Category: General

A couple of years ago Stefania and I were shopping early one Saturday morning at our local market. They had a special on pork butt. I think it was 99 cents a pound.

I stood in the market for a long time wondering what to do. This same market will have prime rib on sale from time to time at $7-$8 a pound. Once they even hit $5 a pound. That’s an easy buy. A prime rib I can cut up. I can make steaks or I can cut it into smaller roasts and freeze it for later. Pork butt though really should not be cut up. It’s best cooked long, slow and whole. Our freezer is small, and mostly used for cocktail equipment, so freezing a pork butt isn’t really a good idea.

What to do, I wondered? “Pork Emergency, Pork Emergency”!! That’s what we did. We bought it and sent out a message to a few friends – “Pork emergency, come help us eat this thing.”

Well it happened again on Saturday. The market had good looking butts and St Louis Style ribs at 2 for 1. It was time for a Pork Emergency.

Sunday morning Stefania and I broke up an old barrel to use for smoke and we put the pork on about 9AM. This was at about 1PM when I took the ribs off the smoke.

I like to let ribs stay on the smoker for about 4 hours, then remove them and finish them on the grill. I find the fat does not render down to my liking on the smoker alone. I do the same with pork butt, but don’t feel like I’ve got in down 100% yet. I did 6 hours on the smoker, then three in the oven at higher temperature. I would have liked to get the fat rendered down a bit more. Maybe next time I’ll do it Carnitas style and return the meat to the oven at 450 degrees for 20 minutes after chopping it up to get it slightly crispy.

In the mean time, watch your emails and texts for the next Pork Emergency!

Seems like we drank more wine than that…or we’re starting to slow down a bit. 🙂

All I know about cooking with fresh okra is that it can be weird and there are techniques used to avoid it getting gummy.

I didn’t bother to research it further and followed my instinct last night. Maybe it was the gin martini talking (Hendricks with a slice of cucumber)

In a hot skillet I browned chicken pieces, added garlic, onion, fennel, and red bell peppers.
When it got too hot and sizzly, I poured a little white wine into the pan and gave it a toss.
Added sliced shiitake mushrooms and sliced okra then poured a lemongrass/soy mixture over everything and covered it. Walked away for 30 minutes while it burbled on medium low heat.

Shared the last half of a bottle of sake with Paul…(previously opened)

Added fresh snow peas and raw bok choy, covered and let steam/burble another 15 minutes.

When the snow peas and bok choy got added, Paul started a pot of asian noodles.

I don’t know if it was because the okra was super fresh or because I sliced it lengthwise and let it mostly steam, but it was perfect.

We shared this feast in front of the t.v. while watching a past episode of Anthony Bourdain shooting guns in Texas with Ted Nugent. A classic episode and one I like to quote often.

Last night Stefania and I were back in Morgan Hill for a dinner meeting at a local pub down there. As we parked Stefania spotted these growing on the fence that divides the property lines. Unlike the bright healthy plants from our bike ride, these were withered and browning from powdery mildew.

This is an advanced stage of the disease. The white powder of the early stages has turned brown and dirty. The leafs have started to curl and die. Growth is stunting the plant and the mildew has spread to the grapes.

The berries are underdeveloped and will not get ripe. You can see the leafs starting to curl here, the first step in their death. The plant will survive through next year and onwards after that, but it will not produce any ripe fruit. The berries you see here will turn brown in a few months and fall off.

We had started the evening though with a more hopeful sight. We visited the Sesson vineyard in Coyote Valley. Jerry had spent the day tieing down new cordons and we were checking on his progress. The vineyard needs another mowing, but it seems to be fully recovered from the training mishap of last year and should produce some fruit next year.

I know most wineries, and almost all small businesses start off without a written business plan. Truth is our initial plan consisted of a lot of excel spreadsheets, a business plan template with my hand written modifications scribbled in and my memory. I had it all pulled together in a small blue binder. To anyone but me and Stefania it probably looked like a scrapbook.

We knew enough though to break the plan out into phases. This would let us focus on smaller goals while still keeping the longer ones in focus. It would also guide us on choices we made, acting as a road map to make sure things we were doing matched our short term goals and supported our longer term ones.

Here’s what our original phases, time lines and goals looked like:

Phase I – Original Projection 2005-2012

In Phase I of our business plan our key success criteria were: Establish a brand, grow our mail order customer list to 500 names, secure long term vineyard sources, make high quality wine, achieve high customer loyalty and satisfaction, start distribution sales and reach a cash flow positive state at a production level of 600-800 cases per year.

Phase II – Original Projection 2012-2019

In Phase II of our business plan our key objectives are: Move into a dedicated urban facility, handle 100% of our own production, grow our mailing list to 1500 names, establish a wine club and grow it to 200+ names, expand our restaurant and retail presence to 100+ locations and maintain a cash flow positive state and profitability at a production level of 1200-2000 cases per year.

