It’s late, but I’m all revved up after a night of tasting fine wines – if not also young wines. So I’m vinoblogging after an hour on the train home. But I’ll keep it somewhat pared down, if I can. I gotta sleep! To wit:

Faces
El Jefe y Fermento of Twisted Oak Winery; Alyssa Rapp (co-host), Bayard Collins, Ainsley Hines, Kathryn, Alyssa’s boyfriend Hal Morris (honestly?), all not necessarily Bottlenotes.com folk; Cornelius Geary of RadCru and co-host; Bill Canihan of Canihan Family Cellars; Steve Ross of Girard; Melanie Hoffman from Diaz Communications; and a host of others who’d either run out of business cards, run out of wine, or run out of the building.

Delight of the evening
Talking at length with Stephen Yafa of Segue Winery who had made a 2005 Russian River Valley Pinot Noir that I had panned last year. But oh boy, Steve’s steered my rudder clear ’round with his latest effort, a 2006 Russian River Valley Pinot Noir from DuNah Vineyard. In our conversation, Steve dropped a nugget or two about the DuNah Vineyard, but with holding one rarely-empty wine glass and three conversations going simultaneously most of the evening, my retention level is not at this moment very elevated. Nevertheless I hope to get Stephen to talk about the vineyard, specifically, for this blog. Geez, I’m rambling already! Well, I’m just glad Steve and I connected.

Wine 2.0
Why were two seeming competitors co-hosting an event (Alyssa, Cornelius)? “Well, we’re not really sure what it means yet, but Wine 2.0 has somehow brought us together tonight. We love wine, we’re a community, and we come together to celebrate wine.”

Oh! Words dear dear to my heart. And yet the marketing of this event was entirely driven via Facebook.

Makes ya think, don’t it? And I think Cornelius and Alyssa got somethin’.

I suspect we won’t ever know what Wine 2.0 really is. At least not until Wine 3.0 arrives, somewhere down the trail we’re all walkin’.

~winehiker

Having a few friends on Facebook is a cooler thing than I expected it would be. For instance, while I originally joined Facebook some weeks back to ostensibly stay in touch with my burgeoning band of wine and hiking friends – bloggers and nonbloggers alike – I sometimes find myself invited to actually see them face-to-face!

Tonight is such a night. I’ve been invited by Cornelius Geary of RadCru.com to attend a Wine 2.0 mixer in San Francisco that will be showcasing the latest releases from over 40 local small-producer wineries. With a $40 pre-admission, I believe I can easily taste at least $40 worth of really good wines*, many poured by the winemakers themselves. If you know your boutique California wineries, you might agree that the wares of the following producers – and talking with them – will give me a shiny happy face tonight.

Bourassa, Cameron Hughes Wine, Canihan Wines, Clautiere Winery, Concannon, Creekview Vineyards, Dashe Cellars, Dogwood Cellars, Dono dal Cielo Vineyards, Due Vigne, Esca Wines, Fantesca Estate & Winery, Foppiano, Four Vines Winery, Girard, Gryphon Wines, Halleck, J Dusi Wines, Jeriko Estate, Joseph Family, Kenefick Ranch, Kenwood, Lake Sonoma Winery, McFadden, Medlock Ames, Modus Operandi, Otter Cove Wines, Owl Ridge, Peter Franus, Radog, Robert Stemmler, Sapid, Spencer-Roloson, Stag’s Leap, The Donum Estate, Three Families Winery, Tobacco Road Cellars, Twisted Oak, Valley of the Moon, Vie Winery, Windsor Sonoma

I hope to come back to this post when I have time to organize the above list of wineries by appellation. But I’ll be sure to report on tonight’s fun in a follow-up post.

Tonight’s New Releases Tasting event is happening at Varnish Fine Art and Wine Bar in SF; price at the door is $60 and those doors are open from 7:00 to 10:00 p.m. If you plan to attend tonight, look for the guy with the Winehiker name badge.

~winehiker

*Thank goodness I’m getting a good walk in the City and riding CalTrain home!

Are you searching for the right gift for the wine lover or adventurer in your life but dread the thought of one more trip to the shopping mall?

Are you ready for a no-hassle gift-giving solution that doesn’t involve long lines, traffic, gift wrap, or merchandise returns? One that helps to prevent your carbon footprint from becoming a Size 15 Triple-E?

Fortunately for you, dear reader, California Wine Hikes can help tame the shopping beast.

Just click here to spread the joy!

~winehiker

May your stuffing be tasty

May your turkey be plump,

May your potatoes and gravy

Have never a lump.

May your yams be delicious

And your pies take the prize,

And may your Thanksgiving dinner

Stay off your thighs!

