Life is a State of Mind

More gorgeous weather got us off to a good start today. Erci started writing a paper while I went to the Fortune District (Soka Gakkai) discussion meeting on “What is Kosen Rufu and how can we achieve it in our lifetimes?” that Mike and Steve lead us in. I particularly liked a passage Steve had selected from the SGI website about separating people from their victimhood so they could find happiness being a key to stopping violence. I am trying to find the passage, because it was so very good.

Then we headed out to Gadino Vineyards where dance teachers from The Ballroom Studio taught some basic Salsa and we did the Gadino wine tasting. We liked their “Sunset” blended white wine, that had characteristics of a light Gewurztraminer and their Cabernet Sauvignon and bought a few bottles of each. The drive out and back was gorgeous; it had just rained, and the mountains were shrouded in a blue mist.

On our way back from little Washington, Virginia, we stopped at Blue Ridge Seafood for some lobster, snow crab legs, and gator tail. Very informal and very good eats.

Just fiddling about with Wayfaring.com, I started putting together a map of local vineyards near my home.

Local Vineyards:

Locations we visited in Japan in 2005:

Erci and Kate went to the Vintage Virginia Wine Festival with me today. We had some spectacular tastings of James River and Horton and Valhalla wines, then we got drenched in rain. I mean soaked through to our nickers and such that everything in our bags and purses was soaked right through. At one point the event coordinators were attempting to evacuate the site due to lightning and a tornado watch, but most attendees simple refused to understand the announcements. We got out before the mud got too high, though it took a while for the wines we’d bought to show up at the “will call” booth. Erci lost enough core body temperature that it took a long soak in the hot tub at home to get her back to normal. Of course, as soon as we left the site, the weather cleared up some.

Many thanks to Johnny for inviting us out to the event. He reports he found a Meteor wine called Firefly that tasted quite good, though we left before we found it to try ourselves. John, you rock!

We brought home:
Vino Curioso Chardontage 2007 (crisp white blend)
Vino Curioso 954 2006 (full bodied red blend)
James River Cellars 2006 Montpelier (surprisingly good blush with dry after notes)
James River Cellars 2006 Hanover White (yummy dry white)
James River Cellars 2006 Chambourcin (fantastic port-like blend, wow)
Wish we’d had time to snag Valhalla’s Cabernet Sauvignon, and Row Ten (white), and Horton’s wines (where we got soaked the first time).

We chased that with a wonderful house warming party in Centreville with friends. Pleasantly tired and mellow.

Erci makes some of the best mead I’ve ever had, and after several years of hiatus, she just started fermenting a couple of batches of the good stuff. One is made from BlackCap honey and wine yeast; and the other with Cranberry honey and champaign yeast. Both honeys are from The Bee Folks out of Mount Airy, Maryland.

She will have better details, but I think now we wait and watch, and let the little yeast-y-beasties do their work turning sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide. In about a year we will kill off the remaining yeast with boiling and then bottle the meads for storage, gifts, and yummy consumption.

Huge thanks to Alan, Dave, and Brian for helping to nag Erci into action again.

Erci’s father picked us up in San Mateo Friday morning and took us down the coast for scenery and catching up, we followed coastal highway 1 from Half Moon Bay to Santa Cruz stopping briefly at San Gregorio, at Pigeon Point and in Davenport for lunch. We took longer at both Bonnie Doon Vineyard and at Storr’s Winery tasting and ordering wine at both. We checked out the new giant Whole Foods in Cupertino, which is immense, and they had a SmartCar display and test drive in the parking lot (too long a line, but they are cute cars). We headed back to San Mateo to eat at Viognier compliments of Erci’s dad (thanks a bundle), and it was yummy.

Flying home today. Looking forward to seeing friends and Bailey.

Erci and I like wine. We like wine from several places, but we are particularly fond of wines from Bonny Doon Vineyard in the mountains over Santa Cruz, California. We like Bonnie Doon wines so much that we tried to join DEWN (their wine of the month club) way back when it was illegal to ship wines via mail-order into Virginia. We did a little research and discovered that the reason it was illegal was because the big alcohol distributers did not want to give up their monopoly, and that this retarded law (written by alcohol distributer lobbyists, and passed by Virginia’s notoriously retarded legislature) was hurting Virginia wine makers and small out-of-state wine makers alike.

We joined the “Free the Grapes” campaign which took a while but eventually got the stupid law repealed and now it is legal to mail-order wines both to and from Virginia, much to the delight of everyone except the monopolistic alcohol distributers… they may find my lack of sympathy disturbing. We were finally able to join DEWN and try some of Bonnie Doon’s eclectic wines about every other month.

UPS has very attractive repeat shipping rates for small businesses, so attractive that many small businesses will only use UPS for all their shipping. It is simpler and cost-effective, and I applaud both the small businesses and UPS for a generally good arrangement. However, it does limit choice; and I’ll get to how that can be a problem later.

There is another law, designed to protect minors from getting their hands on alcohol, that states that none of the shipping companies can leave packages with alcohol without the signature of an adult of drinking age. It’s a pretty strictly enforced law, and I blame none of the shippers and carriers for following it, the penalties are rediculously high for violations.

