Central Coast Wine Blogs

The Buzzard Tree

This is from my old winery blog,  a tribute to a kind and gentle man I will always remember fondly.  RIP, Art.

At 7 a.m. on a frosty Friday morning, Jim gently took his mother by the shoulders and asked her to look out the window. The vineyard canes were bare, the ground covered with a hoarfrost of snow.

“The buzzard tree,” she gasped. “It’s broken! Oh, it’s gone.”

For as long as Art and Lei Norman had lived in their home, a tall oak on the property had one large dead limb protruding from its crown. They called it ‘the buzzard tree’ because a flock of turkey buzzards gathered on the naked limb each morning and evening. And now apparently the limb was gone.

At four in the afternoon the day before, Lei had lost her husband, winemaker Art Norman. So the missing limb was doubly significant—a cruel affirmation of loss.

Some Random Tasting Room Guidelines

The Trinacria is a symbol of Sicily, but it also looks like a tasting room attendant on a busy day.

Every time I go on a little wine tasting jaunt I notice details.  And not just in the wine.  I notice when a tasting room attendant makes handling a busy room look as effortless as ballet.  I also notice when tasting room attendants drop the ball, fumble and foul like a doomed football game. 

Here are some random bits of advice from my forthcoming book, Managing Your Tasting Room.

First impressions

Smile and greet everyone as they walk in the door.  Make eye contact.  Always have glasses and tasting lists ready. 

If it becomes difficult to keep track of tasters, orders, and requests--just work clockwise.  Always start with the person on your left and move to the right.  You'll still have to multi-task, but if people have wine in their glass, and they can see that you are moving from guest to guest in an orderly fashion,  they're more inclined to be patient.  You can also do the "fade out/fade in".  Continue answering questions from one couple as you edge gently to the right to pour for the next couple and smile at them. 

If someone is really pinning you down with questions, say something like, "That's a really good question.  Let me just pour some wine for our other guests and I'll be right back."  Finish your circle, and you'll be back to him in no time.

The Art and Angst of Winemaking

I have this recurring daydream about being invited to a famous wine writer's house for dinner. I would be awful, and I would take great delight in being so.

• "I'm afraid the salad dressing is a little on the acetic side."
• "The lamb is a little overdone, somewhat dry, don't you think?"
• "The asparagus, is, well, wonderfully green. Perhaps it needs some cheese."
• "I'm sorry, I'm sure your raspberry chocolate soufflé is wonderful, but I find sweet food so cloying."

When you criticize a winemaker's wine, you are, in essence, criticizing his cooking. Nearly all winemakers are intensely interested in food: fresh ingredients, gentle techniques, attractive presentation. The same things that go into making wine.

Cellars are generally tidy places. The wines move in routine and carefully planned stages through pressing, tanks, barrels, adjustments, bottling. Winemakers shuffle around in the cellar tasting the wines as if they were pasta sauces, waiting a little longer on some, blending here and there, time to finish up on others. They also put a lot of energy into choosing their bottles and designing their labels. Some winemakers shop for glassware with the fervor of a bride looking for china. If the winemaker is also the owner, you can deduct much about him from his label design.

Winemakers, however, don't think of their wine as "product" unless they're talking to their CPA or marketing director. They think of wine as a process--the elegant presentation of a whole food, fermented and finished in oak.

Dessert Wines

Dessert wines - Many people just pour them over high-quality vanilla bean ice cream with fresh berries or shaved dark chocolate atop. But a quality dessert wine is so much more than just a sweet pick-me-up or a syrup for frozen milch. During the holidays you should have a few bottles on hand.  Don't be shy about using them as after-dinner digestifs enjoyed in a tiny glass, as the basis for meat marinades and vinaigrettes, to splash into Spanish cava or champagne for a festive flair, and to accompany holiday desserts.  At the end of a meal, a complex, layered dessert wine is both dessert and digestif, particularly if you serve it with some crisp fruit and mellow cheeses. Some dessert wines, particularly whites, are mellow enough to be served with roasted quail and other savory treats. During the holidays, a good dessert wine makes an instant course for a quickly pulled together dinner, and can even be used as part of the preparation.

Some easy pairings for late harvest and port-style reds:

• Dates stuffed with cream cheese and topped with a raspberry
• Small puff pastry circlets topped with cream fraiche, berries, and shaved chocolate
• Sesame glazed walnuts
• Slices of pear and apple
• Savory cheeses—Gorgonzola, Stilton, Manchego

Quick pairings for white late harvest and dessert wines:

• White chocolate brownies
• Puff pastry cups with fresh peaches, crème fraiche and toasted almonds
• Baklava
• Fruit and cheese quiche
• Tapioca or pudding topped with fruit and crème fraiche

While most people instinctively pair a sweet with a sweet, the oils and sugar in chocolate and dessert dishes coat the palate and subdue the layered flavors of a great dessert wine. When I want the wine to star, I serve nuts, cheese, and savory bites.   