Phase III – Original Projection 2015-

In Phase III of our business plan our key objectives are: Purchase and plant an Estate Vineyard in the Uvas Valley/Uvas Canyon area of the Santa Cruz Mountains with a total property size of not less than 30 acres and a vineyard size of 8-12 acres. Bring that vineyard to bearing by 2019 and build an Estate Winery with a tasting room and event hosting facilities by 2019. Maintain profitability at a production level of 3000-5000 cases.

I’m busy working on a revision now because we feel that we’ll met all the goals we laid out for Phase I in 2010. We’re laying out the ground work and plan for Phase II and seeing if it is possible to move the time line up by a year. The small blue binder has been scrapped for a 50+ page document complete with financial forecasts, budget projects, marketing plans and 100’s of other details.

We’ve started to meet with bankers and sought out advise on attracting investors to help fund the next round of expansion. We think we have a solid plan and a good story to tell. It reminds me though of two quotes from two different CEO’s I’ve worked for. Quote #1; “Now it’s about executing flawlessly”. Quote #2; “The most important quarter of your life is this one”. I think both sum up exactly where we are at.

Stefania has been busy working on the books for Q2. A few months ago I shared our Q1 results in this blog.

We are still looking at the numbers as preliminary but they should be 99% accurate at this point. Our sales were up 8% from Q2 of last year, and that makes it a record Q2. Wholesale sales were actually up more than direct sales at 8.5% compared to Q2/09 and up over 50% from Q1 of this year. We’ve already passed total wholesale sales from 2009.

We are just half way though the year but it looks like we’re on track for a record breaking 2010 across all our sales channels. Being conservative in projections at this point it looks like we will be up at least 40% and that wholesale sales will be up over 100%.

Our success thus far in 2010 has put me to work updating our business plan. No small task, our revised plan will top out over 60 pages! I’ll have some details tomorrow.

Sunday Stefania and I slept in late. We had no plans for the 4th of July and by 11:45 we were wondering what to do. The temps had reached the low 90’s so a few hours out in the sun doing hard exercise seemed like a good plan!

We hooked up the bike rack, packed a picnic lunch, loaded on the bikes and headed to Coyote Creek Trail for a 21 mile bike ride. Yep, more than a little nuts and Stef got over hot on the last 5 miles. We stopped for lunch half way though and had a nice picnic by the river.

On our way back down the trail my shoe lace got tangled in my sprocket and I had to stop along side the trail. Stefania spotted this growing along the river right where we stopped.

They are grapes growing wild along the river bank. I looked around to see if there was any sign of a past vineyard and there really wasn’t. Most likely some time, perhaps as long as 40-50 years ago, some grapes washed down the creek from a vineyard up the valley and took root here. It’s also possible that birds ‘deposited’ seeds along the banks.

In the wild, and left to their own, grapes take a long time to get established. All kinds of critters feed on the leafs, and in a dense riverside canopy they have to struggle for sunlight. It takes four years to get a plant established in a vineyard, it can easily take 20 in the wild. Eventually though the plant will do what it has evolved to do and climb up a tree for sunlight. This one had finally climbed to the top of a young sycamore.

Once the vine gets its leafs up in the sun, it will finally set fruit. In the wild the fruit set will usually be poor and spotty like you see below. But then the plant only needs to get a little fruit out there to reproduce. Once it’s firmly established it will set more fruit.

Our final picture is a stop we took along the trail. You can see the picnic loaded up on Stef’s bike. I was trying to take a picture of a very curious young buck across the trail, not 15 feet away, but as I pulled out my camera, another bike came along and scared him off.

I’m sure we will be back on the trail again this summer, maybe just not on so hot a day.

I couldn’t come up with a good title for this collection of pictures, and I know we’ve used ‘Random Pictures’ as a title before.

When people come and visit the winery I often explain how the fog hangs during the summer on the peaks just about a mile from the winery. This keeps the vineyard cool, even on sunny days and preserves good acidity in the grapes.

I took this picture about a mile from the winery on HWY 35 (on one of those peeks) on a day we were moving barrels from Big Basin. You can see the heavy fog. The temperature was about 58 degrees

I meant to take another picture at the winery, but of course I got busy moving wine and checking on the vineyard and didn’t remember until we were back on the road. Luck would have it though that just about a 1/2 mile down the road from the winery a Cal Trans crew had set up traffic control to manage some road repairs. I took this picture as we waited.

You can see bright blue sky and the crewman is in short sleeves. It was about 78 degrees at this location, 20 degrees warmer than just a mile and a half away. This is one of the key things that makes Chaine d’Or such a great spot for grapes.

The next couple of pictures came from a hike at Calero. This little guy is a California Alligator lizard. It was late on the trail, about 8 PM so he was moving slow.

Stef couldn’t resist picking him up. It was a busy critter day on the trails, we saw deer, wild turkey, dozens of moles, hawks and turkey vultures.

