BLOGSCHU

That Drum Machine Ain't Got No Soul

Summer 1981. I remember sneaking downstairs at midnight to watch the launch of MTV. I remember the first time I saw the rocket blast off, heard the riff played over the Apollo 11 landing that would mark the clock reaching the hour for much of the rest of my adolescence.

And I remember the huge disappointment at the understandable but nonetheless annoying choice of The Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star" for the first video played. I never could get all the way through that song, and I think I went to sleep without seeing the second video to ever air on MTV.

A few weeks back, I heard a song on the radio that made me laugh out loud. Within minutes of it ending, I realized I was still singing it in my head and resolved to make it my next music monday. But it wasn't available on the massive playlist.com database that is the source for the Blogschu Music Monday Archive, and so I chose something else and forgot about it.

In the last week or so, this song is everywhere - one evening I heard it four times on a single commute.  It makes me giggle and tap my feet each time I hear it, but The Limousines have got it backwards.  MTV killed the video star, not the Internet. If anything, YouTube made lots of new ones.

Nothing's Gonna Bring Me Down

How about a little something happy for a Monday morning? The infectiously joyful Paolo Nutini brings a carefree, retro-swing vibe to a sweet little song about all the simple things in life he has that give him cause to be happy, including a buttons on his coat, money in the meter, food in his belly, a pot and a pan, a nice guitar, a pillow for his head, and the amusingly suggestive title. So why not start off the week with, ahem, "A Pencil Full of Lead."

Ask and you shall receive

I woke up this morning alarmed to realize it is Thursday. How did that happen? Where has the week gone? With no Tasty Morsel in mind, I turned to the Gun Bun community on Facebook and pleaded for inspiration, asking for you to please share the delicious delicious food and drink you've been enjoying this week.

Man, you guys eat well! Mochas at breakfast, fresh basil in grilled cheese and tomato soup, hickory pulled pork, paella valenciana, lobster & fresh corn salad, home-smoked fish and meats, and to top it all off brownie-berry cobbler??!! I am fully inspired...and starving! Two hours until lunch seems a long ways away.

Please check out and add to the thread at www.facebook.com/gunbun.

Don't Forget to Look Up

The skies over Sonoma were clear of fog a few nights ago and the quarter moon was low. We figured we had a shot at seeing the Perseids meteor shower, so we bundled up laid on our backs in the yard. There were tons of stars, the Milky Way was clear and bright, and even though we only saw a few shooting stars, it was awesome.

Today's Music Monday, Shooting Star by Air Traffic, to remind us all to remember to look up more often.

The Chill of Summer

Northern California is having the coolest summer in decades, with only three days at or above 'normal' since the equinox. Morning fog has blanketed Rhinefarm daily, usually finally burning off around noontime.  The vineyard crew is busy dropping grape clusters to the ground - aggressively reducing the amount of fruit each vine has to ripen to ensure high-quality flavors. The warm afternoons and persistent breezes have kept the fruit clean and dry thus far, and our winemaking team tells us we'll have a great vintage, if a small one.

So the grapes are happy enough, but the rest of us are feeling a little disoriented.  We should be wearing skirts and sandals in the office, not the gray logo sweatshirts that have become a staff uniform (cozy and cute as they are!). We should be serving gewurztraminer for lunchtime picnickers, not cabernet sauvignon (again, not a bad thing, just unusual). But most confusing of all, where are all the tomatoes?

This time of year, every corner of Sonoma is usually bursting with a colorful assortment of heirloom tomatoes. This year, the few sad heirlooms on display at my local grocery are soft and mealy, and cost a king's ransom. All I could find yesterday were hothouse red slicers. In August in Sonoma!

Leave it to my resourceful sister to find a way to turn lemons into lemonade. Or in this case, boring sandwich tomatoes into delicious, summery gazpacho.

I came home last night to find her in my kitchen with the cuisinart on high. "Taste this," she called across the room, coming toward me with a spoon. I put down my things and opened my mouth.

There is was, the taste of summer I've been missing for weeks. Fresh cucumber, sweet red pepper, earthy parsley and a healthy kick of garlic and pepper. These were the companions those hothouse tomatoes needed to come alive and show they really did have some tomato personality to display. And just what I needed to believe it is truly August.

Letters from the Sky

The South African band Civil Twilight sounds to me like a mix of one part Jeff Buckley, one part Radiohead and a dash of Coldplay. The atmospheric Letters from the Sky is a perfect song for a morning drive.

Backyard Foraging

I'm a terrible gardener.

So it was with low expectations that I went out to water my tomato plants and see if there was any fruit approaching ripeness.

The pleasant surprise I found had nothing to do with the tomatoes, which appeared to be having all moisture sucked from their xylem by the parched soil. No, it was the tangled overgrown bushes behind them that separate my yard from the neighboring driveway that were bearing spectacular fruit.

