With so much schlock floating around winery tasting rooms in the form of trinkets, tee shirts, butter trays and tacky table cloths, it’s nice to come across a wine accessory that is unique, useful and beautiful. WineTrays.com produces serving trays from wine barrels that have a very elegant and handcrafted look to them. I couldn’t quite figure out what I was going to use it for. But I know I liked having it stiting on top of the wine rack…

Imagine planting a crop and knowing it will be 40 years before you can harvest its bounty. You’d have to put it in the ground while attending pre-school in order to see a return during your most productive years. It’s just this situation that has led the Portuguese to become fond of the saying, “Plant cork if you love your grandchildren.” Talk about patience. It does take a cork tree in Portugal about 40 years before it is ready to…

Yesterday, while walking around the vineyard with my graphic designer and photographer and the client (see the previous post), my client states, out of the blue, "That wind is cold…it’s coming from the North. It’s going to be colder tonight and we’ll get frost." It seemed he was talking to himself. I woke up this morning to find a nice layer of frost and ice on my car and roof of my house. I live in Glen Ellen in the…

I had a meeting yesterday on the Plaza in the Town of Sonoma yesterday. It took me five minutes to find a place to park and ended up having to walk quite a distance to get to the business on the plaza at which I was meeting. THIS IS GOOD NEWS! Clearly the tourists are back in Sonoma and in Sonoma County as a whole. And you can tell it’s tourists who are taking all my parking spaces. They are…

Christian over at Turn the Screw has, as he often does, dished out an interesting post. This time it’s about wine competitions and their usefulness. The point that Christian leans toward, but doesn’t quite say explicitly, is that wine competitions tend to reward wines that are bigger than the rest, but are not necessarily true to varietal form. It’s a good point. Having judged at a few wine competitions I can say that it is daunting work, at least for…