BLOGSCHU

Music Monday

BEST WISHES FOR HAPPY HOLIDAYS
AND A MAGNIFICENT NEW YEAR! 

This time of year always brings back memories of holidays past. I can still feel the giddy anticipation of Christmas morning, sitting at the stop of the stairs with my brothers and sister, all in our footed pajamas, anxiously waiting for our parents to give us the nod to go downstairs. Or the annual tradition of my siblings and I staging the manger scene with an old refrigerator box, some stuffed animals, and inevitable arguments about who was going to get to play Mary and Joseph. And remember the time before TiVo when you had to actually plan in advance to watch Christmas specials? We would curl up around our tiny television set, wrapped up in blankets, popcorn in little bowls, watching Rudolph, Frosty and the Charlie Brown crew inaugurate yet another holiday season.

Now I have the pleasure of making Christmas memories for my own children and I absolutely treasure it each and every year. 

This is going to be my last post for 2011 as I plan to take the next two weeks "off" to relax and enjoy the holidays with my family and friends. Thank you for lending me your ear each week. If you hit "play" in our Spotify playlist, it would take over twelve hours to listen to the 186 tracks that we have accumulated over the year. I look forward to discovering and sharing lots more in 2012.

Here are my picks for the final playlist of 2011 which you can listen to via Spotify here: GunBun Music Monday 2011.

"Default" - Django Django
Django Django is made up of four mates who met at art school in Edinburgh. This single is from their self-titled debut album which will be released January 30th, 2012. 

"Hell, Heaven" - Parlovr
This track comes courtesy of my friends Steven and George who are avid SXSW'ers and who have created a Spotify playlist of bands that are slated to perform there in 2012. Parlovr is supposed to be killer live, so you should definitely try to catch them at SXSW if you are going next year.

"Boy Lilikoi" - Jónsi
I am a big fan of Sigur Ros frontman Jónsi so I was very excited to see that Director Cameron Crowe tapped him to score his new film, We Bought A Zoo. I think that the entire album is fantastic and I can't wait to see the film. 

"Ribbons & Detours" - Silversun Pickups
Another favorite of mine is the alt rock band Silversun Pickups - especially their 2006 hit Lazy Eye. This track is from a three-song vinyl they put out in late November for Record Store Day's "Back To Black Friday." I am looking forward to the release of their third studio album in Spring 2012.   

"Woo" - Anthony Hamilton
Anthony Hamilton is an R&B/soul singer-songwriter from Charlotte, North Carolina. I came across his new album, Back to Love, on Spotify and put it on as background music while I worked. Before I knew it, I was dancing around a bit in my seat - it's just that kind of music! Funk-pop meets R&B meets hip-hop. And not a lurid lyric to be found.  

"Riverside - Lulu Rouge Remix" - Agnes Obel
Agnes Obel is a Danish singer/songwriter with lots of prizes and awards under her belt. Her cover of Elliot Smith's "Between The Bars" is worth a listen (available on iTunes here). This remix of her 2010 song Riverside is my bonus song to end the year!

Until next year - Cheers, Lisa 

Music Monday

Today's Music Monday post is brought to you by the 2012 Pantone Color of the Year...Tangerine Tango. According to the official announcement, this color choice is intended to "provide the energy boost we need to recharge and move forward." 

Music + color go hand in hand for me. I have a condition called synesthesia that causes me to "see" letters, numbers and even music in color. It's an involuntary reaction that I always thought everyone had until I read a news story about it in Time Magazine about ten years ago. I think that's why I have a strong reaction to certain types of music. It's also why I struggle sometimes with math: 3 + 2 does not equal a green 5 when you see 5 as the color red!

Here are my picks for this week's playlist which you can listen to via Spotify here: GunBun Music Monday 2011. I've had a busy week so please excuse the lack of info about the songs/artists.

"Cloudy Shoes" - Damien Jurado
"BTSTU" - Jai Paul
"Titanium (feat. Sia)" - David Guetta, Sia
"The Color of Industry" - Radiation City
"Surfer King" - A.A. Bondy

P.S. I recently came across a band called Alabama Shakes and they are definitely worth checking out. They aren't on on Spotify or iTunes yet but for a nominal donation, you can download their 4-track album here. 

Cheers, Lisa

Singing for the Unsung

This letter to you WOMers is being written early in December, anticipating the joyous yet sometimes stressful days most of us experience leading up to Christmas Day. What better time to reflect on the comparable sanity of Thanksgiving, and oh yes, the joys of Gundlach Bundschu Gewurztraminer with turkey.