Try basting a quail with a dessert white or red while roasting, and prepare a long-grain rice stuffing with fruits that have been steeped in a cup of the wine—dark fruits for a red dessert wine, white fruits like apricots and blood oranges in white dessert wine. The savory elements of the fowl and rice are a great marriage with dessert wines. Look for dessert wines that are not too rich and pruney—they should have lifted acidity and clearly definable varietal flavors.

"It takes a lot of good beer to make great wine."

Harvest season in the wine industry is hot, thirsty work. The vines are covered with a summer's worth of dust, and inhabited by black widow spiders and other crawling, climbing, biting insects. Workers who peel back the bird netting draped over the vines have the pleasure of removing dead birds, squirrels and possums entangled in the net. Driving the tractors which tow the picking bins up and down the rows is hot work too, and bees follow the picking bins in swarms, lying thick on top of the sweet, sticky grapes.

In the winery itself, cellarmen drag heavy hoses from one tank to another, even up onto the catwalks, so wine can be pumped up to the top of a tank and sluiced over the grapeskins floating near the top. Others are standing inside fermentation tanks, shoveling out the heavy pomace, the residual grapeskins left after the wine has been pumped off. Everything needs cleaning, all the time. Tanks, barrels, buckets, hoses, fittings---everything is washed, brushed, scoured and sanitized in a continual war against nasty organisms and fruit flies.

This time of year, you are likely to find local winemakers enjoying a hot dinner at Papi's Mexican restaurant, arguing the merits of various yeasts with a hot tostada in one hand and a cold beer in the other. Cellarmen and winemakers sit in the shade at the end of the day with--you guessed it, a cold beer. The cellar refrigerators hold equal parts of yeast, bottled wine samples, steaks, and beer.

Crush, Continued

It's that time of year again. Time for grapes to be harvested and turned into wine. Do we call this time of year "crush" because the grapes are poured into hoppers and dumped into crusher-destemmers to be de-foliated and mangled before fermenting? No, we call it "crush" because this is the time of year when forklifts are backed into doors and tanks; tractors roll down terraced hillsides; hoses get plugged up, tanks overflow, and the winery dogs sleeping on warm cement get run over.

This is how wine is made. When a winemaker refers casually to the "blood and guts" of his winery, he is probably not referring to accounts receivable or distribution channels. He is likely referring to a dismantled crusher, sitting like a beached ship among a sea of littered parts---or the last cellar worker to explode the head off a barrel of wine.

Wayne's Tire does a thriving business this time of year, catering to the ag industry, making road calls nearly 24 hours a day to replace forklift tires, tractor tires and truck tires. The wine industry here is not a tidy, large-scale industry with predictable sizes and types of mobile equipment. Small vineyards and wineries use whatever they can find and afford; picking bin trailers have varying sizes of wheels and tires, and of course they don't just go flat---they shred themselves completely in inconvenient places like terraced hillsides and highway intersections.

Electricians are also highly popular this time of year, as every critical piece of equipment except the punchdown tool runs on electricity---and huge amounts of it. And of course all these generators and presses and whatnot have signs plastered on all their panels saying, "Do Not Open" or "Hazard--Danger," so who wants to go poking around in there?

Forklifts are definitely the most popular piece of equipment during crush---being used for forklift races, diving boards over winery fire protection ponds, to hold basketball hoops, as tire jacks, and for subtly chasing snoopy tasters who wander onto the crush pad.

It's not always fun and games however, as cellar workers wade through hordes of yellow jackets, faint from fermentation fumes (whenever a cellar worker is missing he's presumed sleeping, but we all check the fermentation tanks for floating shoes), drop heavy tools, and yank the barrel washers out without turning off the hot water.

Yellow Jackets and the Sting Pain Index

Yellow jackets are a common pest during harvest. They swarm thickly over the bins of arriving fruit, and explore odd crevices in the winery equipment.

Spring through summer, yellow jackets (a species of wasp, not a bee) bring insects, meat and fish to feed larvae in their rapidly growing colony. The larvae in turn give off a sweet nectar that fuels and satisfies the adults. By late summer or early September, the larvae are all grown and the result is about 5,000 hungry adults. Without the larval love juice, an occasional flower nectar or sip of tree sap is no longer enough to fuel their full-flight metabolisms. They are looking for meat and sugar, which is why they are common pests at summer’s end picnics.

The Magic of Crush

In late summer, there is a moment in vineyards known as "veraison," which translates roughly as "moment of truth." It is the moment when grapes begin to turn from hard, green beads into sweet, plump fruit. From that moment until harvest the vineyards are at their most vulnerable. The hazards of the early season--heavy rains, late frosts--are minor compared to the dangers that haunt the last few weeks of vintage. Hordes of deer and birds descending on tender fruit can wipe out an entire harvest in a few days. Late season heat ripens grapes too quickly, robbing them of flavor. A lack of heat delays harvest into late fall, when freezing nights can turn grapes into tasteless mush. Late season rains swell grapes with water, breaking the skins and infecting entire clusters with mold.