Happy Thanksgiving, Everyone!

~winehiker

Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.
- Cicero, Ancient Roman Statesman and Philosopher

I just determined that my annual salary qualifies me as being in the top 0.77% of people worldwide in terms of how rich I am. In the context of living in the Silicon Valley – where prices for nearly everything are so stratospheric as to be practically irrelevant to everywhere else – I admit I find myself wondering how the other 99.23% are faring. Financially speaking, I don’t feel that rich. Not nearly so.

My salary indeed gets me the things I need and occasionally it affords me the fine wines I want. I am, quite frankly, very thankful to have a salary! But the happiness my salary brings isn’t nearly as important as the people in my life. That particular sense of joy has often arrived in my inbox or via the slough of online tools I use to stay connected.

And so I want to wish all of you in Winehiking World a very Happy Thanksgiving! It has been great getting to know you and spend time with you. You are my family, and you grace and enrich my life. You therefore deserve a shout-out!

What follows is but a partial list of who I’m thankful for; the great remainder don’t have blogs!

Tom
Vindu
Jeff
Farley
Sonadora
Joel
Tim
Tom
Tom
Dan
Rod
John
Mary
Jim
Beau
Ryan
Ben
Carol
Charlie
Jill
Tyler
Jeff
Deb
Jo
Lenn
Alyssa
Rickie
Brian
Erika
Trevor
Alder
Wilf
Jared
Elsbeth
Randy
Duane
Josh
Julie
James
Skye
Tom
Wade
Rick
Derrick
Melanie
Deborah
Ryan
Gabriella
Marshall
Brittany
Ainsley
Alastair
Michelle
Fabio
Gary
Cornelius
Ev
Mary
Mary
Wing
Michael
Tom
Casey
John
Alan
David
Kian
CJ
Frank
Joe
Larian
Jessie

This Thanksgiving, know that I’ve got much to be thankful for in the dialog you have shared with me. I wish each and every one of you a never-ending cornucopia of delight in your lives, now and forever.

All that, and great winehiking too!

~winehiker

A couple of Mondays ago I awarded prizes to the authors of the best reviews of my tour and travel website, californiawinehikes.com, which this blog supports. My grand prize winner, Brian Olson, yesterday received the case of wine I shipped to him, and he appears to be pretty excited. Why? Because he has published a list of all twelve wines I sent him on his wine.com community page for all to see.

Building strong (redneck) bodies, twelve ways.

Brian indicates that he’ll be reviewing each of these wines on his blog, Redneck Wine Review. Y’all see for yourself how excited Brian is on his latest post.

Oh, and the second prize award to Sonadora of Wannabe Wino? A bottle of Gary Farrell Russian River Pinot Noir 2005. Happy Thanksgiving!

~winehiker

• Riverside Land Conservancy
  Over the past few years, the Riverside Land Conservancy has leveraged $34 worth of land for every dollar spent, resulting in the acquisition of over 8,000 acres of land for preservation in Southern California.
  (tags: land nature conservation acquisition preservation)
• The Donna O’Neill Land Conservancy
  The Donna O’Neill Land Conservancy is the steward for a wilderness reserve located in the coastal foothills of Southern California.
  (tags: land nature conservation acquisition preservation)
• Palos Verdes Peninsula Land Conservancy
  The Palos Verdes Peninsula Land Conservancy was founded in 1988 to preserve undeveloped land in perpetuity as open space for historical, educational, ecological, recreational and scenic purposes.
  (tags: land nature conservation acquisition preservation)
• Ojai Valley Land Conservancy (OVLC.org)
  The Conservancy is a volunteer, community-based group of private citizens working for the common goal of preserving open space in the Ojai Valley for your benefit and the benefit of future generations.
  (tags: land nature conservation acquisition preservation)
• The Cayucos Land Conservancy
  The Cayucos Land Conservancy was incorporated in 1999 and soon after became management partners and conservation easement holders for the newly created Estero Bluffs State Park.
  (tags: land nature conservation acquisition preservation)
• Land Conservancy of San Luis Obispo County
  The Land Conservancy of San Luis Obispo County has protected over 9,200 acres of land throughout San Luis Obispo County, California.
  (tags: land nature conservation acquisition preservation)
• Sempervirens Fund Preserves Redwood Forest Lands
  Sempervirens Fund preserves and protects the natural character of California’s Santa Cruz Mountains and encourages appropriate public enjoyment of this environment.
  (tags: land nature conservation acquisition preservation)
• GlobalGiving: donate to grassroots projects; education, health, microfinance
  GlobalGiving is a marketplace for goodness – where you can browse ways to help others around the world, pick the ones you are most passionate about, and give to the solution.
  (tags: activist global Internet resources society tools world giving)

I’ve known Kristina Irvin since the early ’90s, and boy is she a firecracker. She’s got more energy packed into her five-foot frame than anybody I have ever met, and she’s managed to accomplish quite a lot with that energy, including running two businesses and placing consistently high in many ultramarathons (100-mile mountain-trail footraces) over the years. I admire her not only because of her can-do spirit or that she’s been my chiropractor for 17 years, but because of her warmhearted approach to the things we can do as individuals to mitigate the effects of the things we do as a civilization. It is no wonder we’ve been friends since I first became a patient of hers in 1990.