Thanks in great part to you WOMers, more cases of Gewurztraminer left our wine cellar this Thanksgiving than ever before. Thank you. Difficult to say whether it was Jeff Bundschu’s turkey skits on YouTube (visit www.gunbun.com/turkeylove if you have not yet seen them,) a focused marketing campaign directed to our distributors, a great score from the Wine Enthusiast, or the best sales tool of all—word of mouth from people like you. Likely this success was a combination of all the above.

Hurrah for Gewurztraminer! However it happened, we celebrate more converts to this versatile varietal. Because it is a difficult varietal to grow, difficult to say and remember, and too often vinified sweet, it is frequently overshadowed by other, more familiar whites.

As you WOMers know well, a dry, spicy gewürztraminer is one of the friendliest food wines around – and not just with turkey. And yet we often hear restaurateurs and wine shop buyers tell us they personally love the wine, but claim their customers aren’t open to trying it. Some of those buyers aren’t giving their customers enough credit. But we recently heard a great story about  a fellow who really is listening to his customers.

Some weeks before Thanksgiving, the manager of the prestigious Beachcomber Resort in Clearwater, Florida was shopping for interesting and unusual wines to serve his guests at their Thanksgiving meal. He asked all the wine representatives who called on him to submit likely samples. Our sales representative suggested Gun Bun Gewurztraminer for the white. The manager was not familiar with it but upon tasting it, he loved it and immediately selected it for his menu.

He began to have doubts almost as soon as the sales rep left. Would his sophisticated clientele be disappointed that there was no Chardonnay or Sauvignon Blanc on the table, wines with which they were more familiar? Perhaps he should call tomorrow and change his order.

But Bacchus is on our side. Friends of Gundlach Bundschu happened to be having dinner at the Beachcomber. In conversations with their waiter, they mentioned they were from Sonoma; the manager overheard this and approached their table. When he learned they were grape growers in the Sonoma Valley, he mentioned he had just selected a Sonoma Valley wine to feature for Thanksgiving. Oh really, which one, they asked. The manager explained it was a dry gewürztraminer with a difficult German family name, and right there in the wine cellar, the friends taught the manager the 'Gun Lock Bun Shoe' dance. They reassured him that his guests would love the wine, that many would know it and the rest would appreciate being introduced to it. So the manager stuck to his Guns and we have since learned it was a great success for him.

Hurrah for friends! Getting the word out is the hardest part of being a small family winery, and we know and appreciate that you WOMers help spread the word about us, perhaps more than anyone. We know how creative you all are too, so we invite you to help us with our next video campaign.

We had so much fun making the Turkey Loves Gewurz videos, and they proved to be a useful tool for our distributor salespeople to promote this unsung varietal. So next year, we plan to make more of them – not just for gewürztraminer, but for merlot, cab and chard as well. We invite you to send us your concepts for a 2 minute video. You can leave comments here, or email our Marketing Director at susans@gunbun.com. If we choose to use your ideas, we’ll determine some appropriate prize.

Happy Holidays everyone.

Jim

We Made the List! Just Not that List.

 

 

Hi- It's Jeff. ‘Tis the season for, among other things, ‘best of’ lists from wine publications. So far there have been three floating around our office- the Wine Spectator, the Wine Enthusiast and the San Francisco Chronicle. They all are similar in that they list their top wines of the year, ranked in some way that accounts for score, price point and availability. We did not make it on any of these lists. We didn’t submit wines to two out of three of them (SF Chron and Spectator), so that is our excuse with them. We did submit Cab and Gewurtztraminer to the Enthusiast and scored 91 and 90 points respectively, and were totally thrilled regardless of not making their list. Given the historically restrained style of our wine, that favors structure and balance over ripeness and brawn, we have been hesitant to submit wines for mass judgings. Big, bold, high-alcohol wines can dominate the palate, and in a mass tasting where judges taste many California wines at a time, the nuances of more structured wines can get lost. The endorsement of our friends and customers has been enough. Keith and Anne however have been making wines in recent vintages that represent a slight but clear evolution in our style. The structure is still there, but there is also undeniable intensity with freshness and rich mouth-feel. The change is enough for us to try submitting our wines to mass tastings. We started conservatively with the Enthusiast in 2011 and based on that success will expand the effort next year.