Wild blackberry bushes have taken over the tall cypress hedges, and huge clusters of fruit were dangling just above my head.

Naturally, the berries ripen unevenly to improve their chances of propugation (which is why it is so much work for us in the vineyard to force grapes to ripen evenly). About a quarter of the berries looked dark and ripe, but I assumed they were still sour since the birds hadn't gotten to them yet.  I picked the fattest one I could find and tentatively popped it in my mouth.

The sun-warmed berry was an explosion of rich, dark, sweet fruit flavor that coated my whole mouth. It suddenly made more sense than ever why this fruit is used to describe cabernet sauvignon.

I ran into the house to get bowl.  I foolishly neglected to get gloves or a stepladder, and so for the next ten minutes or so, I teetered on my tippy toes to reach as much of the ripe fruit as possible, enduring numerous scratches from the vine and the cactus it wound itself around.

It was so worth it. I carefully washed the two small handfuls of berries I had collected, then proudly presented them to my husband. He raised a dubious eyebrow. "No thanks." No complaints from me, I sat down and ate the whole bowl like popcorn.

I am convinced the berries at the very top that I could not reach looked even better.  This weekend I'm going back with a ladder. Hope the birds don't beat me to it.

Time to get Political: No on HR 5034

There is a bill currently meandering its way into relevancy in the U.S. House of Representatives that, if passed, would be devastating to independent wineries and would seriously compromise consumer choice.

Simply put, it must be stopped. Unfortunately, there is nothing simple about understanding the specifics. To that end, this essay is as clear as anything I have read on the issue, and its Byzantine legal components, and it inspired me to add my voice to its opposition.

One of my earliest lessons once I started working on the business side of the winery was that complicated, outdated regulations of wine sales often legalize unfair advantages and restrict market access. The repeal of prohibition led to a series of laws giving states the right to govern alcohol sales as they saw fit, which in turn led to different regulations in every state, ranging from open markets to strictly controlled ones.

Most states adopted a 'three-tier system,' requiring the use of a distributor, who buys the wine from the supplier and in turn sells it to the retailer or restaurateur, who then sells it directly to the consumer. In addition, many states have anti-competitive franchise laws that make it virtually impossible for a winery to change distributors.

In recent years, consolidation has turned what was once a nation of hundreds if not thousands of small to midsize distributors into a nation of basically 5-10 mega companies. At the same time, the number of wineries and wines produced in the US has exploded. Smaller independent producers looking to stand out in huge distributor portfolios dominated by large, multinational wine and/or liquor companies face a tough challenge getting access to the market.

Motivated by these and other factors, wineries and their constituencies (read: consumers) have been able to chip away at the states’ legal right to control alcohol sales by challenging the constitutionality of the prohibition-era laws.

Recent court decisions have ruled that states cannot create laws that protect local monopolies from out-of-state competition. As a result, many state regulations have been changed, enabling wineries to join the modern digital age and interact both topically and economically with their customers across state lines.

The purpose of HR 5034 is to reverse this trend by strengthening states’ authority to enable the passage of protectionist laws. There are some big beer distributors backing HR 5034, and the bill has been described as ‘the hail mary pass’ the distribution tier is throwing to once and for all cement their protected status as gate keepers for independent wineries and brewers.

The reality is that distributors play a critical role in our business, and in most cases truly are partners to our success. In the best scenarios, wineries and distributors work together to build each other’s businesses.

California has the most open market, in which wineries can forego the distribution tier altogether and sell direct to accounts and consumers alike. Nonetheless, most wineries utilize distributors because they need and are willing to pay for the services they provide.

Wineries that build relationships with their consumers and accounts strengthen their brand and their business, which undeniably strengthens their distributor partners as well.

The bottom line is that the best distributors are strong with or without political protection. What it boils down to for me is a level playing field where good performance begets good performance. HR 5034 is a serious threat to fair competition and consumer choice. Please join me and add your voice at http://www.stophr5034.org.

Jeff

Third Time's the Charm

The third album is usually when I decide how much I like a band.  There are lots of great first albums out there, and almost all of them are followed up with a disappointing second one. I don't know if it is because the record companies rush a follow up after a successful debut that took years to craft, or if it is simply that the originality can't be repeated. But I can't think of a single band that followed up a great first record with a better second one (hopefully someone will help me out here).

I fell in love with The Arcade Fire's first album Funeral and played it to death. The second, Neon Bible, was interesting but ultimately not addictive. There is a pretty huge amount of hype out there, including a huge cover story in yesterday's art section of the NY Times, for the third release, The Suburbs, and my fingers are crossed that they will achieve that ground-breaking third album that proves them worthy of all the buzz. Until then, a little Rebellion for your music monday.