Gwyneth Paltrow: actress, wine lover, and birthday girl

My dear mom spent over 24 hours at San Jose Hospital on what she claims to have been the hottest day of the year back in 1957. Apparently I was quite snuggy-buggy there in the womb and didn’t want to come out!

But there’s an inevitability to such things, and thus I entered this world 50 years ago today. So glad I did, too, seein’ as how I’ve come this far and still manage to feel pretty good about my life. I feel pretty good about most things, including how I feel: regular hiking, a reasonably healthy diet, and a glass of red wine every day allow me to feel as if I’m much closer to 30.

What’s in a number, right? It’s really about how you feel - and what you feel - that counts.

I feel a lot of love for a lot of things, including my many friends, where I live, breathing, and my mom. I do believe Mom has since forgiven me for making her life miserable on that too-hot day way back when.

Thank you, Mom! I could not have been the winehiker without you.

Other birthdays today:

• Beth Heiden (1959): bronze-medal-winning 3000-meter Olympic speed skater
• The Central Intelligence Agency (1947), formerly the Office of Strategic Services, born via the National Security Act and since transmogrified into an often-overestimated agency with evidently limited capabilities for preserving civil liberties around the globe. I think the CIA can’t possibly be a Libra.
• Gwyneth Paltrow (1972) who, at age 35, may not consume wine as regularly as I do, but certainly consumes the good stuff. How do I know? She’s a member of bottlenotes.com’s Little Black Dress Club where she rates the 2002 Enrique Foster Malbec Limited Edition from Mendoza, Argentina a perfect five stars. She’s right to do so, since I agree with her: it’s simply the best Malbec I’ve ever tried. Ladies, you gotta check out Bottlenotes CEO Alyssa Rapp’s interview with Ms. Gwyneth on her Little Black Dress Club blog.

~winehiker

• A Bordello Barolo, Chapter One
  With friends in low places, it’s still possible to have a high time, especially when there’s a bordello involved.
  (tags: wine lodging travel port costa bash 50th birthday milestone party)
• The Monterey Inn: former bordello, now historic California hotel
  Parolees that have no place to stay are directed to the Monterey Inn but are generally nice. After all, they don’t want to go back to prison, plus the FBI building is next door.
  (tags: monterey inn historic california hotel bordello)
• The Prohibition Era History of Lake Arrowhead, California
  Bugsy Siegel’s Club Arrowhead of the Pines, now the Bracken Fern Manor, was hugely popular with the rich and famous of Hollywood and opened July 4, 1929. The posh new club included many state of the art conveniences - such as electricity.
  (tags: prohibition california lodging bordello historical club arrowhead)

“What was the name of that gal that left early on Saturday? I promised to invite her to the PC bash.”

“I believe you refer to Wendy, Andy. Good hiker; we climbed White Mountain together in ‘04. What PC bash?”

“You know - that mondo weekend bash I’m planning. It’s going to be hiking on Saturday, dinner on Saturday night at either the Warehouse or the Bull Valley. The former is mega-casual meat-and-potatoes (and cheap) and the latter fancier with great food and a bit pricey. You pick the one you’d like. If we do the Bull Valley, we can go to the Warehouse afterward to sample their 400 beers. We can even hang out on the Warehouse patio drinking beer with the bikers and mooning the passing Amtrak trains.”

“Sounds fun so far - I’m sure,” I replied, with a brief yet uncertain pause. “But, uh, PC?” I asked. I knew Andy to be anything but politically correct. Plausibly culpable, perhaps.

“It’s all taking place in Port Costa. If you haven’t been there, it’s a trip. An isolated village halfway between Crockett and Martinez that has one main street, one fine restaurant, one huge biker beer & steak pub, and one hotel. All located on the picturesque Carquinez Strait with spectacular views of the sprawling Benicia condo and townhome subdivisions across the water. By the way, the biggest constraint is the hotel. This place looks like the Dodge House in Gunsmoke. It’s kind of funky and weird, some even say haunted, i.e. - my kind of place - but it has limited rooms. So if more than 10-12 people are coming, some will have to drive home afterward or camp somewhere. I don’t know what the camping scene is around there. Anyway, some of the more delicate may not want to stay at the hotel anyway, so it might not be a problem. But it’s miles to the next nearest dump, uh, lodgings. Anyway, it promises to be a mondo send-off for your 5th decade; I’ll be sending out the invite in the mid-August timeframe.”

My fifth decade. I had to hand it to Andy, who had recently turned 50 himself and eminently knew the value of celebrating such a milestone birthday. I wasn’t too sure about Andy’s choice of location for this PC Bash, but having walked a few hundred trail miles in Andy’s company, I figured I knew him well enough to trust his judgment. I decided to cast my fete to the wind.