We did make one ‘best of list’ in 2011, that of Sub Pop Records staff picks of top 10 wines of 2011. It is a dream come true. Okay, that is a stretch, because I had no clue they would list wine as a category. But I can say unequivocally that had anyone given me the option in 1992, as I was starting out in the family business, thrilled by the nature of wine, our family’s legacy, the approachability of our wine community, and put off by what I saw as the general elitism of the wine establishment, I would have put a shout-out by Sub Pop way higher on my aspirational list than any wine publication. Based in Seattle, Sub Pop was the record company for many of the bands that framed my universe at the time, not to mention provided the soundtrack to long work days in the cellar. Most famous among them was Nirvana, but there was also Soundgarden, Mudhoney, Jesus and Mary Chain, 5Style and many more. On my very first visit to Seattle, 1995ish, I went straight to their retail store and bought 10 discs, 9 from Sub Pop artists I'd never heard of, trusting they knew what they were doing. Things have changed a bit since. Sub Pop still releases great music, though their greatest successes are with less loud bands like Fleet Foxes and Iron and Wine, and while we still make great wine, it is in the context of a wine establishment that I am generally proud to be a part of. But it is clear that things haven’t changed that much. When I heard that at the bottom of their compilation of staff best-of music picks for 2011 (see it here), there was a wine list that Gundlach Bundschu was on, I jumped up and down like it was 1992. Glad I didn’t pull out my back.

 

 

 

Music Monday

DIY "Xmas Tree On A Wall"

December is the month for holiday prepping, settling in for a long winter, and - if you're me - pouring over the "best of" lists that abound in print media and on the Internet. I want to make sure that nothing has slipped by, especially when it comes to music and books. Here are a few of my favorite lists: 

• largehearted boy Year-End Online Lists for music + books (mind boggling)
• metacritic Music Critic Top Ten Lists
• FACT magazine 50 best (UK)
• PMA's Best Songs of 2011 (Spotify)
• American Songwriter Top 50 Albums of 2011
• Gorilla vs. Bear's Albums of 2011 - this one is neat because they also asked each featured artist to share their own favorite track of the year.
• This isn't music/book related but it is fantastic - think of it as an advent calendar where each day you get to listen to the best TED talks of the past year.

As a totally random aside, I don't know about where you live but here in Los Angeles, Starbucks has started displaying calories on their drink menu and it is downright depressing to read the number next to my favorite coffee drink of the season, the Eggnog Latte (460! Without whipped cream?!). However, after exploring what goes into eggnog (this is an especially delicious recipe) I see why. 

I suppose our GunBun Music Monday playlist is my own "best of" list when it comes to music. Here are my picks for this week's playlist which you can listen to via Spotify here: GunBun Music Monday 2011 

"Chair" - Big Deal
I love the website Insound and the weekly emails that they send with free recommended tracks. That's how this one came onto my radar screen. It's from Big Deal's recently released (in the UK) debut album Lights Out which the band describes as "a collection of 12 deeply personal songs with universal appeal, innately tapping into the innocence, insecurity, wonder and (sometimes unrequited) love and lust of relationships." 

"Serpents" - Sharon Van Etten
I really enjoyed Brooklyn singer-songwriter Sharon Van Etten's second album Epic so I have high hopes for her new one that is due out early next year. This track is a pre-release from that album and it features members of the National, the Walkmen and Wye Oak.

"Friends Like Those" - Robert Ellis
Ellis is a singer-songwriter who credits his country + modern folk sound to a childhood of listening to lots of bluegrass in Lake Jackson, Texas. While I usually don't like country music, I am a huge fan of strong songwriting and Ellis has that nailed down pat. Ellis is hitting the road this month - tour dates here - including two nights with my favorite band Dawes although those shows are, not surprisingly, already sold out. 

"Crew Love" - Drake, The Weeknd
Drake has received huge hype for his recenly released album Take Care - the NY Times recently dubbed him "hip-hop's current center of gravity." He collaborated with another big act of 2011, The Weeknd, on a few of the tracks, including this one.     

"Just A Habit" - Low Roar
The latest NME magazine has Low Roar on its list of music that is "breaking forth from the underground" this week." They write, "Ever wondered what Thom York's solo album 'The Eraser' might've sounded like stripped of the electronics?" I did so I checked it out - and now you can too: Low Roar.

Holiday Bonus Song: "Baby It's Cold Outside" - She & Him
Indie darlings Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward make up the she and him of this band. My kids and I were listening to this album last night as we decorated gingerbread houses and the girls said, "Hey, isn't she from the movie Elf?" And it turns out that is where Ward first heard Deschanel sing as well. After discovering their shared love of music, the pair started collaborating over email and in 2008 they released their first album together. I highly recommend A Very She & Him Christmas. It's a fun, fresh take on old holiday favorites.

 With Lots of Holiday Cheer, Lisa