March 11 2007
A full cross-post from Indianapolis Foodie web site, Feed Me/Drink Me. Renee, who used to exclusively go by the online nom de plume of “braingirl,” is my partner in crime in helping get local wine and food enthusiasts, bloggers and media types out for a Twisted Oak winery market introduction on Thursday, March 15th. And, you don’t have to be a writer of any sort to attend. In fact, you don’t have to have any talent beyond being able to eat or drink. Be sure to set aside time to head to the Upper Room, enjoy some good wine, appetizers and company.
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From Feed Me/Drink Me:
Bloggers, writers, and fans, many of us have met virtually, but thanks to Jeff Lefevere, (The Good Grape), Ashley from Cork and Cracker, and the guys from Twisted Oak in Calaveras County, we can all meet in person! These fine folks have put together a special wine tasting for a food and wine writer/blogger meet-and-greet this week! We’ve invited the bloggers and writers we knew or could think of who cover food and wine in Indianapolis (and if we missed you, accept our apologies and come anyway!)
And in a special bonus! The Hoosier Beer Geeks will be meeting afterward (8:00 p.m.) on Thursday across the street at Brugge Brasserie. So, come for wine early, then come raise a glass with the Beer Geeks (and save room for the frites.)
If you’re reading this, consider yourself invited. Spouses, fans, foodies, and general hangers-on are welcome. Please feel free to forward this on to anyone else we may have misssed or who might be interested.
Here’s the scoop:
Twisted Oak Wine Tasting
6:00 p.m-8:00 p.m.,
Thursday, March 15,
The Upper Room (at Broad Ripple Steak House)
$15 for wine, snacks, and some give-a-ways.
Hope to see you all there!
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March 11 2007
A continuing short story from my close friend, “Easy” Ed Vodrazka, while he was in New Zealand. Some people are born with the ability to draw people in and lift spirits. Ed has that gift. He has been a California lifeguard for almost thirty years and is something of a California State Park legend. He doesn’t carve notches on the belt but he measures good summer days by the amount of “saves” he makes, numbers that can reach double digits. Ed is my wine mentor and whenever I stay with he and his wife Jen (whom he met on the same trip that he and I met when we were camping for 10 days in Baja California) at the Guy Fleming house at the Torrey Pines State Reserve in San Diego, we frequently enjoy lobster that he has hand caught while free diving off the craggy shore. We always enjoy a bottle or three of wine--a crisp chardonnay or a New Zealand sauvignon blanc, perhaps a Zin mixed in because we drink what we want regardless of what’s on the plate. We share stories and laughs. He marvels at the relative simplicity of my living in the Midwest compared to California and I marvel at his freedom from the pull of materialism and his zen spirit that is infectious. Ed is the only guy that I know of who has met both the Dalai Lama and Mother Theresa, not to mention having spent the better part of 20 years living in a van working on the shores of California beaches.
The Smell of Rainbow Pt. II
I was awake by 5:00, but stayed in the warm bed waiting for Greg to wake up. A few minutes later I could hear him stirring around in the kitchen, and soon the smell of fresh coffee drifted into my room. It seemed that he was as excited as I was to get going. We had a cup of coffee and a quick bowl of oatmeal then filled a thermos with the coffee that was left in the pot. Greg said something about fishing being more important than breakfast, and he certainly didn’t get an argument out of me. It was still dark as we began loading our gear into his car. There was a definite chill in the pre-morning air, and it felt more like early winter than early spring that morning. There was a warm light pouring out from his open kitchen door as we loaded up the fishing gear, and each breath that I released sent a warm plume of mist into the cold air. We drove out of his long dirt driveway, and the only sound that broke the silence was that of his car tires gently rolling over the gravel. Daylight was still just a faint glow on the horizon. Our headlights shone two long beams of light through the thin layer of fog that had settled onto his farm overnight, and there wasn’t a soul to be seen anywhere.