“Andy, your plan seems like the well-rounded Port Costa experience,” I responded. “For a mondo dinner, Bull Valley’s menu [currently offline] suggests that it is worth doing. The reviews on Yelp are hilarious! I don’t believe I’ve hiked in northern Contra Costa County, so I’m looking forward to the discovery. I just searched online for local camping, but there doesn’t appear to be a campground within miles of Port Costa. Maybe the Delicate Ones can find lodging in Crockett, if they want to negotiate what appears to be more of a spaghetti noodle than a road.”

“That would be Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride to Crockett, alright,” wrote Andy. “I’ll research alternate digs for the overbooked/cowards. We’ll reserve the Burlington for the hardcore. I know Vindu wants to stay there. Bull Valley it is. Really good food and a comfy country inn atmosphere. Giant fireplace and great martinis, too. Perfect Fall setting. After that we can slug beers and shots and have a PacMan competition at the Warehouse. I’m thinking I’ll send out the invitation earlier, say late July. That way I can get an early headcount and book the reservations at the Burlington. So send me all dem other dames - I mean names - you wishes to invite. I’ll supply complimentary flea powder for everyone.”

Oh, that Andy. Come to think of it, he doesn’t need to hike or drink. Andy is just naturally high. And that’s just what made him the right person to throw me a big gig in Port Costa, California.

Read the next exciting chapter of the Bordello Barolo saga.

~winehiker

30 days. That’s how long I was away from this blog.

I kinda missed the interaction, checking the stats, reading the words of others, writing my own, being regularly and happily immersed in the middle of something vital: this exotically rich and chaotic vinoambuloblogospheric wonderland. Typically when I’m away from something I do regularly, it’s natural for me to experience withdrawal symptoms - fidgety, high-strung, anomalous weirdness bordering on reverse delirium tremens: it can take 12 miles of hilly hiking or a few glasses of red wine (or both!) to settle me down.

But those DT’s didn’t happen this time. It was the middle of summer, and its heat had infused my bones. I had suddenly found myself wrapped up like a pig in a hot blanket smack-dab in the middle of something that gripped me like a soft vice, upset every routine, sent me spinning into asynchronous and alacritous orbit; something intense and life-altering that promptly baked my neat little world into winehiker upside-down cake.

(Oh, the spacy food references! Excuse me a moment while I go clear some space in the fridge.)

Yet I loved what was happening to me. And no, this wasn’t the kind of heat that landed me in jail, either, despite the catchy headline. I simply stopped the world to melt awhile, allowing all of my free time to be captured, enraptured, germinated alive!, grown tall, to be warmly and grandly blossomed into profound and springlike beatitude.

And it all started because of my love for wine and hiking.

I realize this picture is not complete. In essence, however, Sonadora was right. (So is the lovely and special, if mysterious, CS.) And therefore I was compelled to indulge myself a while. I hope you can forgive me, dear reader. Indeed I would share more here, but much that I would say my sense of integrity disallows. (Indeed, a gentleman does not tell.) Suffice to say: I took more than a vacation, and I’m pretty darn happy these days.

> Sigh… <

I kinda like this new enraptured lifestyle. Nevertheless, I knew that eventually I should come up for air and spin more witiculture. And spin more I shall. Thank you, my friends, for hanging in there.

~winehiker

Speculation has been rampant as to my whereabouts; certainly reports of my demise have been greatly exculpated. But after being away from this blog for a month, dear readers, I’m back here at the Winehiker Central keyboard and ready to once again launch my usual antics into the greater cosmos. If you’ve been missing me at all, I can assure you that I’ve missed you, too - there’s something gloriously heartwarming about sharing my thoughts publicly and learning how those thoughts resonate with you.

Even if you haven’t written me lately, I suppose you’ve been wondering where I’ve been. Indeed, the speculative inquiries that have lately arrived in my inbox are intriguing, amusing, even vexing. Over the course of the last month, it’s been suggested that I’ve experienced the following:

• I’ve been holed up in a hospital for the vinologically insane.
• I’ve been held hostage on a Mendocino County grape-farming commune and forced to pick, sort, and crush grapes 18 hours a day (while naked) and surviving only on tofu and toadstools.
• I’ve been stuck in a slot canyon in Utah and had to cut my own arm off to escape the terrible fate of never drinking wine again while everybody else was searching for Steve Fawcett.
• I’ve been sitting in the sunshine singing a little sunshine song (see first bullet).
• I’ve been in love.
• I’ve been in jail.
• I’ve been enjoying a well-deserved vacation from winehiking which, naturally, included more winehiking.

At least one of the above I’ve beens is true. But rather than tell you which that is, I think it will be fun to let you guess, via your comments on this post, as to what I’ve been up to. Consider it a Winehiker’s neoversion of that venerable TV game show To Tell The Truth.

So, where has the winehiker been? In any case, don’t call the Sheriff, and please cancel that print order for those milk cartons!! I am returned from the missing, and I will see you tomorrow.

~winehiker