And the last random picture from Amber’s birthday party. I think my favorite wine was the 2005 Karl Lawrence to Kalon Cabernet Sauvignon. The Latour was from 1995 and was also really great. No sucky wines in the group!

We’ve been hiking the local foothills the past couple of months and I thought I’d put up a couple pictures.

The little bucky was grazing at Calero and didn’t pay us any attention as we approached. I must have snapped 20 pictures of him, each time getting closer and closer. I was 25 feet away and he didn’t seem to care we were right there in front of him, in fact I think he posed on purposed.

The vineyard pic if the one I mentioned the other day, it’s the one that needs to be trained onto the wires this year. On the other side of the foothills in the background is Calero…not directly behind, but within a couple of miles.

Last weekend we hiked the Zinfandel Trail off Montebello Road. I remember this trail from a few years ago and thought it was a hard hike back then…that was before Paul started taking me on 5 mile treks through the back hills. The Zin trail was kind of a let down since it was so easy and it was heavily traveled the day we went.

Yesterday after Paul got home from work we headed over to Calero and got on the trail at 5:40. Nobody around. It was perfectly quiet. Lots of little moles (or mice? or gophers?) running around in the brush, wild turkeys and their babies, a lizard, a snake skin, a doe and her fawn, and quail. We stopped a couple of times just to enjoy the quiet. This was the first time in the park we got off the main trail and cut over on Vallecito and looped around that way. There were weeds taller than Paul and grasses taller than me!

I found a pyrite cube just off the side of the trail and picked it up – I’m not entirely sure it’s native to our geology so I’m continuing to ask around and look it up. There is plenty of quartz at this park and the area is known to be rich in other minerals so I’m not entirely surprised by the find.

For Neil; I’m still breaking in the sturdy hiking boots I’ve complained about in the past and they are working out better since the shoe guy sold me some leather softener. I need to do another application before they’re good for anything longer than a couple of miles. Maybe I’ll wear them to dinner in NY 😉

I can’t be the only person dissatisfied with these new lightbulbs. I really want to do the right thing for the environment and energy savings yadda yadda, but these bulbs have been nothing but a frustrating pain in the patooter. Is it just me?

The latest failure is photographed below. I knew I smelled something off the other night but never found the culprit – the odor dissipated quickly and I failed to note the burnt out bulb (in a bathroom fixture that uses three bulbs).

Why wouldn’t I notice a burned out bulb after flipping on the switch? They’re never bright right away anyway since they take a bit to reach full lumens…that’s a minor complaint overall, but still something I’ve never fully appreciated.

Gripe number two? These damn things are expensive and are NOT lasting as long as they are supposed to. I’ve got two 25watt incandescent bulbs out front that I burn every night all night long and only replace them every couple of years or so…the bathroom fixture, which is still relatively new (four years ago I put it in?) and I’ve had to replace all 3 bulbs already, one I had to replace the second day after buying it. Total and complete failure these things.

I did a walk-thru the house just now and counted 63 lightbulbs – most of them are incandescent and have not been replaced nor have they burned out since I moved in ten years ago. Except the two outside that I mentioned. However…of the flourescent bulbs I bought to save money and energy, I’ve already been through a box of 12. In four years I’ve had to throw away more toxic waste than I think is worth for saving a few pennies on the electric bill.

Gripe number three…you can’t toss these out in the regular trash. Tell me, when your bulbs burn out, do you drive them back to the hardware store for recycling? Do you make an appointment with your cities hazardous waste collection site? Do you do dispose of them properly?

Note the melted base on the left where the tube meets the plastic. Super.

Seems like all I’ve been doing lately is thinning and tucking, thinning and tucking…. so much green growth this year!

I forwarded pictures of the Crimson Clover vineyard to Paul earlier this month and showed him how woolly the vines were. Then I sent him pics of the rows that Gerry and I finished, and the ground that was covered in green from all the foliage we took off.

After that I shot over to the Sesson site and assessed what the next steps are for there. The shoots are ready to be pulled down to make canes and a few are ready for spur positioning. Very quickly I went through one row and took a photo to show “the boss”.

Paul relies on me to be his eyes in the vineyards this time of year; he goes to his office job during the day and I fill him in on what’s happening with the vines. I know that frustrates him to no end and he’s looking forward to the career change, but we’re not quite there yet.

As for the Mourvedre vineyard at home, I haven’t had the heart yet to drop the clusters on some of the heartier vines. They’re amazing this year. We had one casualty with the weedwhacker so I’m sad about that, but not overly concerned.

I’ve got Zinfandel plants that are purely for landscaping at this point (to shield our driveway from the neighbors) that have sent secondary shoots with flowering clusters already. On the primaries, I think I spotted what looks like the very first few signs of veraison. I’ve actually enjoyed these grapes for eating, if you can get past all the seeds that is.

That’s the quick vineyard update for today – after lunch I’m heading over to the church to clean up their 20 cabernet vines (make that 18, two of them need replacing) and finish up my thinning and tucking.