We drove for about an hour up from Marinara and into the denser bush. We entered the Urewera forest just as the morning was upon us, and Greg drove on along the ever narrowing dirt roads. Twice we came upon wash outs in the road and had to back track to find alternate routes. We passed countless little streams and small rivers, all of which looked great to me, but Greg continued along the shrub lined forestry roads until we came to a sparse and undeveloped camping area known as Te Ara, and Greg’s favorite river...the Rangatiki.
Averaging around 60 feet across in most areas, the Rangatiki flowed strong and steady about 10 feet deep. The water was cold, crystal clear, and clean enough to drink. There were areas of gently cascading rapids and countless promising pools with bushy hiding areas from where one could cast. Greg and I shared a mutual respect for the quietness and solitude that comes to the fisherman naturally when he finds himself in such places of beauty, and we rarely spoke to each other on that cold morning. He generously suggested that I take the lead in fishing the undisturbed pools as we made our way upstream, and he stayed well below me. I used one of his casting rods with a silver Panther Martin spoon, and Greg had chosen his split bamboo fly rod. He gave me so much space to fish that I only caught sight of him several times all morning. But there was one time when I followed the river around a fairly sharp bend and hiked up and over a stand of large boulders. Being well above the waterline gave me an unobstructed view of the river’s downstream path, and there in the distance, standing on a large smooth boulder, was the old fisherman. His weighted green line danced gracefully across the sky, gently turning in perfect response to the old man’s will. I stopped to watch him for awhile. His line flew freely out over the water, and then gently followed back over itself in a perfectly controlled pattern of a wide figure eight. Just shy of seventy years old, the site of Greg Flood dancing his delicate dry fly out over the Rangatiki was sheer poetry.
To be continued ...
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March 9 2007
Yesterday I read Jim Harrison’s essay in Kermit Lynch’s newsletter. Titled “The Spirit of Wine,” Jim Harrison has an incredible gift for packing detail and a depth of meaning in a meandering first person narrative, not an easy task and he does this while offering up chestnuts like, “Wine can offer oxygen to the spirit.”
Today, Indiana feels like the first day of spring has arrived. The weather is in the 50s, the sunshine has poked through nine weeks of clouds, and energy is almost stridently present in what just days ago was still a sleepy winter malaise.
As I sit and contemplate ‘oxygen to the spirit,’ I realize that friendship, wine, arm chair travel and warm weather gets me in the right frame of mind for shaking off the winter doldrums.
My wine mentor, Ed Vodrazka, known to most as ‘Easy’ is somebody who I’m happy to call a lifelong friend even though we’ve known each other for less than a decade. Easy also happens to be a wine lover of repute and a traveler of renown. A legendary California lifeguard in the state park system, Ed was the first person that eased me into my wine journey and is also responsible for the fascination I hold for both A. Rafanelli and Caparone wines.
Ed is a gifted writer. He has written many of his stories from traveling into short story form. On the heels of my reading a short story from Jim Harrison, and in the vein of arm chair travel, it seems only right that I highlight a story or two of his from New Zealand, a fantastic wine region. Herewith, one of Ed’s stories, presented in three parts:
The Adventures of “Easy”
The one thing I do exceptionally well is travel. I am, by nature, a traveler. It’s in my bones. I discovered early in my life that I seem to have the ability to open doors and allow people to open their lives to me. Being the son of immigrant parents, has helped me to be a bit more culturally sensitive to groups of people who may eat, sleep, speak, or behave foreign to me. This sensitivity seems to extend across the varied lines of culture and age. I feel equally ‘at home’ on the streets of Bangkok, the back alleys of Katmandu or in the line up with the surfers at Huntington Beach.
As we come to know more about the differences among peoples, we soon discover that most of those customs we find bizarre or foreign are really in the end our commonality. There exists in the fabric of all people in this world, many common threads. And those things that revolve around the heart are the things we find to be most often universal: a need to be loved, to be heard, and to enjoy the company of family and friends, to laugh and share joy, to behold the wonders of nature in all her splendor.
I am a traveler. These are the stories of my life.