One of Kristina’s recent gestures occurred in late September when she joined me in Port Costa, California, for a fabulous birthday dinner. Enclosed within a birthday card she handed me was a signed check for $50 made out to nobody; her stipulation being that I make a donation to whatever cause I deemed appropriate.

I was touched by Kristina’s goodwill gesture. Therefore, when I found time over these past two months, I’ve been researching and weighing my choices for where to best direct that fifty bucks.

The options are many. After all, many charities champion great causes and are worthwhile recipients; most make it incredibly easy to donate, whether online or by personal check. I felt it would be prudent to align my sensibilities about giving with my innate passion for the great outdoors and our need to preserve, maintain, and educate. This certainly narrowed my range of selection, but it still left me with a vast number of choices.

I knew, however, that I should give back where I’ve taken; that I should think globally but give locally. After all, I love redwoods, and I walk many miles of local redwood forest trail each year. I know I couldn’t do that if those who came before me hadn’t chosen to volunteer their time and their hard-earned money to establish and maintain those trails, as well as to preserve the land and the wilderness that those trails have delivered us through. So where I could, I examined a number of local non-profit entities in terms of their missions, their educational programs, their record of public/private collaboration, and their budget needs. In the end, I chose to send Kristina’s check to the Sempervirens Fund. That check went out in today’s mail.

The Sempervirens Fund, originally established in 1900 as Sempervirens Club, is not a large organization, but it is California’s oldest land conservancy. It was originally dedicated almost entirely to preserving the majestic coast redwoods, Sequoia sempervirens, and was quite instrumental in establishing Big Basin Redwoods State Park in 1902. Since that time, the Sempervirens Fund has earned quiet but consistent success in saving redwood lands throughout the Santa Cruz Mountains’ San Lorenzo River watershed, sparing more than 21,000 acres from logging. These days, due largely to the efforts of the Sempervirens Fund, an integrated eco-belt is beginning to become a reality in this watershed district, and many public parklands that are currently noncontiguous will soon be connected to each other via new trails.

Since I often walk the trails in and near the San Lorenzo headwaters, it only made sense that I should give to an organization whose efforts have made a profound impact on me. It is now time for me to make an impact of my own.

And yet I think that I’m not doing this for me. Rather, I’m just a bit player in a large ecological theater. Nevertheless, I’ve decided that 1% of the proceeds of all California Wine Hikes tours going forward will be donated to the Sempervirens Fund.

It’s good when good friends make good impacts on you. That’s why they’re good friends. Thanks, Kristina!

~winehiker

This year’s Beaujolais Nouveaux have arrived overnight in America and are on store shelves today.

I haven’t tried any yet. You see, I think there are so many better wines to spend my hard-earned money on. When the third Thursday in November comes around, the question that I find myself asking is:

Why should I buy Beaujolais Nouveau wine?

I could even ask,

Why did I buy six of them last year?

Some say that the fresh, fruity, and very young (this year’s crop) Beaujolais Nouveau wines are overrated and not worth the advance media hype. Other say they’re not worth the trouble of being first in line at your local wine merchant to snag a selection of them.

Would you agree? Do you disagree?

Regardless of how you feel about Beaujolais Nouveau, I’d like to hear your thoughts. Maybe you can even influence me to shop for and offer a review of what you feel is the best of the 2007 Beaujolais vintage. In the meantime, I list my observations about last year’s BNs:

Blind Wine Tasting Notes: 2006 Beaujolais Nouveau
The 2006 Beaujolais Nouveau wine reviews are pouring in

~winehiker

Continued from October 6th: A milestone birthday bash in the making, complete with pictures!

Saturday morning broke like your favorite wine glass in too-soapy hands. I crawled out of bed anyway and was breakfasting within the hour in Oakland’s Rockridge neighborhood with a foursome of friends. Andy and Cheryl, forks and knives blazing, were happily stoking for the day’s fun and so was Niki, a good friend who had flown in from Zurich, Switzerland, to celebrate with me.