During these last few weeks of summer, winemakers are in the vineyards, looking at the clusters, crushing grapes between their fingers, tasting the fruit. The winemaker's phone rings unanswered, mail piles up in messy stacks, and deadlines are missed. In the winery itself, cellarmen spend weeks draining barrels and tanks of previous vintages, bottling and labeling wine and shipping it out, cleaning tanks, barrels and equipment. Like the unveiling of a statue, cloth covers are pulled off the crusher and the press, and the huge machines are rolled outside, cleaned, and tested. Truck-size scales are pulled out of storage, assembled and calibrated to receive incoming fruit.

But to those of us who have been through this before, these busy weeks seem quiet, sounds seem muted. The vineyards are full and leafy, and heavy with fruit. Vines sag over their trellis systems and trail on the ground. Heat waves dance over the vines and an occasional breeze lifts the aluminum strips which are meant to frighten birds. In the winery itself, empty tanks stand with their doors hanging open. Barrels are turned upside down in their racks and the whole winery has a strangely hollow feeling.

Like survivors of a storm who smell another forming, we move through our preparations quickly with our minds focused on the horizon of late summer, waiting as the rising sugars and flavor of the vineyard slowly escalate--because all of this activity is only preparation for the season we call "crush."

Pork Tenderloin and Basil Carnitas

 

I use fresh herbs, tomatoes, and peppers from the garden to make this easy and succulent dish during harvest season, when guests are many and time is limited.

Photos are courtesy of Brian Grafstrom, who is making this dish while traveling in London, England!

Order your own copy of The Deck Party Cookbook!  Choose from paperback and easy-print digital versions.

• 1 1/2 pound pork tenderloin
• 1/2 cup olive oil
• 1/2 cup red wine
• 1/4 cup white Worcestershire sauce
• Fresh garlic chives, bay leaves, thyme and oregano
• 1-2 cups fresh basil leaves, julienned or sliced
• 2 cups chopped vine-ripened tomatoes
• 1 cup chopped white onion
• 1 cup chopped yellow bell pepper
• 4 flour tortillas

Serves 4

Place the pork tenderloin in a one gallon sealable bag with the olive oil, wine, white Worcestershire sauce, half of the julienned basil, and plenty of chopped fresh herbs.  (Strip the tiny leaves off the thyme stems, and gently crush the bay leaves.) 

Marinate for 2-3 hours.  Grill the tenderloin over medium-hot coals until faintly pink inside, about 10-15 minutes on each side.  You can also sear the tenderloin on the stove over medium heat, and then roast it at 400º for 10-15 minutes, or at 300º for 25-30 minutes.  Check the tenderloin after 15 minutes, because pork cooks quickly.  If you have a meat thermometer, interior temperature should be about 150º, and the center should be hot, yet still pink and juicy. 

Chop the tenderloin into bite-size chunks, and serve on warmed flour tortillas with the fresh basil, chopped tomatoes, chopped onion and peppers.

Wine suggestion: 

Pinot noir, sangiovese, or zinfandel.

 

Abalone's Revenge: The Cayucos Abalone Farm

 
 
A while back, I arranged a fundraising dinner and some tours of local food producers as a fundraiser for a culinary association.  We started the day at the Cayucos Abalone Farm with a personally guided tour conducted by Brad Buckley. Perched on small bluff overlooking the ocean, the farm produces almost 500,000 abalone a year. They culture only red abalone, under the brand name Ocean Rose.

Our first abalone epiphany was that abalone are not bi-valves like clams or oysters. They are snails. Gross, yet cool. Various strains of abalone also have their own particular flavor.

Blending Trials

 

  
 
We face each other over two glasses of wine. He asks for my opinion first. My wine repertoire consists of "I like it," or "I don't like it," and maybe a comment on the acid-fruit balance. But this is all he needs—the gauntlet thrown down.

Examining wine is this man's sport and passion. He doesn't just taste, or smell, or see. He views wine as a chessmaster views the board, or a sailor his boat. Every tiny detail is vital, and my opinion is only a catalyst, a challenge that invites him to step closer and lose himself in yet another brief but passionate relationship.

If I say I like it, he looks surprised, as though I couldn't possibly be serious, but bravely he says nothing, going back into the glass to re-examine it dubiously for positive qualities. After a moment he says, "But the phenolics are a bit high, don't you think? And there is a definite brassica component that detracts from the varietal character of the wine."

On Blogging: The Power of an Evergreen Article

 

Last month I was selected by Tripbase as one of the top ten bloggers in their World Wine category.  Please bear with me as I do a little chest-thumping, because my real intent is to share with you how you can make your blog impactful. 