THE SMELL OF A RAINBOW
Things always seemed to work out best for me when I wasn’t busy trying to plan the steps ahead. The more I allowed myself to remain open to whatever happened to come along, the more rewarding the total experience usually proved to be. In keeping with this frame of mind, I found myself once again walking down a two-lane road with my small pack hanging off my shoulder and the morning sun gently warming my face. I had no real goal for where I would end up, and the only choice I needed to make was to decide which direction I would turn when I reached the main road. I chose to turn south, and continued walking with a consciousness as open as the bright green fields that surrounded me.
My first ride was with a young doctor who was playing Neil Young’s “Rust Never Sleeps”. It was a great way to start the day, and as luck would have it, he took me all the way through Auckland where I knew the rides would come easy. From there I got a ride to Huntley (population about 10) with a sewing machine repairman and another into Hamilton with an old Maori fisherman. Minutes later, a farmer picked me up in an old red pick-up. He told me he was on his way to a wool trading barn on the outskirts of town and invited me to come along. He had two large bags of wool in the truck bed, and said he had seven naked sheep back at home. The barn was huge and business was booming. I found it quite amazing to see all the farmers involved in the ‘middle’ part of the wool industry. In considering a simple wool sweater, I had never realized how many hands were involved in the transfer of wool from the sheep’s back to our own. I wandered back to the road and continued on, more or less heading south. The scenery began to change with each new ride, as mountains rose up around the roadway. The miles of rolling green fields behind us gradually gave way to shaded pine forests. The air turned cooler and the skies began to fill with huge white cumulous clouds. Once in the mountains, I walked away from the main road. The narrower road gently wrapped around the hillsides cutting an aimless path through the vibrantly green vegetation. Narrow bridges offered a chance to look straight down through the crystal running water of cold creeks and small streams. The solitude and setting of the lonely mountain road was well worth the trade off of the less frequent rides. Hours passed and I lost track of time.
It was springtime then, and the sun didn’t set until around 8:30. Right around dusk a dark green car pulled over, and the driver offered me a ride. He was an older man, with a sad but friendly smile wearing full length wading boots and a fly-fishing vest. Greg Flood was a soft spoken retired farmer who rarely missed a chance to fish. His wife had taken ill recently, and was convalescing in a local hospital. He was on his way back from his daily visit to see her, and had stopped off to dip the line a bit on his way home. He invited me over for dinner, and I gratefully accepted. I was thankful for a bed for the night and hoped I could cheer old Greg up a bit. He heated up some stew for supper, and then we went into the knotty pine den where we shared a few beers. In the dim lit comfort of the wood walls and the warm fire, I sat back on the big couch and became an appreciative audience for an old fisherman who slowly began to share his stories. In close to 50 years of fishing these waters, Greg had lived a fisherman’s dream. His stories were quite enchanting to me and as he remembered each one, his smile widened and his eyes danced. On my request, he broke out some of his gear. There was an assortment of reels in velvet pouches and each rod had its own case. He pulled out an immaculate split bamboo fly rod, one he had made over 30 years ago. His assortment of flies numbered in the thousands, each one hand tied by Greg himself. What impressed me even more was that he remembered exactly which fly he had used to land every great fish he had told me about.
We turned in early that night. As I lay in bed, I felt contentment in seeing how much the evening had cheered him up. It was also rewarding for us both to realize that two guys like us, almost 50 years apart in age, could still become friends. I closed my eyes and let his stories run around in my mind until I fell asleep.
Needless to say ... in the morning we went fishing.
To be continued ...
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March 8 2007
As much as we would like to think that wine blogs are upsetting the traditional media apple cart, there is still a ways to go before potential equates to influence.
Because of this (and because it’s sometimes good grist for the mill), I still read a lot of mainstream wine media. Just to keep up, you know.
But, where the monthly glossies are easier to keep track of, most syndicated weekly print columnists are a little bit more difficult to track down; not every news paper is on the RSS bandwagon, either. And, for precisely that reason, I signed up for the Wine Opinions “Wine Review Weekly.” It’s on a trial basis and I like what I see in the first issue.
What a handy little service—kind of like a public relations clip service or the News Coverage Index, except for wine.
