Churches and Tasting Rooms

I live in wine country.  Within walking distance of my home there are 4 or 5 tasting rooms and if I drive 20 miles, I will pass a combination of about 140 wineries and tasting rooms.  If you saw the film Sideways, you saw the area where I live.  They grow and make some great Pinot Noirs on the western end of the valley and mostly Rhone varietals to the east.  The wines range from OK to spectacular with many being in the good to very good.  (If you're ever in this area, I can point you to the spectacular ones).  Going wine tasting is a common recreation and we do it a few times a year, usually when friends are visiting and when we have a pickup at from a wine club (we're members at Loring, Evans Ranch, and L'Aventure).  We had a friend visiting and did a few tastings this past weekend.

I'm always fascinated at the differences from one tasting room to another, the clienteles, and the overall atmosphere of the different settings.  It has to say something about churches, who a specific church attracts and why.  Two experiences stood out for me on Saturday.

from their website

The first was Brewer-Clifton, owned by two experienced and respected wine folk in the area.  Greg Brewer is the wine maker for Melville and Steve Clifton is one of the owners of Palmina. The room is minimalist as you can see from the photo to the right - mostly white and stainless steel.  It is located in an area of Lompoc where there are three other tasting rooms I think.  Lompoc is a less expensive town about 50 miles from Santa Barbara with an up and coming wine scene.  The background music was "Chill" from some satellite provider... electronic with a light beat.  I liked it a lot and  I think I heard a tune by an artist I like, Rhye.  There was nothing I could have sung along to.  The wine was excellent to spectacular.  It was also expensive with the least expensive bottles being $40.  I didn't purchase any but it was tempting.  Our friend bought an excellent pinot priced at $74.  The wine was worth the price.  The tasting was also on the upper end of the price scale for Santa Barbara County but it included a small cheese plate with excellent cheeses, dried fruit, and a piece of dark chocolate.  I thought the pourers were warm but our friend experienced them as being a bit standoffish.   It was a place that I will go back to and if I was looking for another wine club to join, Brewer-Clifton would be in the running.  I liked the space, enjoyed the music, and I really liked the wines.  We were the only people there.  Was it because the space doesn't fit in Lompoc?  Was it just because we were early in the day and more folk would show up later?  Price?  Got me.

from their facebook page

At the end of the day we stopped at Casa Dumetz which is owned by Emilio Estavez's spouse, Sonja Magdevski.  She is also the wine maker and is a very warm and outgoing person who has been there the two times we've visited.  She is passionate about her wine and is simply a delight to be around.  They are in a tiny town called Los Alamos which is about half way between the Santa Ynez Valley and Santa Maria, right off the 101.  There are a few restaurants and one or two other tasting rooms but that is it in the maybe 6 or 8 square block town.  We parked about a block away and could hear the laughter and loud talk as soon as we got out of the car. The atmosphere of the room is much warmer, a bit "lived in," with eclectic decor.  I couldn't hear the music playing most of the time but it was a mix of a wide variety of styles from 80's R&B to pop to crooners.  When you could hear the music, you likely could have sung along.  While we were there, we were clearly the oldest folk present.  The pourers were warm and friendly and in spite of being very busy, took the time to engage us.  I was surprised that one of the pourers and the owner both touched my shoulder at least once.  The wine was priced at about 1/2 of Brewer-Clifton, maybe a bit less than that.  It was good... I certainly wouldn't turn my nose up at the wine, but I also didn't purchase any and wasn't  really tempted to.  It was a fun place and I will go back there just to be there.  The only reason I would join the wine club would be to get to know Sonja and the pourers (Grace and Chris) better.  They really were wonderful.

So what does it say about churches?  I'm not entirely sure.  Clearly the experience was more important than the content.  The content - the wine - was clearly superior at Brewer-Clifton (at least to my palate.  Yours may vary).  It was also priced at a point that would exclude all but serious wine folk but for that matter, Casa Dumetz prices - $20 - 34 - would also exclude many.  I enjoyed the pourers both places but Chris and Grace really did make us feel welcome at Casa Dumetz.  So I'd say my takeaway is that the welcome is the most important piece.  Content can't be bad, but great content won't make up for a lack of connections.  And maybe something about context...

All in all though, both were positive experiences for me and I will go back to both tasting rooms.