Bread Machine Recipe: Saffron-Coriander

  

I recently received compliments on my favorite homemade bread loaf, which I brought to a winery gathering, so I thought I'd share it here.  It's great with hearty grilled foods and red wine.  Enjoy with friends, family and customers.

I prefer an upright-style bread machine for even rising and baking.  If you haven't tried using a bread machine yet, inexpensive models are available used on eBay and similar sites for around $30. 

I prefer the upright model to the horizontal pan machines because it consistently produces a thoroughly mixed, fluffier, and uniform loaf.  The basic recipe is for a large 2 pound loaf of white bread, but I add two secret ingredients:  coriander seed and a saffron mix.  Coriander seed gives the bread cubes a citrusy crunch, and the saffron blend gives it a deep yellow color and a toasty, almost tobacco-like aroma which is great with red wine.  For another variation, you can also add dried safflower petals, which are frequently available in your grocer's Mexican spice section.

Here's the recipe, which you may want to adjust depending on your basic bread machine recipe . . .

A Paean to Zinfandel:Paso Robles Zinfandel Festival March 18-20

 

March. The end of winter and cold feet, of leaving for work in the dark and coming home in the dark. It's almost time to dust off the barbecue; our hunter-gatherer instinct awakens and hungers for blackened, peppered steaks and grilled vegetables.

This month is our paean salute, our end-of-winter bonfire, our celebration of everything wine symbolizes—good food, warmth, red berries and red lips, sunlight and firelight, and most of all, the mystery of earth's bounty and man's eagerness to preserve it.

Some zinfandels are elegant yet barbaric contenders for a Gallic throne, mysterious and powerful, with layers of complexity under a velvet mantle. Some are distinctively New World zinfandels—brash, bold and individualistic. Late harvest zinfandels and syrahs with dark, divine flavors strike a resonant note deep in your soul on a chilly night.

Each season's harvest is different, a reflection of the winds, the moons, and man's ability to capture earth's magnificence in a bottle.

Join us for Paso Robles' annual Zinfandel Festival, March 18-20.

50 Tips for Cellar Rats: Intro Excerpt

 

The following is an excerpt from 50 Tips for Cellar Rats, available from Amazon and Lulu.

Do you want to work harvest at a winery?

Are you looking for excitement?  Want to learn more about wine production?  Do you want to sink your hands into a bin of warm, fermenting, aromatic must and breathe deeply of the perfume of terroir?

Working crush at a winery is one of the most exciting work opportunities in the world.  You will be working with men and women who are simultaneously artists and scientists, farmers and celebrities.

Wine is an industry that revolves around the land, the magic of soil, and a luxury product that is fragile and yet has been known to improve over decades.  Like music, wine is an industry where math, art, and passion combine, and where humble artisans can become stars overnight.

The wine industry has a lot of fans, and many of those fans would like to be a part of it, if even for a few magical moments.

And this is where you come in. 

A New Year in the Vineyard

 

Winter, even here in our relatively mild central coast, is a time of dormancy. Barbecues are covered or rolled into the garage, basketballs and baseballs lie forgotten in dusty corners, roses and grapevines raise bare arms against cold and shredding skies.

Like most fruit trees and vines, grapes require this period of dormancy to build strength for the coming vintage. In a way, this time of year is truly the beginning of the next vintage, just as January is the beginning of our new year. A vine is impacted by its past—the type of trellising selected, the demands of past years in terms of water and heat and production, and the amount of tender care and handling it may or may not have enjoyed. But that is in the past. Now the vine is resting, rebuilding, getting ready to produce a new "leaf," as a year is often referred to in viticulture. A new leaf, new buds, new clusters as if nothing had gone on before, as though nothing can deter it from beginning fresh.

Like all plants, a vine is mindless in the sense that it will joyously burst into life in the spring and given its own way it will sprawl, climb, and spread like the weed it is, until, exhausted by its summertime orgy of sun-chasing growth, it finally produces some wild clusters of bird-size fruit.

It is up to the husbandman, gardener, or vineyard manager to prune, shape, domesticate, and tame those shameless vines into tidy rows of well-branched vines dripping with the appropriate number of grape clusters per acre—discipline bringing order and strength into nature.

How to Tell a Wine Geek from a Cork Dork

 

The following post is a reprise of a newspaper article I wrote in 1992.  It was subsequently published on the Dover Canyon Winery blog (which no longer exists). The post enjoyed viral hits and backlinks from all over the world.   I'm sure poor Roger (pictured above) never expected to see his photo reprinted on hundred of sites.  I hope he can take comfort in my opinion that he is not a cork dork, but a true geek. 

Recently, at a dinner with friends, one man's date turned to me and complained, "He's so boring.  All he ever talks about is wine.  All day long he talks about wine."