The Project for Excellence in Journalism has an influential weekly service—the News Coverage Index--where they summarize the broad news stories of the previous week. Each week the NCI collects and reviews coverage from top news organizations across five major sectors of the media: newspapers, network television, cable television, radio and the internet. Every Tuesday, the News Coverage Index is updated on PewResearch.org to identify the top stories covered by the media during the preceding Sunday through Friday.
Wine Opinions, a side project by John Gillespie from the Wine Market Council, strikes me as a project that might end up heading in that direction, except devoted to wine. It’s an interesting idea and one with merit--information consumption around wine is only growing commensurate with the amount of content available; that is to say there is plenty to go around.
Eventually somebody has to figure out how to keep track of all of this information. The difference between reading and knowledge is wisdom and that can only be had by experience, but in the interim, and just launched it should be noted, Wine Opinions keeps tracks of the major dailies and their wine columnists for wines tasted.
And, while I won’t even begin to broach the subject that Tyler Colman’s palate has more relevance to me, then, say, Bob Hosman from the South-Florida Sun Sentinel, I will say that having national columnists linked in an email digest is a handy little thing.
Unfortunately, I’m on a *free* trial subscription, open to anybody that responded to the Wines & Vines promo email, and I think regular priced subscriptions will be an incredibly outrageous price of $349 dollars annually. For an email. Priced, undoubtedly, like a clip service and not a wine enthusiast service. Did I mention that Wine Opinions creates no content of its own in this email digest?
Frankly, I’m torn because I like what I see, but not $349 dollars worth of like.
Check it out at the following link and weigh in with thoughts. Too much money for the price of convenience or incredible time-saver?
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Posted in, Free Run: Field Notes From a Wine Life. Permalink | Comments (1) | Print | Email This
March 6 2007
With apologies to Martin Scorsese, this is something like the movie the “Gangs of New York” where the rule of the street is challenged by the immigrants and everybody is greasin’ ‘The Man.’
And, if there was any question whether Tom at Fermentation had his finger on the pulse, all doubts should now be erased. Though, I’m not going to compare him to Bill “The Butcher.”
From the back-room of the Uptown Café in Bloomington, IN this past Friday afternoon to an article in The Terre Haute Tribune-Star on Sunday to Tom’s blog today, Tuesday.
That’s pretty quick given that Indiana isn’t exactly a hot bed of interesting wine news.
I was at lunch a week ago with an Indianapolis foodie blogger, planning the Twisted Oak wine dinner actually, when she mentioned that a friend of a friend was starting up a consumer-oriented wine group in order to fight the Byzantine laws of the state regarding the shipment of alcohol.
I subsequently traded emails last week and over the weekend with Allen Dale Olson, known to friends as Ole, though I was unable to attend his kickoff meeting to a new consumer organization called Vinsense.
Vinsense is dedicated to creating more consumer wine choice in the state of Indiana by exposing the three-tier system.
I have to give them credit for trying to fight (ostensibly) the good fight and for setting some lofty goals (signing up 10,000 members in the next year).
Their positioning is crystal clear and they are using easily understandable, shareable language--the kind of sound bites that people can latch onto.
Their tag line is: “Because the glass is 95% empty, not 5% full.”
This is in reference to the notion that —legally—Indiana consumers can’t buy wine direct and the wholesale tier controls the flow of wines in the state, excluding some 95% of the market of available wine.
I get all of this and I understand it.
Here’s where I diverge. This fight has been fought on many levels for many years, mostly to no avail. I mean, the state just went through this shipping bill and passed a band-aid law in 2006 that allowed in-state wineries to ship in-state while preventing shipments from out of state wineries UNLESS you sign a form IN PERSON at the winery.
So, in theory, you CAN get Pinot from that Willamette Valley winery you visited, one of the examples they cite in their verbiage as not being possible. It’s just a bit difficult to do and most everybody is operating under FUD (a scientific word).
Anybody that followed the winery fight in local media through 2005 into 2006 understands that it was an absolute tit ringer (another scientific word).