In the Ghetto

Yesterday was the first real sit down meal for the blended Busby/Donkin families (although John was working so we weren't all here).  It was a simple meal, sauteed asparagus and sloppy joes, but I decided to open a little higher grade wine.  We have about 180 bottles in our "cellar" so I sat in front of them and looked at the labels and came across Ghetto Red from Joseph Blair winery. 

Yep... Ghetto Red. 

It is a fun joke as the wine area in Lompoc, CA is called the Lompoc Wine Ghetto.  It clearly is not the ghetto red I knew as a teenager growing up very near the ghetto in Wilkinsburg, PA.  The ghetto red I knew was Tiger Rose or Bali High...  I think it had some kind of grapes in it.  The Ghetto Red we had was a very nice blend of Merlot and Petit Verdot.  It really went well with the cloves in the sloppy joes.

Fall

I miss fall... at least the kind of fall we had in upstate New York - when the air turns crisp, the leaves turn from green to reds and yellows and then brown, you put on sweaters and the first coats of winter, eat hearty soups,  maybe even a little snow falls that hints of what is coming, and the last deluge of produce comes forth, especially the apples and the products made from them - cider, apple cider donuts, pies, and crisps...  I feel it every year.  I see the apples in the grocery store and I'm not impressed.  They just aren't the same.  Literally, they are different varieties than we loved in Pennsylvania and New York.  The apples there were crisp and tart.  Many of the ones here, even at the farmers' markets, are sweet and mushy.

Of course, there are other signs of fall here.  The last of the grapes are picked and crushed and the new wines are beginning to ferment.  Many wineries bottle wines to free up space in the barrel rooms and sales are abundant because of the need for warehouse space for the new bottlings.

While the temperatures in the low 80's would never have betrayed it, today was a fall day here.  Cheryl and I jumped in the car and headed north to See Canyon in San Luis Opisbo county.  I don't know why they can grow good apples there, but they do.  And we have a favorite orchard - Gopher Glen - that grows 60 varieties of apples including some that we love from the northeast and some we enjoyed that were new to us.  Two weeks ago they were selling Stayman Winesaps - one of our favorites from Pennsylvania and we bought ten pounds.  They're all gone now.   Today we purchased ten pounds of an apple we didn't know as they weren't selling the Stayman Winesaps - Arkansas Black - and two gallons of cider (if you've never had fresh pressed cider directly from an orchard, you've never tasted cider).  It gives us a taste of the fall we know from our past.  Some warm cider donuts would have made me think I had died and gone to heaven... or at least to upstate New York.

Then we headed south, towards home and stopped at Core Winery in Orcutt to pick up a wine club shipment.  Dave and Becky Corey run a great little winery that is just fun.  The wines are quite good and very reasonably priced but it was the family atmosphere that pulled us in and inspired us to join.  So, we enjoyed some wines, talked with folk, picked up our three bottles (and bought three more) and headed home.

Yes, it was 80 degrees and didn't feel anything like an October day in upstate New York (where it was snowing today), but it still felt like fall... and that felt good.

gonna party like it's my birfday. it's my birfday!

It's my birthday.  That pulls together a bunch of different threads for me.  On the one hand, it is a day like any other day.  'nough said...  but it is good to set time aside to be aware of the passage of time, of people and places and experiences that are important to us and to celebrate and commemorate.  It doesn't have to be expensive or elaborate.  It just needs to be.

So we're celebrating.  And it won't be expensive or elaborate.  We blew way more money than we could afford on our recent trip to Kauai so it can't be either.  I'll be thankful for family and friends, for technology that kept me alive way beyond most of the men in my family, and for blessings too numerous to even remember let alone list.

Cheryl and I started last night by stopping by a wine bar in Lompoc called D'vine.  It was our first time there.  We'll be sure to go back.  We had some nice local wine and heard some great music by Owen Plant (who we have coming back to the Cambridge Drive Concert Series in January).  We weren't planning to eat anything but they had this desert that wouldn't let us not try it.  It was a dark chocolate chili tart with candied apple smoked bacon.  It was soooo good and was just perfect with red wine.

Today... I'm beginning by trying to put off finishing my sermon.  It is not an easy passage (Matthew 21:33-46) and I've never preached on it before so I can't even cheat and pull out an old sermon.  So, I blog first and then I'll get back to it.