I probably  looked hurt, because I was just as engrossed in our discussion of Syrah as he was.  Lorraine leaned toward me and whispered, "She's right, you know.  We're all hopeless wine geeks.  Look at us from an outsider's point of view."

But the deeper I get into the world of wine, the harder that is to do.  I think moving our discussion from Merlot to Syrah is a total change in conversation.  Have I been slowly losing touch with reality and drifting more and more into a fascination with varietal differences and degrees of oak, malolactic overindulgence, and varying theories on wild yeasts? 

I must, however, point out the vast difference between a wine geek and a cork dork.  In my lexicon, a wine geek, like a computer geek, is consumed by his field.  He likes dry and sweet wines, white and red wines, French and American wines.  He is an experience junkie, always looking for a new and vinous adventure.  

A wine geek will look at an untried varietal like a biologist discovering a new phylum.  "What's this?  A pinot verde?  Get out the Riedel, we must examine this!"

A cork dork, on the other hand, will hold his glass by the base.  He'll swirl a wine until it's exhausted, and after a long speech on the supposed characteristics of a wine he has yet to taste, will finally sniff it and announce his disappointment in its aroma.  A cork dork will aspire to all things French, and the barrels must be new, the women young, and the wines very old—although any one with any experience knows that these choices are not necessarily the best.  If you try to pour him some dessert wine, he'll snatch his glass away in horror, leaving you in the foolish position of pouring wine on the table.

When visiting wine country, you will inevitably encounter both wine geeks and cork dorks.   Therefore, I suggest these ten guidelines for differentiating between poseurs (dorks) and real geeks (us). 

1.   A dork will make you feel uncomfortable.  They are supercilious, punctilious, and from my point of view, just plain supersillious.  A geek, however, will make you feel comfortable, and value your opinion of his wines.

2. A dork holds his glass by the base, or with his fingers curled sensuously around the body of the glass.  A geek grabs his glass by the stem and just sticks his nose in.  All business.

An interview with Thomas J. Rice: Author of 'Paso Robles: An American Terroir'

 

For the last twenty years, Tom Rice has led a double life.   As an energetic yet mild-mannered professor of soil science at California Polytechnic Institute in San Luis Obispo, California, Dr. Rice has supervised over 50 detailed senior projects and Masters theses which detail the soils and environment of the San Luis Obispo environs, including soil maps of well known vineyards in both the eastern and western regions of the Paso Robles AVA.  The soil science program at Cal Poly, which Dr. Rice helped develop, consistently attracts the largest soil science undergraduate enrollment in the United States.

In his other life, Dr. Rice works as a private consultant and adventurer, braving cultural unrest to speak in Xi’an, the People’s Republic of China on watershed management; clambering through hot, rattlesnake hills  to study the viability of planting vineyards over the oil fields of Texas, escorting scientists through the Mojave Desert, and researching the insidious incursion of mercury contamination in the Lake Nacimiento basin of coastal California.  In September 1998, Dr. Rice presented a talk at the University of Florence, Italy, on “Vineyards on Limestone Soils in California and France.”

The book begins . . . “It was not a terribly auspicious beginning for a world class wine country.  For brevity’s sake, we’ll only go back 20 million years.  The Tertiary Period was when most of our landmass was forming.  There followed a number of epochs; the Pliocene era (2 to 5 million years ago) was the California Coastal Ranges mountain-building era.  The San Andreas Fault was fracturing during the Miocene era (5 to 24 million years ago) and it has been a real inconvenience ever since.”

An introduction describes the terroir as seen through the eyes of early ranching, farming and winegrowing families.  Chapter one addresses environmental contrasts between the east side and west side, and general issues of water quality, wildlife habitat and native plants.

 
 
An aerial view of Halter Ranch vineyards

The remaining chapters are organized by region:  Templeton Gap, Adelaida Hills, Salinas River Valley Terraces West, Estrella River Terraces, Salinas River Terraces Southeast, and the Creston/Shandon Area.  Terraces West would include the San Marcos drainage area, and the Dusi Ranch vineyards.  The Southeast Terraces are possibly two separate regions—Santa Margarita and Huerhuero River Terraces. 

Dr. Rice adds, "Although there are not many wineries in that region, there are big vineyards, with lots of geologic and soil variation.  This region encompasses vineyards as diverse as Wild Horse, Maloy O’Neill, and Chateau Margene.  We once had redwood forests here, and huge flood plains which were uplifted into river terraces.  There’s been a lot of undercutting as layers were forced underneath the plains, so in the high plateaus and orchards of the El Pomar region, the eroded tops of the highest points may be all calcareous shale, with underlying alluvium and a veneer of Paso Robles formation . . . sand, gravel, and clay."

The Memory Garden

 
 
"How do you come up with all these aromas and flavors?" is a question I am frequently asked about wine. 

One fall, as I was barrel sampling some wines a particular scent eluded me.  I knew I had encountered it before, but where?  I finally found it in the pantry of my "memory garden"--it was the yellow-ish green lace that is found on whole nutmeg cloves:  mace.

