied with an email December 26th,
Boxing Day:
Our adventure started in 2004 in the garage pressing 1,000 lbs. of grapes by hand & paw, thus began Blue-Merle Winery in San Diego, California. In 2006, "Bluey"--the Australian Shepherd Blue-Merle who rules the winery--had outgrown life in the city. So, we downsized the house, upsized the land and moved to Blue-Merle Country, a land where dogs run free, blessed with pomegranates & persimmons, olive trees & macadamias, and prowled by bobcats, coyotes and an occasional mountain lion. Continuously battling the challenges of steep terrain, rattlesnakes, drought, and wildfires (not to mention vine-eating gophers and ground squirrels), we planted our vineyard in 2007 making hundreds of mistakes along the way. Join us and a cast of characters on our continuous adventures and musings as we "Grow Your Own, Make Your Own, Drink Your Own Wine."