For dinner, like many folk, the birthday person gets to pick either a favorite restaurant or a favorite meal.  Cheryl is an amazing cook.  She can do sophisticated and fancy and she can also do peasant food.  I like both.  We can get sophisticated pretty easily in Santa Barbara and some kinds of peasant food, especially Mexican, but other peasant foods are just not available.  Good pizza is very difficult to get on the west coast period and the people's Italian food is almost as difficult to find.  Back in Philly and Pittsburgh, every few blocks there was a knock you off the bar stool neighborhood Italian restaurant.  Here... there just aren't.  Cheryl makes a red sauce, called gravy in Philly, that is as good as any I've ever had anywhere  and a killer meatball.  So that is what I requested.  We'll have a nice super Tuscan, the Tocata Riserva from Mandolina and some store bought deserts.  Cheryl also makes some amazing deserts but if she made an entire flour less chocolate torte I'd eat it.  So we bought deserts from a local bakery.  They won't be as good as hers, but I'll be finished with it this evening and won't have all of those evil calories calling me.

Now... back to the sermon.  Thanks for the diversion.

Gee... life is hard

My daughter is getting married in August and we're working on all of the details for the service and the reception. Parts of the preparation have been a lot of fun.

Alexis and Christian wanted two things at the reception... live music for dancing and decent wine (we do live in wine country). That presented problems. Volume rules and anti-alcohol policies ruled out many different spaces. Add to that the fact that we live in Santa Barbara where everything costs more and the possibilities narrowed quickly. We chose a venue that met our hopes, was reasonably affordable (it is Santa Barbara so reasonable is relative), allowed live music, and had a great menu. We tasted the wines available and at $20 a bottle and up, we were less than impressed. There is a $10 corkage fee so we figured anything $10 a bottle or less and we'd be ahead of the game. So... we've been having tastings of sub $10 wines.

This evening we were tasting some whites. Today, I picked up two bottles - a Tiger Hill Sauvignon Blanc from India! (as a joke, we tasted some Indian wines when we were in India in October and they were bad) and a bottle of Montes Chardonnay from Chile. From an earlier shopping trip I had bottles of Kono Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand, a Firestone Chardonnay, a Fetzer Chardonnay, and a Kendall Jackson Chardonnay - all of which were well under our $10 limit.

Cheryl made some amazing chicken and Cheryl, Alexis, Christin, and I had dinner and tastes of 6 wines.

Here are some thoughts...

Tiger Hill - very simple, watery... let's just say that everyone dumped their little tastes.

Kono Sauvignon Blanc - This wine is from the Marlborough region of New Zealand which is known for wonderful citrusy wines. Some great ones like the Kim Crawford cost $13-15 a bottle. The Kona still had some of the grapefruit flavors I associate with this region but it didn't have a lot more than that. I liked it. Nobody else did.

Fetzer Chardonnay - years ago we used to drink Fetzer Sundial and thought this would be a reasonable wine to try. The label said "apple, pear, and tropical fruits." I tasted a dominant flavor of banana which I'm not crazy about. Everybody else liked it more than I did.

Montes Chardonnay - Alexis took a sip and immediately dumped it. She said, amoxicillan! bubble gum flavored amoxicillan." Everyone dumped it.

Firestone Chardonnay - I liked this idea since Firestone is a Santa Barbara winery and they have reasonably good wines. This chard had a bit more citrus than the others. I liked it. Alexis and Cheryl didn't.

Kendall Jackson Chardonnay - KJ has some vineyards right along route 1 in the northern part of Santa Barbara county and blends grapes from a number of regions including Santa Barbara County to make these lower level wines. While this one wasn't a great wine, it also didn't have any overwhelming flaws. Everyone liked it enough to add to it our list and nobody dumped it.

We tasted reds and a few other whites earlier (I'll blog about this later) and it seems that it is much easier to find reasonable reds than whites in the sub $10 range. We'll likely purchase a few cases of the Kendall Jackson to supplement a Paul Mas Sauvignon Blanc that we purchased after an earlier tasting...

tastes great!

I've said before that one of the real joys of living in Santa Barbara is the availability of wonderful, local wines. On Friday we're going to a friend's house to do a tasting of Cabernet's at a variety of price points and I decided to go across the mountains yesterday to pick up a bottle from our favorite winery - Beckmen. Since we're members there, that means a free tasting. So, Cheryl and I along with Alexis and her significant other, Christian, drove to Los Olivos, got lunch at a little cafe and then off to Beckmen's to taste some wonderful red wines. We bought the cab and a bottle of their top of the line blend, jumped in the car and off for some more tastings.