Based loosely on the concept of The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, I have created a memory garden in my mind that I visit when seeking the scents and flavors in a wine.

How to Select a Distributor: 7 Questions to Ask

When an opportunity to engage a distributor pops up, it can be incredibly tempting to just say yes.  They'll flatter you and promise you the moon . . . but can they walk the walk? 

Here are 7 questions to ask a distributor before committing your brand:

A Visit with Benito Dusi

 

As clearly as I can recall, Ridge was the first extra-appellate winery to actually put "Paso Robles" as an appellation on their label. A daring move for a winery with a fine reputation—to align itself with an area that, at the time, was commonly associated with cattle farming and the subterranean Salinas River, which disappears entirely under its sandy riverbed every summer.

Imagine it is 1959.  Driving down Highway 101 to the beach towns of Morro Bay and Cambria, Dusi Vineyard was a charming stop on the way to a clamming weekend with the wife and kids. Women wearing loose rayon sundresses, silk stockings and open-toed heels accompanied their husbands on the short walk into the Dusi tasting room—a small, separate cottage between the home and vineyard. A six-foot tasting bar hosts the southern side of the cottage. Magazines lauding the four San Luis Obispo County wineries are still carefully fanned out on the corner of the tasting bar. I pick up the 1959 Sunset guide to California wineries. A two page black-and-white spread with brief descriptions of each of the four wineries also includes photographs of sleepy Cambria, a rickety one-boat dock with a view of the Rock at Morro Bay, and a family clamming on a local beach.

In a daring leap of faith, central coast zinfandel grower Sylvester Dusi and his son Benito raised the price of their wine by ten cents a case. Dusi zinfandel went from $5.90 a case to $6.00. They held their price at $6.00 a case for fifteen years—from 1959 to 1974.

In 1959 Benito Dusi was a young man in his mid-twenties. Although now in his seventies, it’s not hard to see Beni as the young man he was and always will be. He has a way of flashing oblique glances at me under his lashes, as though he knows a good joke but is too shy to tell it. He’s not tall, but he’s muscular in a wiry kind of way, standing upright with his shoulders unconsciously back and open, even when the room is cold. It is easy to see him as a young, bashful, and incredibly smart farmer.

Reviews for '50 Tips for Cellar Rats'

From Sheldon Haynie, Lightheart Cellars, San Martin, CA:

"It's an excellent training manual that we will use to orient new volunteers and as a seasonal refresher for the part time family and friends who may be assisting, as well as for ourselves, as a reminder of things we haven't done in a year. 

Your style of presenting the 50 tips makes it an easy read, and the block highlights set off salient points well. The many anecdotes and observations make the do's and don'ts more sensible in context. 

We'll be buying several."

Editor Eric Arnold at The Daily Sip says:

"The guide is packed with simple, easy-to-read information that you can absorb in less than hour: Everything from what sorts of food and drinks to stock up on for the busy harvest season to how to be clean and efficient on the job to when to speak up--or keep your mouth shut. Many of us here at The Daily Sip wish we'd had such a crash course before our first winery jobs--it'd have prevented some serious drama, not to mention some property damage."

Eric is the author of First Big Crush and a former editor at Wine Spectator and Forbes.

How to Work with Your Wholesaler

In his wine industry blog Fermentation, Tom Wark provides this excellent advice in an article called Ten Things Every Small Winery Must Know:

"Many small wineries will contract with wholesalers in their home state and other states. The biggest mistake wineries make when working with wholesalers is selling them a pallet or half pallet or quarter pallet of wine to them hoping the wholesaler sells the wine. If you really want them to sell your wine after they buy it, you'll need to demand they do so by staying in touch with them regularly. Demand they use the sales materials they get form you. Demand they deliver regular depletion reports. Demand they take time to work with your wine so you are in the market. Demand you have the opportunity to communicate with sales people. If you don't do these things, the likelihood is that your wines will languish in their warehouses as they focus on larger brands."

Mary Woodworth, owner of HarvestGate—a Paso Robles distributor that focuses on central coast brands—has a slightly different take on the subject. Mary's advice to wineries is to build a firm foundation first by studying the market, your brand demographics, and your competition. "My biggest concern is that many wineries want to launch a consumer product but have absolutely no idea where they will sell it. This isn’t a case of 'if you build it they will come'. "

Mary's advice:

1. Know your market—don’t sit back and expect a distributor to create a viable marketing plan for you (unless of course you pay them to do it).
2. Know your competition – unless you’re highly sought after, you have competition and a lot of it. Be realistic.
3. Know your customer – who is it that buys your wine (to drink!) and why. What will you do to reach that pull through?
4. Know the sales reps – treat them with respect as they represent your hard work.