After a sumptuous nitrite and cholesterol breakfast, we hit the road. It wasn’t long before we were off the highway and into the cow-dotted hillsides of Contra Costa County, dangling our fenders over the most tortuous and hopelessly ridiculous ribbon of asphalt I’d ever encountered: the road to Port Costa, California.

It was a pretty exciting drive. That is, until we arrived in the narrow postage stamp of level ground that Port Costa occupies. After much meandering over and through and down-down-down a big fat wedge of a hill, we began to see a few buildings followed by a short main street, then all at once we were at our destination: a big dirt lot behind which there’s nothing but a railroad line and a mile of water.

That’s when it became clear to me why Port Costa’s prior status as a shipping port was effectively erased when the rail line went in. Since the evening freight trains could carry more goods more efficiently than the tiny and remote Port Costa could store, process, and distribute them, there had come a time when it no longer made sense to dock cargo ships here.

I peered toward the water, a moment’s observation yielding only the rail line and a cyclone fence to keep people off the tracks. There was no freight dock, no fishing pier, no official public facility connecting people to the water. The nearly-pure isolation of this little notch-in-the-hillside town is palpable.

So why were we here, again? Andy??

I glanced at Niki, who shrugged her shoulders, silently asking the same question. Andy, though, was sporting a broad grin; the guy was in his element. I looked over at the two large, time-wrenched buildings framing this rather bleak and unassuming edge of town – the Warehouse Restaurant and the Burlington Hotel – and then I looked back at the rail line: with a space of about 200 feet of separation across the dirt lot, it was clear what Andy had foretold: it would not be a quiet night for sleeping.

And as if to put a fine point on it, an Amtrak passenger train suddenly arrived from behind the nearest hill and roared through, nearly blowing us out of our boots with a loud, abundantly prolonged blast of its horn!

Oh well, we knew we hadn’t come to Port Costa to sleep, anyway.

We came here to eat, to drink, and especially to drink barolo in a bordello. We came here, ostensibly, to par-TAY!

But first we had some exploring to do. Once our handful of hiking hooligans were assembled, we shambled off down the tracks toward Crockett, the next big town on the Carquinez Straits.

The Bordello Barolo Gang on the noble outskirts of Port Costa, California, and ready for hiking (such as it is here).

One didn’t need a map to know we were quickly – and very clearly – on the outskirts of town, even the outskirts of comfort and civility. There surely wasn’t much redeeming value to be found among the wild assortment of forgotten human debris, notable among it being a used syringe, several rusted railroad spikes, skeleton fishheads and headless babydoll bodies. Undeterred, we continued on down the rail line, a narrow and otherwise featureless strip of land tucked beneath a long hillside at the water’s edge. About two miles later – industrial facade of the C&H Sugar Refinery announcing its presence – we strode safely into Crockett.

The day was perfect for a visit to Crockett, California.

In contrast to Port Costa, Crockett certainly appeared more interesting – especially the Crockett Museum, the unique and offbeat downtown area, the hodge-podge of residential architectures, and one of its most famous landmarks, the Nantucket Restaurant, which was situated on the marina under the 680 overpass, just back of the sewage treatment plant.

The Crockett skyline is breathtaking. If you can actually call it breathing.

Arriving at the wastewater treatment plant. I am loath to take credit for tagging this shipping container; I only give such cooties to my blog posts.

At least it would smell better inside the Nantucket than it smelled out here. Or so we hoped.

Lunch was… well, let’s just say that lunch got us up and over the next hill.

Finally, open space! Suddenly the day seemed brighter. At least less disparagingly bleak.

The view looking west toward the Carquinez Bridge and the San Francisco Bay beyond.

The view north across the Carquinez Straits. One can dimly make out Napa’s Mt. St. Helena, shrouded in overcast on the upper left. Just out of sight over the near hills is the railroad line.

Looking to the northeast along the trail that makes up the backbone of the Carquinez Strait Regional Shoreline.

The teeming burb that is Benicia reaches into the channel as we trudge eastward. The refineries of Martinez lay in the background.

A brooding Mt. Diablo governs the view to the east as we approach the notch in the ground that is Port Costa.

Looking upon the town of Port Costa, in all its formerly-radiant splendor. Note the (lack of) distance between the rail line and our hallowed hotel which is the yellow building just left of center.

On our downhill descent into town, we were in a merry mood despite the weather and the surroundings. I, for one, knew I had a bottle of Barolo which I suspected needed to breathe awhile before we gathered to sample the many wines we’d brought with us. Little did I suspect that bottle would be just as ready to be drunk as everyone else!

~winehiker

Stay tuned for the breathless confusion conclusion of A Bordello Barolo, coming someday to Winehiker Witiculture.