Tastings are a wonderful social event... the pourers are all wonderfully social and informed people and it is great fun to taste some wines, learn about them, and meet some fun people. It is also interesting to feel the different atmospheres of the different wineries and to see the different clientele that is attracted. It was a gray and drizzly day but what better way to spend that than tasting some great wines and laughing with fun people?

We didn't feel like driving around a lot so we went to Solvang where we could visit a number of tasting rooms that we hadn't visited before, walk around a bit, and then head home.

Our first visit was Mandolina. One of the trends here is known as CalItal - growing Italian grapes and making Italian style wines and this little winery is one of the ones devoted to that trend. We tasted some very nice Italian varietals and ended up purchasing a bottle of their version of a super Tuscan - a blend of Italian and Bordeaux varieties of grapes. Yummy. It was a small tasting room and we were the only ones there for most of the time. We enjoyed talking with the pourer.

A short walk around the corner brought us to our next stop - Stolpman Vineyards. Stolpman is known more as a grower than a vintner and it isn't unusual to see other wineries with bottles labeled that the grapes came from Stolpman. I had drunk other vintners wines made from Stolpman grapes, but hadn't tasted their own wines before. When we got to the reds, we were struck by the huge tannins in their wines. I'm told that the vast majority of wines sold in the US are drunk within 3 days and most US wines are produced with that in mind. It would be a shame to drink these wines in 3 days. These puppies need to sit for a few years... and then they'll be amazing. The tasting room was a little larger than Mandolina and David, the pourer, obviously knew their wines. There were a few other people there. This winery is tempting me to join another wine club... but Cheryl says it is more than she wants to commit to spending on wines... I'll be working on her.

Around the corner and down the street and we stopped at Lucas and Lewellen, who also own Mandolina. I have wanted to taste their wines for some time as I pass some of their vineyards on 101 everytime I drive to Santa Maria for my clergy group meetings. This tasting room was full. Beth, the pourer, was a lot of fun. She obviously enjoys her job and the clientele enjoyed her. She described one wine to me as being so wonderful that one drink and the heavens opened and the angels sang... but that wine was sold out. Her second favorite, she told us was almost as good... the heavens still opened and the angels were there but no Baptist choir. You can imagine the look on her face when I told her that I am a Baptist pastor. We bought a bottle of Petit Syrah (her 2nd favorite).

I hate to sound like I represent the chamber of commerce or the visitor's bureau, but if you find yourself anywhere near the California central coast, do plan to do some tastings... and maybe encourage your favorite restaurant or local wine merchant to add some Santa Barbara wines to their wine list.

wino's unite!

I live in Santa Barbara, California and it is hard to not love wine here. Each year, wine grapes are the #1 or #2 crop in Santa Barbara county and they make some wonderful wines here. If you saw Sideways, you got a taste of that even though I think the Rhone style wines here are better than the Pinot Noirs. It is always a fun day to hop in the car, drive over the mountains and do some tastings.

One of our favorite wineries is called Beckmen Vineyards. They are a family owned and run, biodynamic winery that makes wonderful syrahs, grenaches, cabernets, and Rhone style blends. In fact, we like this winery so much that we are members of their Purisima Club. I highly recommend their wines if you enjoy great reds.

Some time ago, a wine loving friend of mine from back east sent me a link to Gary Vaynerchuk's website and daily webcasts of wine reviews. He is fun, knowledgeable, and honest in his reviews even if his descriptions are not always what one expects from a wine lover - "who doesn't like jockstrap filled with pickles because let me tell you right now this is man sweat with pickles all around..." Yep, he actually said that about a wine he loved (2005 Guillon Gevrey Chambertin Pere Galland) on episode 353!

Even if you don't love wines or if you do and think he is insane, he is fun to watch... And jockstrap filled with pickles certainly removes any of the pretentiousness that often surrounds serious wine drinking. Click on the widget on the right to see his latest reviews.

futures

We aren't wine snobs but if we could afford it, we could easily become so... Cheryl and I are members of one of the wine clubs at Beckmen Vineyards. Yesterday we had a wonderful day at a tasting of futures (and a few current wines) exclusively for wine club members. Beckmen produces wonderful Syrahs, Grenaches, and Rhone style blends. We learned about Beckmen's biodynamic farming, had a nice picnic, enjoyed the tastings, and ordered a number of bottles of wine which will be released over the next year or so. Then, some we'll drink and some we'll hold for as many as 10 years. Buying good wine is a statement of optimism regarding the future.

Ecclesiastes was right when it tells us that "wine makes the heart merry." Good wine does it doubly