Understanding the market and your competition is key to a healthy sales program because conditions continually shift, like sand dunes. New wineries entering the market may take your place if you are complacent, and new consumer trends may veer retailers away from your product. "The product itself is both subjective and dynamic. In other words, the variables are not constant. It's a moving target if you will," says Mary.

Paso Robles Wine Festival: Ten Tips for Max Fun

A glass full of wine tasting tickets, the aroma of Greek cooking, and rowdy country rock music—you’ll find it all during the annual Paso Robles Wine Festival this coming weekend, May 21-23. Our historic and shady park will host 12,000 visitors heading for wine tasting, music and picnics.

Although much of Paso Robles is always balmy and breezy, downtown Paso Robles is framed by steep western hills that block the ocean winds. The buildings surrounding the town square also limit air flow, so weekend temperatures in the park may be in the upper 90s. For those of you who will be joining us for the weekend, here are my Top Ten Tips for enjoying the Paso Robles Wine Festival in style.

Getting Ready for Wine Festival: Managing Large Crowds

Most established wineries know these angles aready, but if you are new on the circuit—or still working through your first five years of post-festival debriefing—get a leg up on organizing for festival crowds with the following tips from other wineries.

First - Choose your top priority

Understand the difference between sales and hospitality, and choose ONE for your priority.  Both goals should be customer-oriented however.   You can DO both, but in order to do so effectively, you must have just one priority.

When it comes to planning, remember it's not about YOU.  Both hospitality and sales planning should be about the customer. 

If you are an established winery expecting large crowds, then sales should be your top priority.   Making sales fast, easy and efficient will help your visitors achieve their goals.  They'll be able to taste, order, and then layaway, ship or accept their order with ease, allowing them time to enjoy your hospitality as well.   Give them a seamless sales experience, augmented by excellent hospitality, and they'll leave with fond memories.

If you are a new winery, remotely located, or very small, maybe you expect to welcome less people, and you'd like to give them a stellar hospitality experience.  In this case, make sure you've covered all the aspects of a good party—shade, music, food, cleanliness, seating, games, and so on.  But even with sales as your second priority, be prepared.  Don't run out of tasting sheets or credit card machine tape, or become otherwise discomboobled on the sales front. 

Second - Define your goals

Common goals for a festival weekend are:

Getting Ready for Wine Festival: Managing Volunteers

Volunteers aren’t really ‘volunteers’ in the usual sense of the word. They are ad hoc assistants. At some wineries they are paid—and paid well, perhaps with a combination of cash and wine.  And you might want to warn them they will work hard on their shifts. You'll also want them to have your best interests at heart—on everything from sales to cleanup.

How many volunteers should you have for an event? Not too many, not too few. Depending on your past years’ experience you should have enough people to handle sales and packing comfortably and efficiency, with extra volunteers assigned specifically to food or tours, and one or two extra for go-fers. Go-fers may sound like a luxury, but they often end up being the busiest of your volunteer staff—they will replenish wine stacks, wash and buff glasses, carry clean glasses and supplies to outdoor stations, step in when others need a break, carry food from barbecue to serving tables, relay messages and run errands, and pick up tourist debris.

Understand that you (the owner or manager) may not be able to work effectively during the event—you’ll be busy supervising and visiting.  Even if you plan to man the barbecue or a sales station, odds are high that your time will be taken up by visitors. Therefore, get all your setup tasks done well before the event. The day of the event (or on each day of the event) you should ideally have an hour of peace and quiet before opening in which to relax, review details, and greet your volunteers.

Use lists! And improve or edit the list after each event. If you are not a ‘list’ person, then delegate the list-making to someone who is—and ask that person to keep you on task as well.

Have a prepatory meeting prior to the event. For locals, maybe a wine and cheese evening.  Be prepped for the prep. Have take-away instructions to hand out, and give out fresh sets the day of the event.  For out-of-towners, email them a complete list of your expectations.  Then call them and go over each item and invite questions.

Your volunteers do not need to be very wine knowledgeable, but they must care about your product and your presentation.  The image they project at an event is an important part of your branding and hospitality experience. A loud guffaw accompanied by, "Aw shucks hon, just drink what ya like!" will not impress a lady who is seriously interested in wine. Each event is an important chance to reach a large number of people with an efficient use of time and samples. Make every second count by ensuring that your volunteers respect this opportunity and maximize it for you.

Some things to go over:

Getting Ready for Wine Festival: Handouts!

  
When customers flock to your tasting room this coming festival weekend, whether they buy one bottle or one hundred, you'll want each customer to become an ambassador for your brand—and that means giving them information.

I usually recommend to clients that you craft a postcard handout.  Postcards, unlike full size tasting sheets or newsletters, can be affixed to refrigerators and bulletin boards.  And they're inexpensive to print—make the first side full color for impact, and the back in black-in-white to save money.  With a supply of postcards on hand, you can save your more expensive print newsletters for customers who buy $50-$100 or more.  If you have a spare laptop, set it up in the tasting room so visitors can subscribe to your blog and leave comments while they are there.  (You might want to cover the keyboard with a plastic protector.)