Erci and I are both professionals who work in office buildings, pretty long hours. The chances of any delivery catching us at home are next to negligable. We simply are not home that often. in a perfect world this would be no problem, we could notify the shipping companies that we are never home, that they can save themselves a trip and simply call us when a package comes in and we can stop by the warehouse on our way home (it literally is on the way home for UPS, Fedex, USPS, and DHL) and sign for packages. Fedex and USPS both do this routinely when the shipper says signature is required and provides our phone number. For some reason the Chantilly branch of UPS is not able to do this simple and time/effort saving trick.

Chantilly UPS insists on putting the package of alcohol, clearly marked with our phone number and the fact that we are almost never home during the day, on their delivery truck. Invariably they leave a sticker on our door with a phone number to call UPS and warning us they will only try twice more to deliver and that after that it will be held at warehouse for only 5 days. Annoying, but we can deal with that. We call UPS’s 800 number, go through voice menu hell for 10 minutes, and instruct them to hold the package at the warehouse for customer pickup. Warehouse is on the way, and warehouse hours are much better than delivery hours.

Every two months the shipment comes in from Bonnie Doon. Every two months we get three successive days of stickers on our front door (they ignore the phone calls and keep trying to deliver). Every two months I call and go to the warehouse, only to find that they have continued to try to deliver and the package is not there for me. It would be funny if it happened once. Every two months makes me an incoherent ball of rage. This last time takes the cake:

Thursday: 2/8 come home to find sticker, call UPS 800 number and instruct them to hold package.
Friday: 2/9 go to UPS warehouse Chantilly… they do not have package, it’s “on the truck” again, sure enough - sticker on door with “2nd notice” on it
bastards
Monday: 2/12 I don’t bother going by warehouse, and sure enough we get 3rd sticker marked “Final notice” - I call again anyway and instruct them to hold at warehouse for customer pickup
Tuesday: 2/13 - snow day, astonishingly I am working from home all day!!! No UPS delivery truck. Great - they finally are holding it at warehouse…
Wednesday: 2/14 - second snow day, again home. UPS truck goes through neighborhood, stops at three neighbor’s houses (I was shoveling) and not at ours - great, package must be at warehouse.
Thursday: 2/15 - more important errand
Friday: 2/16 - I go to warehouse to pick up package, guess where it is…. On the #&*%&A%$ truck!!!

To hell with Chantilly UPS, they can take the wine and shove it. I call Bonnie Doon and reluctantly cancel the standing order because they can’t switch to another carrier and UPS Chantilly are a pack of idiots.

Monday night I opened a bottle of 2000 Elyse Petite Syrah that someone bought at Dean and Deluca (fancy grocer in DC and NY) for $38 a few years ago. This was an amazing bottle of wine. Rich, sense of black berries, very savory, positively yummy.

It has been a lucky year for us opening bottles we’ve had racked for a long time. The highlights in no particular order:

1997 Ridge Geyserville
2000 Elyse Petite Syrah, Rutherford Napa Valley
2005 Three Foxes Piemontese Nebbiolo

Also, I’d like to apologize for not being very communicative since the new year began. I’ve been buried under a major project at work that has pretty much taken almost every bit of my waking time, and I am looking forward to launching this albatross soon so I can relax and catch-up a little.

On Saturday, October 25th, we took my brother, his girlfriend, and my mother out to Stillhouse Vineyards in Hume, Virginia, to taste a little wine and see the Autumn foliage. The foliage was disappointing, but the Cabernet Franc was awesome. I normally dislike Chardonnay, but Stillhouse and Naked Mountain both have Chardonnay wines that are actually pretty good. It is an interesting argument for the effects of terroir on a grape, as these two vineyards are effectively neighbors; both are just off exit 18 from I-66 and only an hour or a little more outside the Washington beltway in some really pretty country.

We developed a flat tire on the way back, so we pulled over in front of the “Cowboy Mercantile” in Hume to install the spare, and before we had all gotten out of the car a resident appeared with tools in hand to help. I was sufficiently well prepared that I actually did not need his help, so he entertained everyone with local jokes while I changed the tire. What a friendly place, we must go back for some country bicycle riding.

October 18th

Anniversary Dinner:
Erci and I went to Tuscarora Mill restaurant in Leesburg, Virginia for our 10th wedding anniversary. The food and service were both extraordinary, and the atmosphere was romantic and rustic. I had a beef tenderloin entree that was worth writing home about. Dinner for two will set you back around a hundred dollars, but it is worth it for special occasions. I must get back and walk around old Leesburg, I had no idea it was so interesting a place to visit. The part of Leesburg I usally see (along the U.S. highway 15 bypass) is a horrid collection of strip malls and is completely indistinguishable from any other strip mall in America. Lucky for us, we read about Tuscarora Mill online, and actually drove into Leesburg for dinner, and the heart of the town is full of little tourist trap stores and interesting architecture, a place where parking is scarce and everything is actually within walking distance. Nice, must go shopping the next time my Mom visits Virginia.

October 11th and 12th

La Belle Compagnie:
Had a fantastic weekend photography session with the folks of La Belle Compagnie and a few auxilliaries recruited for the weekend. We shot bits of the faire, Sir Geoffrey and family sitting to dinner, and some cook and cooking shots. La Belle Compagnie is well on it’s way to having a “coffea table picture book” of life in late 14th century Hampshire, England. The project has turned out a bit bigger than many of us first imagined, but also a lot of fun. November will be time to shoot the main parts of the big medieval faire.