I’m somewhat skeptical, despite the best intentions by the guys at Vinsense, that this is going to be anything other than a nice idea with good intentions.
A quote from Jim Purucker, Executive Director from the Indiana wholesale organization, in the Terre Haute Tribune-Star article, tells the story in a few shorts words:
“Every day there are retailers being suspended” or having their licenses revoked for selling to minors, being a public nuisance or not paying their licensing fees or taxes, said Jim Purucker, executive director of the Wine and Spirits Wholesalers of Indiana (WSWI). Wholesalers “are the gate-keepers,” he said, allowing the state to efficiently enforce its tax and underage drinking laws. Opening up the system to 7,000 to 10,000 producers would make the job of collecting state excise taxes “enormous,” Purucker said.
This is what it’s all about. And, the state isn’t going to give the wineries any help—because this is about out of state wineries, not in-state wineries. Aforementioned laws were changed in 2006 to help the in-state wineries. I have it straight from the lips of a high-ranking official in the Indiana ATC, while at a backyard barbecue in the summer of ’06, that the goal was to not kill Indiana wineries while still maintaining some order. And, order to the government is an organized way to collect taxes.
Unfortunately, I doubt this is going to change anytime soon.
That is, unless, of course, Angelo Pizzo decides to write a movie about this saga. Pizzo is an Indiana native son and an Advisor for Vinsense. Pizzo also happens to be the writer for two of the best sports movies ever made, both based in Indiana: Hoosiers and Rudy.
Here’s where Pizzo could actually come in handy save for writing a muckrucking movie—provide seed money.
I’d like to see Vinsense take this fight into the streets. I’m not advocating an “if you can’t beat them, join them” mentality, but to paraphrase an idiom I heard this past weekend, “It’s like prison sex, if it’s gonna happen, you might as well enjoy it.”
And, in this regard, fighting the three-tier system is like being the recipient of some good old fashion prison lovin’
But, (and a big but) there are other ways …
Indiana ATC laws are pretty easy and explicit in what you can and cannot do.
In order to be a wine wholesaler you basically have to be incorporated as a business, have a beer wholesalers permit or be eligible to obtain a beer wholesalers permit and have a place to store wine that can be your listed premise.
That’s it. Well, maybe you can’t have a felony on your record, but besides that it’s pretty easy.
Any fool can become a wine wholesaler.
Here’s the gauntlet that I’m throwing down. This isn’t directed at Vinsense, because I think they’re fighting a noble fight, but I’d like to see somebody mobilize interested wine consumers and set-up an LLC and sell partnership shares in this LLC for, say, $2000 a piece--limited to the first 250 participants. I’d like to see a consumer owned distributor, similar to a cooperative, but set-up as an LLC so partnership is divided for a for profit entity.
This company will have $500,000 in start-up money--plenty enough cash to establish a line of credit, enough to rent a location, pay a President who will hold the license, hire a sales guy and an operations person while securing initial inventory.
Use this distributor to take in positions of boutique wines from California, Oregon, Washington, Michigan and other states where people travel on vacations and have cultivated favorites that are not currently available in the market.
If it’s true that Indiana only has access to 5% of the market, setting up another distributor to join the six or seven already in business would be a no brainer based on fulfilling the pent up demand in the market.
Maybe it’s just me, but I prefer to fight the fight on the field and not be a screaming parent yelling at the ref’s from the sidelines.
After I clear up a little conflict of interest issue with my employer, I’d be the first guy with my check book out to invest and buy shares and every time I bought a beautiful bottle of wine at retail that was from a distributor that I had ownership in I’d laugh all the way to the bank because I’d know I’d be getting paid on that same bottle of wine in my other pocket.
This is completely doable, a solution to the problem within the context of the problem and a lot easier to do than change the minds of low level politicos that don’t get the issues and receive retainer fees from wholesalers because they’re usually lawyers themselves and only getting like $13K a year to be an Indiana representative.
To defeat the enemy, you have to think like the enemy. Who wants to pour a glass and start a distributor? It’s better than being on the receiving end of prison sex.
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