Make sure you've got all the winery contact information on your cards, including your winery blog address and Facebook or other social media identities.  Your goal is to get people to visit your website, subscribe to your blog, become your friend/fan on Facebook, and otherwise subscribe for future contact.  
 

10 Signs Your Business is Failing: And How to Recover

Although we are seeing signs of general economic recovery, the last year has been a hard slog for small winery and vineyard owners.  In an economic downturn, the luxury good, hospitality, and travel industries are often the hardest hit.  Among our associates, chins are held high and stories of silver linings abound.  But industry vendors and salesmen are telling a different story--one of back payments requiring COD status, higher returns, downtrending sales, and equipment foreclosures.

Now more than ever, it's important to have a clear-eyed view of your business' health, ratios and sales trends.  In a climate where bankers are looking at every new loan application with a jaundiced eye, and subjecting renewals to greater scrutiny, it's important to be able to identify and address each of the signs that your bankers will be looking at.  Even if you feel that your sales and bottom line are healthy, you may be surprised to see your business in a different light by applying some of the ratios below.  And if your business really is healthy, then you should be able to present these ratios with pride and explain what you are doing to protect and increase them.

A white-paper article by Debra Ellis of Wilson & Ellis Consulting describes the Ten Hidden Signs Your Company Is Sinking and Some Life Preservers.  We'll discuss each of these ten issues in a little more detail, including what you can do to improve your business health, but here is the list in simple form:

1. Customer attrition exceeds acquisition.
2. Your best customers are buying less.
3. Buyers are not completing the life cycle.
4. Your vital signs are erratic.
5. You have more back inventory.
6. Costs are not aligned with sales.
7. Analytics are trending down.
8. You are avoiding innovation.
9. Employees are unhappy.
10. You have lost your passion.

Death, Desire and Cassoulet . . .

 
 
  
What, exactly, does Central Coast Wine Blogs do?

What I do is make your dreams possible. 

In fact, I may occasionally take you outside of your comfort zone and show you the possible. 

For instance, when I met New York cookbook author Brigit Binns, who is also known in culinary circles as roadfoodie, I was instantly charmed. Who hasn't heard of roadfoodie, the sassy vixen who has documented her culinary travels across the US and around the world?   Brigit is the author of 23 cookbooks, including some gorgeous Williams Sonoma selections. When I met her last month she was working hard on a couple of cookbook drafts and  taking a month-long hiatus in Paso Robles to relax and finish her recipe testing.  But her current dream is to write a cookbook inspired by the central coast, where she spent many glorious summers as a child.

To help her achieve that goal, I introduced her to some wineries and local food artisans.  But I really wanted her to experience our culinary connection to the land, so I even went so far as to set up a boar hunt for us.  Dubost Ranch Winery kindly hooked us up with professional guide Matt Tupen ([email protected]) and we had the time of our lives. 

From roadfoodie.com, What a Boar:

"I am standing underneath a scarred, ancient oak tree on an isolated ranch far to the west of Paso Robles, in central California, with a dead body, a blond woman, and a strange man—I first laid eyes on him five minutes ago—who is holding a very, very sharp knife.  'It’s a surgical blade,' he says, with disarming cheer."

"The dead body is a 200-pound wild boar, the man is a hunter, and the blond woman is Mary Baker, of Central Coast Wine Blogs; she has opened doors for me in this wine community that I might otherwise have spent months—if not years—knocking on."

You might think that sliding around in the mud in an ATV and learning to skin a boar with a surgical knife is not a typical woman's idea of fun.  And you'd probably be right.  But we loved it  And the boar (pictured above) was parceled out lovingly to local foodies.  In Brigit's hands, he became a delicious and robust cassoulet, which she proclaimed a 'Passoulet', and it was served with Paso Robles syrah and cabernet.

So when you ask me what Central Coast Wine Blogs does, my reply would be . . .

I help you realize your dreams.  Whatever you want to achieve, I can take you there and beyond. 

#1 Wine Blog on Facebook's Networked Blogs

 

Central Coast Wine Blogs is now the #1 blog on the topic of wine on Facebook's Networked Blogs list.

The Dover Canyon wine blog, which I also wrote, has slipped from the #1 spot but is still hanging in there at #6.

Dubost Ranch Winery, another CCWB blog, has entered the Top 50 list at #44.

Other central coast bloggers in the Top 50 include Justin Vineyards & Winery at #49, and Elizabeth in SLO at #24.

On the 'Dating' Top 50, my personal blog, A Year by the Lake is currently #24 and rising.

Come on, central coast bloggers!  You belong in the Top 50 too.  Go to NetworkedBlogs today and submit your blog.  (You can also get a cool widget like the one at right to add to your blog.)