Goodie goodie!

Spending a long weekend with good friends and hot air balloons...the perfect time for Grape Hill.  Cannot believe that it has been six months.  But the back is feeling good and I am so ready for joy!  Dinner at jimgermanbar Thursday, hanging out and taking walks Friday, then art walk and dinner at Brasserie and a play at Whitman College.  Saturday, dinner is at Big Table with fifteen of us, paella by John of Graze, good guy, appetizers by Sue and dessert is all mine.  Great wine, friends, hopefully nice evening weather.  Bliss.

It takes all sorts.

Maybe all showers should be outdoors?  Showers can be really enjoyable, yet most often they seem to be a utilitarian purpose.  An outdoor shower is an event.  Baths, too.  Add a candle and bubbles and a good bath is a nice activity.  Haven't tried watching TV from in the bath...does this add to the experience or detract?  Multi-tasking is a lot like too many things inside a room...less is so often more.  I just saw a car commercial that shows two separate flip-down lcd screens so each child in the back seat can watch a separate program.  Is that good? 

This is probably heresy, since hand-held devices are certainly the newest and baddest religion of all these days, but a device-free sit down dinner each night might save more than one American family from implosion.  I still maintain...we should have dropped off-the-grid laptops into Afghanistan and offered free HBO for everyone.  Hulu, too.  Let the Taliban try to stop that momentum!  Don't know what is more compelling and more dangerous, too, the heroin coming out from Afghanistan or the 24/7 electrified existences that we are doing to ourselves?

Odd stuff.

I'm still losing weight, on purpose, which is great. But after having been on diets so many times in my life, it seems unreal that I am losing lots of weight without really dieting at all. With the back still recovering from surgery, I cannot even attribute this to exercising like mad. In fact, I have not exercised since December and still am down 42 pounds.


All that I have been doing is eating differently. Fewer second helpings. Spiced popcorn or fruit for snacks. Generally avoiding fatty foods, processed sugars, processed flours.  Definitely missing great cheeses if I am missing anything.  Not missing most meats.  Easily going for brown rice and whole wheat flours except during sushi.  Frozen yogurt rather than ice cream.  Considering the benefits, this is it for the rest of my life.  Looking to get pretty doggone slender and take the strain off my well-worn back. 

The saddest part of all this is the notable higher cost of these foods.  Healthy eating is so much more expensive than just filling up. Fish costs are insane.  Quality veggies, too.  This is not right!  I'm not any zealot, but my own body is now telling me, every day, that  everyone should have access to affordable healthy foods.  When I think of the societal expenses of shitty foods versus the lower medical costs of reducing diabetes and heart ailments, possibly vision problems, sexual problems, and even cancer...we should be taxing the crap out of sugar and fat-laden processed foods until healthy alternatives are cheaper.  Did North Carolina tobacco ever kill as many people as New Jersey food science?

Curse you, Red Baron!

Actually, this "Red Baron" is my bad back, which, I hope has been shot from the skies to never return! Four months of pain that flat out knocked me down and shut me up...groans aside.  Surgeons are a good thing.  Even if we go broke getting Liliana through med school, having a surgeon in the family sounds very reassuring.
Grape Hill has been renting so often again that we need to reserve time to get there. I have not been over since November, but still wonder if my back can take the four hour drive? At least others are enjoying my beautiful spot! We are going to need to treat Grape Hill differently and reserve our own times months in advance.  It's so sad having to tell people who really Get It and love Grape Hill that there isn't any time available for them.  At this rate, it may become necessary to reserve many months in advance.  I suppose we could raise the rental fees, but I hate that! It isn't about that at all.
So, I barrel-tasted the wines from two syrahs and a one cab this week.  Totally glyceral with bright cherries on the cab along with hints of mint and cedar. The syrahs were divergent and they should not have been different.  I have so much to learn.  One was brooding and backward, the other was much more inviting, with smoked meats and both blue and black fruit.  Damn me if I turn into a winemaker, and damn me if I don't.

Swimming upstream.

I try to make some improvements every year.  It was the new windows last year, and the outdoor shower.  Sue is wanting to see some landscaping right around the house.  We debate about that one, as I like the raw, unfinishedness and the open, agricultural quality.  Just don't cotton to much citified elements here.

This year, the plan is to pour a new slab connecting the front patio to the south-facing view.  Doubt that, this year, I will get around to putting in the arbor and grapevines over the new patio, but it will come, it will come.

The 2009 cabernet, "Liliana", is embarrassing me.  I can't quite accept that I made wine this wonderful and instead have decided that I lack all objectivity where the wine named for our lovely daughter is concerned. 

Labels

The 2009s are shaping up nicely and so are the labels! A very fine graphics professional is working on this as a trade. Seems like we are doing more trading than before, trading houses for vacations, trading skills, trading ideas.  I like it a lot. Still, this has me wondering whether this is good or bad? Is the US turning rapidly into a society that will soon look much more like a developing nation? I have always loved turning garages and barns into housing. I love mopeds, home gardens & pea patches, and fixing things myself or learning to fix them with the help of my friend, Bob. But will our self-image adapt so that, as materialism declines, we retain the American optimism that I so much love? I digress.

Labels. From the start, "Boginvilla" was suggested umpteen times for the name of our winery...long ago crossing the line between clever and banal.  I was thinking to keep things simple and classy, with just minimal writing on the BOGIN label.  But I was rightly trumped as everone loves the draft labels that are celebrating the land with some views to the horizon.  So, now it looks like BOGIN wine will also display a sense of Grape Hill.

Four wines are aging now, ahead of blending in a year.  We have "Liliana", a complex cabernet build from multiple yeast fermentations out from the single block from Little Vineyard.  The Twins, Shane, a Cab-dominant blend with syrah and Connor, a Syrah-dominant blend with cab. The Walla Walla Bing Bang, the unoaked fruit bomb 100% Syrah.

At some time in the future I can see that we might make a right-bank blend of cab franc and merlot.  Thinking that these kids of ours will need to bring some of their own energy into the mix if the vineyard is to expand.  Let's see how their palates and inclinations unfold...I may also put in some petit verdot and malbec, but we'll let the future evolve on its own.  It takes four vigilant years after planting to pick worthwhile fruit.  So, that leaves us likely a decade out from these new objectives. I'll be 51 in 2010. Since it is going to take a good four more years before the right bank blend (55), and since I really like my merlots at least ten years old (65+), our 21 year olds will be 35 and Liliana will 32 before we are cracking those bottles...

Christmastime

With temperatures warmer than expected, as high as 55 during the days and only just below freezing at night, it has been very comfortable at Grape Hill this week.  The winter wheat is showing green across the north fields.  The vineyard fence was covered with more tumbleweed than I have seen ever before...spent lots of time on Tuesday pushing out maybe 800 cubic feet of these, leaving them to head for Waitsburg with the next strong wind blowing through.  Quiet and uneventful, with no jobs or chores on my plate. Sue and I had nice meals at jimgermanbar and at Brasserie Four, with some great pastrami sandwiches from the new Graze restaurant on Colville Street.  High recommendation!  Stopped at a field with more pheasants than I have ever before seen congregating all in one spot...plenty of roosters along with a couple dozen hens and lots of quail, too.  So many people in town!  Full restaurants, no parking spots, good business in the tasting rooms that were open.  Very nice to see that business is looking healthy.  On the way over we stopped at Airfield Winery in Prosser after driving past it for the past couple years.  A very impressive run of about 15 or more different wines and not a stinker in the bunch...everything was pleasant at the very least and many were quite good.  Turns out that all around Airfield is a fairly new winemaking center with about a dozen new facilities and tasting rooms.  We checked out Bunnell Family Winery and will definitely be back there for lunch stops on our way to and from Grape Hill.  The foods looked attractive and carefully constructed, the setting was warm and pleasing, and the wines are serious.  They are focusing on Rhone blends and seem to be hitting their stride...deep concentrations, powerful flavor profiles with nice consistency across the entire palate and good harmony.  Perhaps they could bring the acids up a tad, but the oaking is under control and the grapes are top flight.  It is such a joy to see more and more grenache, cinsault, mouvedre...Washington is producing impressive varietals across the board, it seems.  As we were leaving Grape Hill I went and cleaned out the recycling.  Another hoard of empty bottles from prior Guests.  Maybe I will make note of the empties next year.  Impressive!  We must have had at least eighty bottles this year...nearly every top NW vintner was represented, plus some nice Italian and French wines, too.  Lots of fun being had, no doubt!